WYFF (channel 4) is a television station licensed to Greenville, South Carolina, United States, serving Upstate South Carolina and Western North Carolina as an affiliate of NBC. Owned by Hearst Television, the station maintains studios on Rutherford Street (west of US 276) in northwest Greenville, and its transmitter is located near Caesars Head State Park in northwestern Greenville County.
History
The station first signed on the air on December 31, 1953, as WFBC-TV; it was the fifth television station to sign on in South Carolina, and transmitted its signal from a tower located on Paris Mountain. The station was owned by the Peace family and their News-Piedmont Publishing Company alongside local newspapers The Greenville News and The Greenville Piedmont, and was a sister station to WFBC radio (1330 AM, now WYRD, and 93.7 FM). For its first two years on the air, the station operated from studio facilities located on Paris Mountain before moving to its current location on Rutherford Street in 1955. Norvin Duncan was the station's first news anchor, moving from the sister AM radio station.
In 1961, the News-Piedmont Publishing Company purchased WBIR-AM-FM and WBIR-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, from the former Taft Broadcasting Company. News-Piedmont merged with Southern Broadcasting to form Multimedia, Inc., with WFBC-AM-FM-TV as the company's flagship stations. WFBC-TV began transmitting locally produced programming in color in February 1967. In the mid-1970s, the station implemented the well-known "Arrow 4" as its logo, which was used in one form or another for many years until 1991.
In 1983, due to new rules set by the Federal Communications Commission restricting common ownership of newspapers and broadcasting outlets in the same market, Multimedia traded WFBC-TV, along with WXII-TV in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to the Pulitzer Publishing Company in exchange for KSDK in St. Louis. On March 3, the station changed its call letters to WYFF-TV (standing for its slogan "We're Your Friend Four", which was used from 1979 to 1991). The change was made due to an FCC rule in effect at the time that stated that two stations in the same market, but with different owners needed to have different call letters. Although Pulitzer closed on its purchase of WXII later in the year, the acquisition of WYFF would not be finalized for another two years until January 1985 as Pulitzer had to sell off WLNE-TV in Providence in order to comply with FCC ownership limits of the time that limited the number of stations one company can own to twelve; in the interim, Pulitzer took over the operations of WYFF through a time brokerage agreement with Multimedia. In 1998, Hearst-Argyle bought Pulitzer's entire television division, including WYFF-TV.
On June 23, 1985, the original WYFF studio building was damaged in a fire causing the station to knock off the air for two hours before its evening newscast.
Programming
WYFF carries the majority of the NBC network schedule; however, it preempts the live broadcast of the fourth hour of Today, hosted by Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager (which is shown only on overnights at 2 a.m.). It delays the Saturday edition of Today for one hour due to its morning newscast.
One of the station's popular children's programs was Monty's Rascals, debuting in 1960, hosted by Monty DuPuy and Stowe Hoyle as Mr. Doohickey (wearing a hat with an old Santa's beard), both of whom served as weathermen at channel 4. The show was moved to Saturday mornings in 1970, to accommodate the soap opera Bright Promise. The program continued as The Rascal's Clubhouse after DuPuy's departure in 1978 and continued until 1982; Hoyle retired two years later. An earlier version of the program, Kids Korral, was hosted by Johnny Wright.
WFBC was one of the few NBC affiliates that did not clear The Monkees during its initial first run on NBC from 1966 to 1968 meaning western Carolina and northeast Georgia viewers missed out on the popular TV band starring Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and Davy Jones.