KSWO-TV (channel 7) is a television station licensed to Lawton, Oklahoma, United States, serving the western Texoma area as an affiliate of ABC and Telemundo. It is owned by Gray Television, which maintains a shared services agreement (SSA) with American Spirit Media, owner of Wichita Falls, Texas–licensed dual CBS/CW+ affiliate KAUZ-TV (channel 6), for the provision of certain services. KSWO-TV's studios are located on 60th Street in southeastern Lawton, and its transmitter is located near East 1940 and North 2390 Roads in rural southwestern Tillman County, Oklahoma (near Grandfield).
History
Early history
On May 22, 1952, Oklahoma Quality Broadcasting Co.—a locally based company founded by M&D Finance Co. owner Ransom H. Drewry, who co-founded the licensee with a group of shareholders that included J.R. Montgomery (then-president of Lawton's City National Bank), T.R. Warkentin, Robert P. Scott (both of whom were minority partners in locally based S.W. Stationery) and G.G. Downing—submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a construction permit to build and license to operate a broadcast television station in the Wichita Falls–Lawton market that would transmit on VHF channel 7. When the FCC awarded the license and permit for channel 7 to the Drewry-led group on December 23, 1952, the group requested and received approval to assign KSWO-TV as the call letters for his television station; the calls were taken from the Lawton radio station that Drewry founded in 1941, KSWO (1380 AM, now KKRX).
KSWO-TV first signed on the air on March 8, 1953; it was the second television station to sign on in the Wichita Falls-Lawton market, launching one week after CBS affiliate KWFT-TV (channel 6, later KSYD-TV and now KAUZ-TV)—located across the Oklahoma–Texas state line in Wichita Falls—made its debut on March 1. (Wichita Falls NBC affiliate KFDX-TV [channel 3] would sign on one month later, on April 12.) Channel 7 has been an ABC television affiliate since its debut, inheriting those rights through KSWO radio's longtime relationship with the progenitor ABC Radio Network; however, the station also maintained a secondary affiliation with the DuMont Television Network. The station originally maintained transmitter facilities located at its studios, located east of Lawton; construction on the studio facility was delayed 60 days due to inclement winter weather conditions that affected southwestern Oklahoma during the winter of that year, such so that the studio doors were covered with canvas until adequate doors were installed in the building. The transmitter was a relatively low-power unit that propagated a signal that reached over a limited radius spanning to Altus to the west, Wichita Falls to the south, Anadarko to the north, and Ringling to the east.
By the late 1950s, other nearby ABC affiliates (such as KTEN in Ada and KOCO-TV, which had recently relocated to Oklahoma City from Enid) began encroaching the northern and eastern fringes on KSWO's viewing area; however, wide gaps in channel 7's signal coverage existed to the south and west of Wichita Falls—the only primary ABC stations in north and west Texas at the time were Dallas affiliate WFAA-TV, and Amarillo affiliate KVII-TV (Lubbock and Abilene, respectively, did not get their own primary ABC affiliates until KAMC affiliated with the network in 1969, followed by the switch of KTXS-TV to ABC from CBS in 1979). KSWO disaffiliated from DuMont upon its shut down in 1956, amid various issues that arose from its relations with Paramount Pictures that hamstrung it from expansion; the station became a full-time ABC affiliate on November 10 of that year. On December 15, 1957, a fire caused extensive damage to the 60th Street studio facility after gasoline being used to clean a weather map caught fire;
In August 1959, the FCC gave permission for Drewry to construct a tower near Grandfield, Oklahoma, which would operate at 316,000 watts of power (the maximum power allowable for stations broadcasting on VHF channels 7–13), thereby providing a more powerful signal that could extend KSWO-TV's reach to many portions of far southwestern Oklahoma and northwestern Texas where reception of the station had been marginal at best. Wichitex Radio and Television and Sydney Grayson—the respective owners of NBC affiliate KFDX-TV and CBS affiliate KSYD-TV in Wichita Falls—opposed the application, resulting in Drewry having to convince the FCC that the construction permit merited approval. The new site was located about halfway between Wichita Falls and Lawton (from a Lawton perspective, it was in the same direction as the Wichita Falls stations).