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Norfolk VA TV History

 I don't know if you're interested in individual TV station histories, but here is my contribution.

After WTAR-TV/NBC came WTOV-TV in Norfolk Virginia (Dec 1953). It was a DuMont and ABC-TV station in downtown Norfolk in what is now a Maaco paint shop. Because WTAR was VHF Channel 3, and WTOV was UHF Channel 27, most people didn't bother with a converter, and WTOV went dark after a few months.

West Virginia used car dealer Tim Brite moved the station across the Elizabeth River to Portsmouth, and reopened the station at the trasmitter site with county music shows and westerns.
WVEC-TV Channel 13 moved into WTOV's old studio and became NBC after WTAR moved to CBS. (WTAR is now WTKR).

WTOV went bankrupt again until 1960 when Pat Robertson bought it, and renamed it WYAH. He started the Christian Broadcasting Network and The 700 Club from the same transmitter site, expanding the building by leaps and bounds over the next 20 years. (The call letters WTOV now belong to the NBC station in Steubenville, Ohio).

He finally moved his CBN operation out to Virginia Beach, VA and sold WYAH to publisher Ray Bottom for $8 million. Ray changed the call letters to WGNT.

In 1995, Ray affiliated with UPN, making WGNT-TV one of the network's top five affiliates in terms of viewers. The next year, he sold WGNT to Paramount Stations Group for $45 million. The station is now branded UPN27, and still in the original Portsmouth transmitter building.)

Al McGilvray
Former UPN27 master control operator