Tim Frakes Productions Inc. Live in Three States, The Story of WCFC TV-38 Chicago
Channel: Tim Frakes
Date: 2019-09-04

It was the summer of 1983.  I was a 22 year old college student serving an internship at the only Chicago broadcast market television station that would take me.  The network VHF stations, WBBM, WLS, WMAQ, WTTW PBS and the independent WGN all required a B average and formal academia was never me strength.  

I spotted WCFC-TV 38 in a 1982 copy of Broadcast Yearbook, a trade publication that listed names and telephone numbers of station management. 

An Internship was a requirement for graduation at Harding Universities Mass Communications program.  So, I wrote to Station Manager Harold Wheat, got an interview, and while home on break, borrowed my dad’s black leather wingtip shoes and jumped onto the Metra Chicago Northwestern line from West Chicago, into the city.

The interview went well, and the next summer, I found myself standing behind an RCA TK-760 plumbicon three tube color broadcast studio camera in a tiny studio (known as the two-car garage) on the 44th floor of Chicago’s Kemper Building at 20 North Wacker Drive. 

WCFC-TV38 was in some ways, a typical television station. Cameras, studio, set’s, lights, video tape machines, a master control, offices.  But in other ways, more profound ways, WCFC-TV38 was different.  The call letters, W-C-F-C stood for “Winning Chicagoland for Christ.”  At the time, TV-38 was the largest, independent Christian television station in America and part of an emerging trend that saw the rise and public fall of famous televangelists like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert, the emergence of the religious right on the conservative political landscape, and a mainstreaming of the American Pentecostal movement. 

And in more subtle ways, TV-38 also nurtured a grass-roots ecumenical movement that crossed ecclesiastical, racial and economic barriers that had divided Christians in Chicago for decades.