And Robert Feder (whose Tribune-operated blog is under their pay wall) received word from Cubs historian George Castle that Cubs games aired on what was then WENR at channel 7 in 1949, with Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby announcing. In addition to WENR and WGN, Cubs games were also telecast that year on WBKB at channel 4 with "Whispering Joe" Wilson (best known nationally as the original host of "Championship Bowling," where he got that nickname) announcing (Jack Brickhouse, of course, was WGN's PBP man). WBKB at that time was sharing CBS affiliation with WGN (channel 9 was also a DuMont affil). WBKB was owned by the Balaban & Katz movie theater unit of United Paramount Theatres, and when United Paramount bought ABC a few years later, the WBKB calls migrated up to channel 7, CBS bought channel 4 and swapped it with WTMJ in Milwaukee so they could get the preferred channel 2 and WBBM went on the air.
In 1969, ABC flipped WBKB's calls to WLS, where they have stayed to this day. On radio, WENR was the ABC-owned station that shared time at 890 AM with Prairie Farmer-owned ABC affil WLS. When ABC bought Prairie Farmer in 1956, the Big 89 became WLS full-time and to this day under Cumuls (WENR remained the FM station's call letters at 94.7 until 1965, when they became WLS-FM--since then, ABC, Citadel and Cumulus have changed the calls about as often as they changed formats to 94.7 and currently the station's WLS-FM again with a "classic hits" format in which, thanks to PPM, they are branding simply as "WLS" without an "-FM," even if the AM station is also branding as "WLS." On Friday, December 12, 2014 3:22:29 PM UTC-6, Bob Jersey wrote: > > > From the Trib article: > "'WLS-TV has established itself as a trusted voice in Chicago, and we look > forward to a new chapter of Cubs baseball airing on the flagship station of > the ABC television network,' Crane Kenney, president of business operations > for the Cubs, said in a statement." > > I'm sure KABC and WABC have called Kenney since that was pubbed. > > B > > -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
