WECT’s 70th Anniversary: Signing on the air in 1954

WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - Life changed in southeastern North Carolina on April 9, 1954.

WMFD, which many people knew from being one of two radio stations at the time, launched a new broadcast platform consisting of audio and video. WMFD-TV, which would soon become WECT-TV, was just the seventh television station in North Carolina went it went on the air.

The television audience at the time was not what it is today. It’s estimated that WMFD-TV broadcast to fewer than 10,000 television sets in its first days, carrying a dozen live commercials. The first hour or so of every broadcast day consisted of a picture known to many now as the test pattern, which viewers would use to adjust their antennas to get the best signal reception.

WMFD-TV aired several local shows from its studios on Princess Street in downtown Wilmington. They included TV Song Shop, where a local host would play music records for the audience, and sometimes showed film clips of performers. The station soon started airing several network entertainment shows on delay, since they could not be received live from New York City.

“My first business trip to New York for the television station was to secure delayed broadcast network programming that we were offering to run free just to give our viewers network programming to fill some of the slots that we had voids in,” said C.D. Martin, who was WMFD’s general manager at the time. “We really didn’t have enough programming to fill a full day.”

Wayne Jackson arrived at WMFD-TV in September 1954, straight out of working in radio, and became one of the station’s first on-air personalities. He started what would become a 35-year career at the station by hosting a live talk show called Relax with Jax.

“I talked with anyone who had anything interesting to say on practically any subject,” Jackson said during WECT’s 30th anniversary special. “One of the most interesting guests was baseball star Jackie Robinson. One of the nicest things about those early days was the fact that we could do anything we wanted. Nothing had ever been done before.”

Jackson also anchored one of the station’s earliest news broadcasts, called Your Esso Reporter, a nightly show that also included weather and sports reports. Not long after the station went on the air, the team had a major news event on its hands when Hurricane Hazel devastated the coast on October 15. The hurricane made landfall at the North Carolina-South Carolina state line as a Category-4 storm, with winds peaking at 134 miles per hour. Hurricane Hazel is blamed for 19 deaths in North Carolina, and is estimated to have destroyed 15,000 homes.

In 1955, WMFD-TV became affiliated with the National Broadcasting Company, and started broadcasting live NBC network shows through a phone line to the station transmitter in downtown Wilmington. WMFD-TV also did its first remote broadcast that year, which was live coverage of the Azalea Festival Parade along Front Street.

It wasn’t easy. The crew took the station’s only camera out of the studio and put it on a platform set up along the parade route. They dropped camera cables out of the station window, across several rooftops, and hooked it up to provide the video feed.

Big changes happened in 1957 when the owners of WMFD-TV moved the station’s transmitter from the top of the building on Princess Street to a site in Delco, in Columbus County. That happened in June, and in October, Atlantic Telecasting Corporation bought WMFD-TV. The new owners changed the station’s call letters the next year to WECT-TV.

Technology improved quickly enough that in 1958, WECT-TV became one of the first television stations in the eastern United States to receive its network signal from New York City through a series of microwave receivers and transmitters. That path continued for several decades, before being replaced by satellites in the early 1980s.

As the decade of the 1950s ended, WECT-TV got a new home, moving from the studio downtown to a new building along Shipyard Boulevard, where we continue to produce nearly 50 hours of on-air news programming every week, along with hundreds of local stories on wect.com and the WECT News app.