WJMY (TV)

WJMY

Allen Park, Michigan
Channels	Analog: 20
Affiliations	Defunct
Owner	Dr. Robert M. Parr (1962-64); Richard Eaton (1964-70) (Triangle Broadcasting (1962-64); United Broadcasting (1964-70))
Founded	1962
First air date	1962
Last air date	1963
Sister station(s)	WOOK-TV, 1964-70

WJMY-TV is a defunct television station based in Allen Park, Michigan assigned to channel 20 for the Detroit market following the demise of Ann Arbor's WPAG-TV December 1957.

For many years, it was believed that WJMY never made it to the air at all except for a test signal consisting merely of a card displaying its calls and city-of-license in 1968.^[1] Additional research by Victor Edward Swanson and K. M. Richards in 2015, however, revealed this to be false. WJMY was actually on the air for just over eight months in 1962-63.^[2]

WJMY on the air

Rev. Dr. Robert M. Parr, founder of the Gilead Baptist Church, filed for the channel 62 allocation in Allen Park on September 20, 1960 (as well as an FM station at 98.3). Both were to carry his initials in their call letters as WRMP-FM/TV, except that one month after the FM permit was issued he made a deal to acquire the construction permit for a higher-powered station in Detroit proper on 98.7 and moved his initials there (the Detroit station went to air in 1961 as WBFG). Since FCC rules at the time disallowed common use of call letters between stations with different cities of license, channel 62 was renamed WJMY. Parr then filed to move channel 20 from Ann Arbor to Allen Park, modifying his permit to operate on that channel.

On October 7, 1962, WJMY began operation and the Detroit Free Press began including its listings. Station manager Henry Vanden Bosch stated channel 20 was only operating two hours nightly (7:00 to 9:00pm) with "travel and information films", augmented by a weekly broadcast of the 1953 series The Air Force Story. On Sundays, WJMY aired a block of "gospel films" from noon to 2:00pm. They also aired such one-off specials as Trial For Tara, a production of the Catholic Church about St. Patrick's victory over paganism in Ireland, and the US Navy-produced The John Glenn Story to commemorate the first anniversary of his spaceflight. (Also, Dr. Parr's son-in-law, Theron Spurr, offered five-minute sermons right before sign-off each night.) Ratings were minuscule, though, and on June 10, 1963, WJMY went dark.

Going dark

Parr died on January 22, 1964; in July of that year, Richard Eaton of United Broadcasting Company (owners of black-oriented WOOK-TV in Washington, DC) bought the WJMY construction permit for $115,000 and arranged to lease space on WKBD-TV's new tower in Southfield, Michigan, then under construction. But because United ran into legal and financial difficulties, studio construction was delayed (both in Detroit and at a would-be sister station in Baltimore), although tests were made periodically of the new transmitting facilities. These tests apparently produced the long-held belief that WJMY never transmitted anything beyond its station identification slide (see above).

WJMY proceeded to announce several target dates for resuming operation. The Free Press, at various times, quoted "no air date" (June 24, 1965), "this fall" (January 22, 1967), "late in 1968" (December 27, 1967), "maybe ... by September" (May 9, 1969) and "September 15 if the studio is ready" (August 29, 1969); none of these came to pass. On September 13, 1969, the sale of the channel 20 permit to United Artists Broadcasting was announced -- but the sale never took place. Instead, real estate developer Aben Johnson Jr. put WXON, Channel 62, on the air September 15, 1968, and later requested that channel 20 be assigned to WXON, claiming that Eaton had not adequately pursued putting WJMY back on the air in the five years he had owned the station. The FCC ruled in 1970 that United was entitled to recoup their expenses by selling the channel 20 permit, which they did -- to Johnson, who used it to move WXON from channel 62 to channel 20 on December 9, 1972.

WXON's former channel 62 dial position was taken by WGPR-TV, which signed on in 1975 as the first completely black-owned television station in the U.S.; it was sold to CBS in 1995 and is now WWJ-TV.

References

1. "TVDX in Metro Detroit". TVDX in Metro Detroit. Retrieved 2007-10-20.
2. "History of UHF Television". Retrieved 2016-08-19.