WHFV Memorabilia - Fall 1973 · 9:35am Nov 21st, 2016
This video comes to us via YouTuber stevations. It's a collection of audio clips captured from a long-defunct UHF-TV station in northern Virginia. WHFV (the HFV stood for Historic Fredericksburg, Virginia) was on the air only twenty months, commencing operations on October 8, 1973 and going dark for good just before 5 PM local time on May 29, 1975. Though Fredericksburg was an established radio market of its own, it was, apparently, not large enough to financially support a TV station, the result being WHFV was in dire monetary straits from the beginning. Channel 69 had an affiliation with NBC and carried all of that network's programming, and yet it operated in the shadows of two powerful VHF NBC stations in the region, WRC-TV4 (NBC's O&O in the nation's capital, and the only network O&O there until WTTG-TV5 was sold to Rupert Murdoch) and WWBT Channel 12 (Richmond). The saga of WHFV can be seen in greater detail in this well-documented Wikipedia article.
Upon clicking the embedded video, you will hear a couple of station IDs, an incomplete WHFV advertisement promoting sales of stock in the station to local viewers, and an incomplete nightly sign-off announcement. Also, you will see WHFV stationery and a printed schedule of Channel 69's programming for Fall 1973; if you want to see any part the entire schedule for that station, just pause the video. How many of these NBC shows do some of you remember viewing back in the day?
