It was late summer in 1978, and helicopters were airlifting components of a television transmitter and tower to the top of Mount Ascutney, marking the coming of a new television station to serve the Upper Valley. It was exciting news for thousands of residents long starved for popular NBC programs like “Dragnet,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Bonanza” and “The Today Show.”
Reliable broadcast television reception reached the region in April 1954 when Channel 3 from Burlington and Channel 8 from Mount Washington came on the air. WCAX brought the network programming of CBS; WMTW had ABC. But there was no NBC offering to be found for viewers looking for off-the-air service.
Fledgling community antenna systems — what came to be called “cable” — picked up distant signals from Boston, but they served only densely developed village areas. The local Jaycees put up a wooden tower to rebroadcast Springfield, Mass.’s NBC station and beam it into Windsor, and efforts to bring in NBC with a transmitter on Crafts Hill in West Lebanon sputtered and failed twice.
The station would operate on Channel 31, with its transmitter and tower atop 3,144-foot Mount Ascutney and have studios in White River Junction. Call letters would be WNNE, for Northern New England. Its power was projected to reach 400,000 viewers in 126,000 homes from Concord to Montpelier. Founding general manager William Loftus said the broadcast signal would cover two-thirds of Vermont and a third of New Hampshire. Initial investment was projected at $600,000 ($2.9 million today) by Taft Broadcasting of Texas, a company headed by Wallingford, Vt., native Paul Taft.
The new channel would enable Upper Valley folks to boast for two decades, “we’ve got our own TV station.”
Channel 31 started out Sept. 28, 1978, with news, sports and weather broadcasts at 6 and 11 p.m. Advertising, administrative and technical staffers plus on-air talent would soon surpass 30 employees, who Loftus said were ”elated” the station was up and operating. It wasn’t clear sailing, however, and WNNE was dogged initially by “shadowing” of its reception and then skirmishes for years over “exclusivity.”
Signals on UHF frequencies are like rifle shots and can’t reach valleys behind terrain, so some viewers were in the dark, requiring the establishment of “translators” or repeaters to fill in some of the gaps. A maze of rules governs how cable systems must manage programming from distant stations that duplicate what is offered by nearby stations. Disputes over exclusivity would engage the station, cable carriers and viewers off and on over the ensuing years.
John Yaccavone was a 42-year-old Lebanon businessman who had always been fascinated with the weather. He would talk his way into becoming Channel 31’s founding weatherman by showing up for his interview armed with all the visuals he’d need to do his first ‘cast. He would deliver folksy weather segments, often at both ends of the day, and carry on his business obligations in between. After two years, he stepped away, but today, 45-plus years later, people on the street often see him and say, “Hey, you’re the weather guy.”
Over the following two decades, there would be dozens of men and women — mostly younger than 30 — passing through the WNNE studios, many aspiring and some succeeding as reporters and anchors in television news, sports and weather. Often they would learn that there’s really little glamour in television and they’d drift off to employment in business, sales, teaching or the law.
Some stuck it out and a few made successful careers in television. One who did was Rachael Ruble, who went on from WNNE to serve as digital media manager for the Bezos Family Foundation, after gigs as a news anchor at bigger-market stations from Maine to Seattle. Then she became a Beijing-based anchor for English language broadcasts of the official Chinese state television system, and after that an English language anchor for Turkey’s public television network.
Another was Diana Jones, now retired and living in North Haverhill. A UNH English lit graduate, she was working in Nashville when she was bitten by the TV bug. She took the advice of Barbara Walters to start out at a small station and landed a job as a traffic manager at WNNE, which eventually led to duty as a news anchor. She would go on to many years in production of syndicated reports on health and medical topics that were distributed for use by hundreds of local stations across the country.
“A lot of young people came there and cut their teeth,” says Bruce Lyndes, news director and lead anchor for WNNE in the late 1980s and early 90s. “They were trying to get their feet in the door, but it was a hard slog, a culture shock. They had to learn through an immersive experience.
“The idea that TV news was glamorous would quickly evaporate. We didn’t have the best of equipment, mistakes got made, but the people had the Upper Valley at heart.”
In its early years, the station’s news department employed a dozen people; by the end of his tenure, Lyndes recalls, there were about four left. He went on to be the public affairs director for Plymouth State University for a decade, then wrapped things up as an administrator at the White River Junction Veterans Affairs hospital.
One piece of equipment that Taft Broadcasting acquired, however, set the station apart from its Northern New England peers. It was a satellite truck that could enable reporters to transmit news and sports accounts back to the station in real time, lending an immediacy to the news barely ever seen on a small-market television station anywhere in the country.
JJ Cioffi was a West Rutland-area native who came to the Upper Valley to be the sports voice of Lebanon’s WTSL radio station. For one game, he was assigned to do color with the station’s regular play-by-play man, but his partner didn’t show up, so he had no choice but to call the action himself. That helped advance what would become almost a half-century of work covering school and college sports in Vermont and New Hampshire, including a six-year stint with WNNE.
Today he loves to tell about what he was able to accomplish with that satellite truck.
“Here we were a small local television station that really paid attention to local sports. The satellite truck allowed us to follow local teams when they went on the road, like down to Keene or up to St. Jay, and have the story on the evening broadcast. It showed people we gave a damn,” Cioffi says.
But that satellite truck often would also serve as the uplink for other stations that lacked its capability. And in the fall of 1986 Cioffi took it to Fenway Park and then Shea Stadium for the World Series between the Red Sox and the Mets. He witnessed the infamous Bill Bruckner misplay that helped tear defeat from the jaw of victory for the Bosox, and viewers got his report on the 11 o’clock broadcast over their hyper local television station back home in the Upper Valley.
One day, Cioffi was interviewing coaches and players at the end of a football game in Hanover when a female athlete came up and asked him why he didn’t do game coverage for girls’ sports as he did for the boys’. Today, he looks back on that moment as a turning point in his career in sports reporting; from then on, he made sure girls’ sports got equal coverage, going forward to the 20 years he spent as sports director for WCAX in Burlington before retiring to a California golf enclave.
“At Channel 31 we made it work, it wasn’t easy, and we were sometimes regarded as the “po’ Boys” by the big guys in the industry. We didn’t just talk to coaches, kids got their moment of fame, too.” Cioffi says.
But that robust package of local news, weather and sports began to crack when Taft sold WNNE to Heritage Media in 1990. The station had recently been on the market at an asking price close to $6 million. After Heritage took over, it was a steady drip-drip of reductions in airtime for local content and the personnel to put it together. The station was being pulled under the wings of WPTZ Channel 5 in Plattsburgh, N.Y.
As this was evolving, the U.S. broadcast industry was beginning to be roiled by mergers, new technologies, demand for space on the electronic spectrum, vast change in the cable sector, development of internet options for viewing, upstart channels like CNN and ESPN, streaming services and changing consumer tastes. Stations were changing hands fast —names like Sinclair, Rupert Murdoch and others were buzzing around before Channel 31 eventually ended up in the lap of Hearst Television, which already had WPTZ Channel 5 Plattsburg/Burlington NBC; WMTW Channel 8 Poland Spring/Portland, Maine, ABC; Channel 9 WMUR Manchester ABC; and WCVB Channel 5 in Boston ABC.
Channel 31’s frequency was sold off for $50 million to telecommunications interests and now its lineage traces to Channel 26 Montpelier, a CW Network station linked to WPTZ. Keeping track of it all in Valley News TV listings has become a dizzying project.
Now-retired bank executive Tom Hoyt of West Lebanon did double duty as a news anchor evenings for Channel 31 and as morning man for Q106 FM during the heyday of the Imus in the Morning Show. His last TV day was Dec. 29, 2000, and today he looks back on his time on the air with reverence for what such a small station was able to accomplish in informing the citizens of the Upper Valley.
“Given the size of the area it served, it was pretty remarkable,” Hoyt says.
Steve Taylor has been an occasional contributor to the Valley News for many years. He lives in Meriden.