City Milwaukee, Wisconsin Affiliations silent Last air date February 26, 1955 | Channels Analog: 25 (UHF) First air date September 6, 1953 | |
Owner Midwest Broadcasting (Lou Poller) | ||
WCAN-TV was a CBS-affiliated television station that was licensed to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and served the Milwaukee area from 1953 to 1955.
Station history
WCAN, which first signed on the air at 11:25 P.M. Central Time on 6 September 1953, was the first UHF and second overall television station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It broadcast on Channel 25, whose signal space is now used by the digital signal of WCGV-TV (a station which is unrelated to WCAN-TV). A primary affiliate of the CBS network, perhaps it is most noted for having been the only CBS affiliate in Wisconsin to air Edward R. Murrow's See It Now broadcast of March 9, 1954, in which the anti-Communist campaign of Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was criticized. As a CBS affiliate, the station did well in the ratings, even surpassing NBC affiliate WTMJ-TV, rare at the time for a UHF station. The station, along with WOKY-TV (channel 19), was also profitable as a CBS affiliate, and helped spur purchases of UHF converter boxes in the Milwaukee area.
On October 21, 1954, CBS purchased rival WOKY-TV Channel 19, a part-time ABC/Dumont affiliate, for $335,000 and announced it was moving its affiliation from WCAN-TV to the newly acquired station. WCAN-TV owner Lou Poller sold CBS the studio facilities of WCAN-TV, effectively merging the station into WOKY-TV, which then took on the new call sign WXIX. The last day of broadcasting for WCAN-TV was February 26, 1955, after which Poller turned the license for the station back to the Federal Communications Commission. CBS had given Poller the old WOKY-TV studio to continue broadcasting on Channel 25, but Poller never did so.
In 1958, the FCC shifted the UHF channel allocations in Milwaukee from Channels 19, 25 and 31 to Channels 18, 24 and 30. Lou Poller held a construction permit to put a new station on Channel 24, but sold it in December 1966 to Field Communications, which had just put WFLD on the air in Chicago and was seeking to expand that independent station's market coverage with a full-powered repeater station in Milwaukee. However, Field never built the station, and the permit was deleted by the FCC in 1969. WCGV-TV, whose original construction permit dates back only to 1973, started broadcasting on Channel 24 in 1980, coincidentally using the old WCAN-TV studio site on North 27th Street in Milwaukee.