page_title: WBAL-TV
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: WBAL-TV / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The WBAL-TV studio and office facility, on Television Hill in Baltimore, opened in 1962.
context_page_description: WBAL-TV, virtual channel 11, is an NBC-affiliated television station licensed to Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It is the flagship station of the Hearst Television subsidiary of New York City-based Hearst Communications, and is co-owned with the company's sole radio properties, WBAL and WIYY. The three stations share studios and offices on "Television Hill" in the Woodberry section of Baltimore, west of the Jones Falls stream valley, near the landmark "candleabra" transmission tower that WBAL-TV also shares with WIYY and several other Baltimore TV and radio broadcast outlets.
  On cable, WBAL-TV is carried on Comcast Xfinity channels 21 and 811. On Verizon FiOS, DirecTV and Dish Network and in most outlying areas of the market, the station is carried on channel 11.
context_section_description: WBAL-TV began operations on Channel 11 on March 11, 1948, from its original studios on North Charles Street in Downtown Baltimore.  It was the second station in Baltimore, signing on five months after WMAR-TV on Channel 2 in October 1947, and eight months ahead of WAAM-TV (now WJZ-TV) on Channel 13 later that year. The station's parent, the Hearst Corporation (founded by newspaper chain syndicate titan William Randolph Hearst, 1863-1951 of San Francisco and New York City) also owned WBAL radio and two local newspapers, the largest circulation in town, the afternoon daily "Baltimore News-Post" (and "The Baltimore American" on Sundays - which later merged as the News American in 1965 before shutting down in 1986, as one of the city's later then three daily papers).
  WBAL-TV is one of two Hearst-owned broadcast properties to have been built and signed on by the company (the other being WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh), and the oldest to be continuously owned by Hearst through its various television subsidiaries through the years. At its launch, WBAL-TV was an NBC affiliate, owing to its radio sister's long affiliation with the NBC Red Network.
  Early programming on channel 11 included Musical Almanac, Look and Cook and Know Baltimore, along with news and sports productions. In the 1950s, the station introduced Romper Room, a children's program produced locally by Bert and Nancy Claster that eventually became a nationally franchised and syndicated program. Another long-running show of the 1950s was the weekday Quiz Club, co-hosted by local personalities Brent Gunts and Jay Grayson. Baltimore Sun local history columnist Jacques Kelly described it at the time of Grayson's death in June 2000, as "pure 1950s live television ... executed on a low budget ... the genial hosts ... ruled the 1 p.m. airwaves".
  WBAL-TV produced several local bowling shows in the 1960s and early 1970s, including Strikes and Spares, Pinbusters, Duckpins and Dollars, Bowling for Dollars and Spare Time. The station even went as far as building and installing several "duckpin" bowling alleys at its studios. It also launched several children's entertainment shows during this period, such as Rhea and Sunshine, Pete the Pirate, P.W. Doodle, Heads Up, and the teen-oriented rock and roll music and the mid 1960s teen dancing on the Kerby Scott Show which introduced its "mod" fashions and "hippie" culture style of rock music to the area.
  WBAL-TV has boasted many television firsts, including becoming the first Baltimore television station to broadcast in color, the first station in Maryland (and the eighth in the world) to acquire a videocassette machine (of the U-Matic format); the first station in Baltimore to acquire a mobile satellite news-gathering system (dubbed "NEWSTAR 11") and the first Baltimore station to hire an African-American news anchor and a Black news director.
  In the late 1970s, ABC steadily rose in the ratings to become the number one network in primetime. Accordingly, the network began to seek upgrades to its slate of affiliates, which included some stations that either had poor signals or poorly performing local programming. WBAL-TV had been invited to switch to ABC in 1977, but opted to remain with NBC out of concerns about the poor ratings for ABC's then-recently revamped evening newscasts.
  On March 3, 1981, CBS announced that it would be ending its 33-year affiliation with WMAR-TV (channel 2), then owned by the A. S. Abell Company (then-publishers of the Baltimore Sun), and moving its programming to WBAL-TV. Among its reasons for making the switch, CBS cited channel 11's strength in local news ratings and overall non-network programming as opposed to WMAR-TV, which heavily preempted the network in favor of syndicated programs, local public affairs and sports coverage; CBS also cited low ratings for WMAR's newscasts. WBAL-TV's first stint as an NBC affiliate ended on August 30, 1981, when the two station exchanged networks–the first affiliation swap to occur in Baltimore. The last NBC program to air on channel 11 until 1995 was a rerun from the evening 
caption: The WBAL-TV modernistic glass walled studio and offices facility with huge call sign letters on the roof, visible from passing on the Jones Falls Expressway (Interstate 83), on "Television Hill" near Woodberry in north-central Baltimore, opened in 1962.
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