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WTVE History
 WTVE-TV
51 commenced broadcast operations on Sunday, May 4, 1980 at 8:05 PM. After a
period of test patterns, Channel-51 came on the air with a series of local
scenes such as the Pagoda and City Hall, followed by opening remarks by its
chief executive officer, Dr. Henry N. Aurandt. “We have been working for over 10
years for this goal, and we finally made it tonight,” Dr. Aurandt told viewers.
Sign-on ceremonies were followed by the airing of an uncut version of “From Here
to Eternity”. Regular programming began on Monday, May 5, 1980 with “The Dinah
Shore Show”.
The station was
founded by Dr. Aurandt, an obstetrician who had practiced in Reading for more
than a decade, after realizing the need for a local television station in the
area. He was amazed that a metropolitan region of Readin g’s
size and its surrounding suburbs had no local TV outlet, where nearby cities
including Lancaster and Lebanon had one or more stations
of their own. Sharing Dr. Aurandt’s vision, 26
stockholders invested over $2.0 million in a concession that UHF television had
matured to the point of succeeding in Reading (please see “UHF History” below).
Headquartered in a
building purchased from American Color at 1729 North 11th Street, Reading, the
station began broadcasting atop Mt. Penn with a total
output of 1,445,000 watts for a primary coverage radius of roughly 50 miles..
WTVE went on the air with a new RCA 60 kW transmitter. Its antenna was - and
still is - 1,247 feet above sea level.
The station signed on
as a commercial independent TV station airing over seven hours of live original
local programming per week. The decision was made early on not program its
format in the same vein as other in dependents,
with reruns of “I Love Lucy” and “The Beverly Hillbillies”. Instead, Channel-51
offered mainly first-run programs, including “The John
Davidson Show”, “Hour Magazine”, “The Toni Tennile Show”
and the “Rockford Files”. It must be noted, however, that the station did,
indeed air episodes of “Leave It to Beaver” weekday afternoons at 3:30 PM.
Through the early
years, WTVE produced local news and news/talk programs, including, among others,
“Total News”, “Newsbeat” and Night Beat”, a popular viewer call-in show. The
station also constructed a kitchen in its studio for Chef
Jean Maurice Juge of Earlville who hosted the half-hour cooking show “Jean
Maurice, Chef de Cuisine”. Some of the movie titles that aired on the station in
its early days included “The Parson and the Outlaw”, “Dracula’s Great Love”,
“Shriek of the Mutilated” and “Screaming Mimi”.
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