WAKA (channel 8) is a television station licensed to Selma, Alabama, United States, serving as the CBS affiliate for the Montgomery area. It is owned by Bahakel Communications alongside Tuskegee-licensed CW+ affiliate WBMM (channel 22); Bahakel also provides certain services to ABC affiliate WNCF (channel 32) under a shared services agreement (SSA) with SagamoreHill Broadcasting. The stations share studios on Harrison Road in north Montgomery, while WAKA's transmitter is located in Gordonville, Alabama, which is about halfway between Montgomery and Selma.
History
Early years
Channel 8 debuted on March 17, 1960, as WSLA (call letters representing Selma). The station was originally owned by the Brennan family and their company, Deep South Broadcasting, along with WBAM radio in Montgomery (740 AM, now WMSP), and broadcast from a converted home in Selma with the studio located in the garage. Deep South originally sought the WBAM-TV call letters for channel 8. However, in those days, Selma and Montgomery were separate markets, and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations at the time would not allow companion call letters to be issued to stations located in different markets. Originally an independent, it picked up an ABC affiliation soon afterward.
Channel 8 was the only primary ABC affiliate in south-central Alabama. In Montgomery, ABC was relegated to off-hours clearances on NBC affiliate WSFA-TV and CBS affiliate WCOV-TV. Originally, Deep South could not afford a direct network feed. Instead, station engineers switched in and out of the signal of WBRC-TV in Birmingham whenever ABC programming was available. Often, if the engineer was not paying attention, local WBRC breaks and IDs would air on WSLA. It operated from a tiny tower just west of Selma, with only 3,000 watts of power. This effectively limited its coverage area to Dallas County.
In 1964, WKAB-TV (later WHOA-TV and now WNCF) started up as Montgomery's ABC affiliate, but WSLA continued to broadcast ABC programming to the western part of the market because of UHF's limited coverage at the time. It could be argued that WSLA was almost always a CBS affiliate. Once it ended a brief stint as an independent station and affiliated with ABC, it also established a secondary affiliation with CBS by carrying one hour of that network's programming every week with Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour.
1968 fire and rebuilding
On the morning of July 31, 1968, WSLA employee Bailey Bowline, Jr. drove to work at 3:30 a.m. to discover the station had been set on fire, completely destroying the facility on Land Line Road and causing more than $100,000 in damage. The night before, the station had been airing a religious program, during which the station received a phone call from a viewer, promising to "settle it with TNT". It was also reported that filing cabinets had been pulled open before the fire. George Singleton, who worked at the station as a teenager and later became its general manager, noted that WSLA's loss was not a large one for the community, saying that "it really wasn't much of a station".
Channel 8 had been for sale prior to the fire, and negotiations continued with H. Guthrie Bell, whose Gay-Bell Broadcasting owned WCOV-TV and a station in Lexington, Kentucky. Gay-Bell agreed to buy WSLA in August for $115,000; it would have operated the station as a semi-satellite of WCOV-TV. However, the application was dismissed on August 25, 1969. Ten months later, on June 11, 1970, the Brennans filed to sell the station to Charles Grisham and his company, Central Alabama Broadcasting, which owned WHNT-TV in Huntsville and WYEA in Columbus, Georgia. Central Alabama also filed to rebuild WSLA with 25,100 watts of effective radiated power—the station had previously broadcast with 2,510 watts—which was approved by the FCC in 1971. A second increase to 53.8 kW followed in 1975.
It would not be until November 1, 1973, when WSLA began broadcasting again. The new WSLA was a full-color CBS affiliate. However, it broadcast in one of the smallest markets in the United States, ranked 211th out of 215; in 1981, its small news department produced just one early evening newscast, and the sports and weather presenters doubled as a swimming pool salesman and a station sales executive, respectively.