WYFF - History

History

The station went on the air on December 26, 1953 as WFBC-TV, South Carolina's fifth television station, broadcasting from a transmitter located on Paris Mountain. It was owned by the Peace family and their News-Piedmont Publishing Company along with The Greenville News, The Greenville Piedmont and WFBC radio (1330 AM, now WYRD, and 93.7 FM). For its first two years of operation, its studios were 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 radio side.

Monty's Rascals (started in 1960) was one of the station's popular children's shows, starring two channel 4 weathermen: Monty DuPuy (who left in 1978) and Stowe Hoyle as Mr. Doohickey (wearing a hat with an old Santa's beard). The show continued as The Rascal's Clubhouse after DuPuy's departure in 1978 and continued until 1982. Two years later, Hoyle retired. An earlier version of the program, Kids Korral, was hosted by Johnny Wright.

Locally televised color programming also began in February 1967. In 1968, News-Piedmont merged with Southern Broadcasting to form Multimedia, Inc., with WFBC AM/-FM/-TV as the flagship stations. In the mid 1970s, the famous "Arrow 4" logo was introduced and was used in one form or another for many years.

In 1983, due to new rules restricting common ownership of newspapers and broadcasting outlets in the same market, Multimedia sold off its Upstate cluster. In an unusual trade of one group's flagship station for another, WFBC-TV was traded to Pulitzer Publishing Company in return for KSD-TV (now KSDK) in St. Louis. At that point, Channel 4 changed its call letters to WYFF-TV (We're Your Friend Four). Pulitzer also acquired WXII-TV in the Piedmont Triad as part of the same deal. Although Pulitzer closed on WXII later in 1983, the acquisition of WYFF would not be finalized until January 1985 because Pulitzer had to sell off WLNE-TV in Providence in order to comply with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ownership limits of the time; in the interim, Pulitzer took over the operations of WYFF through a time brokerage agreement with Multimedia.

Channel 4 was the first upstate television station to begin 24/7 broadcasting, and did so in the fall of 1988. It ran NBC News Overnight (later Nightside), Home Shopping Spree and CNN Headline News overnight. In 2005, it discontinued CNN Headline News (and previously the Home Shopping Spree) overnight and now runs NBC late night, drama reruns, home and garden shows, and paid programming overnight. In 1999 Hearst-Argyle bought Pulitzer's entire television division, including WYFF-TV.

In 2010 WYFF covered the attempted rape of Kelly Dodson. Which would later become the basis of the famous you tube video "Hide your kids, Hide your wife"