WISC-TV Looks Back On 50 Years Of Excellence

By Mary Erpenbach
Madison Magazine
Special To Channel 3000

On the evening of June 24, 1956, at a hastily built television studio in a Quonset hut on Madison's far West Side, a broadcast engineer named Walter Hariu took one last look at the test pattern on the screen in front of him.

He reached up and flipped a switch; the test pattern disappeared. In its place, on his screen and on television sets in homes throughout south-central Wisconsin (and parts of Illinois and Iowa), was a new program called Theater Three. At that moment, WISC-TV officially became a television station.

A pretty big television station, actually. The Quonset hut notwithstanding, WISC sparked to life as the automatic leading station in its market. It had the strongest signal, the largest audience, the most local programming, the biggest news department, the tallest transmitter tower. But none of that was actually the point of putting WISC-TV on the air.

It still isn't. "Lonely at the top" has never been the goal for this television station -- not for the people who were there at the beginning, and not for the people who run it now.

Which, it turns out, has had everything to do with how WISC became what it is today: the venerable station-of-record for Wisconsin's capitol city and, more importantly, a vital and vibrant touchstone for communities throughout southern Wisconsin.

To this day, there are only a handful of television stations in the nation like WISC-TV -- stations that, in the high-turnover world of media ownership, have never once changed hands.

"WISC-TV has always been owned by the Murphy family, and that's a remarkable record in this industry," said John Laabs, president of the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association. "That has had a lot to do with this feeling of family the station has."

Morgan and Elizabeth Murphy, of Superior, Wisconsin, put WISC-TV on the air in 1956. They partnered with a group of prominent Madison businessmen: Walter Bridges, Ken Harley, Ralph Immell, George Johnson, Russ Nelson and Ralph O'Connor. The Murphy children, Elizabeth Murphy Burns and John Murphy, own the station now.

Even in the beginning, though, the Murphys' television station was anything but a mom-and-pop shop. Morgan's father, John T. Murphy, had built a chain of newspapers from scratch, and Morgan grew up in the family publishing business -- named the Evening Telegram Company for the first Murphy newspaper, the Superior Evening Telegram.

By 1956, though, Morgan and Elizabeth were in the full middle of their lives and had taken the Evening Telegram Company and turned it into a growing media empire of newspaper interests, radio stations, and licenses for television frequencies.

"Dad was first and foremost a newspaper guy," recalled Liz Murphy Burns. "But he was interested in everything, period. And many newspapers during that time got into radio, and from radio into television."

Morgan became one of Wisconsin's earliest boosters of commercial television; recognizing his influence on broadcasting in the state, the Wisconsin Broadcasters Hall of Fame inducted him as a charter member in 1989.

WISC-TV's First Programs

WISC hit the ground running. Its very first newscasts, in fact, were broadcast with cameras so new that no tripod had yet been assembled -- the cameras were simply propped on shipping boxes. But from the start, general manager Ralph O'Connor, program director Dick Kepler, and chief engineer Hariu brought a wealth of broadcasting experience to their new positions. Sales managers Richard Nickeson and Tom Tilson wasted no time getting to New York City to sell advertising airtime slots. Back home, future national network star Roger Grimsby delivered local newscasts. Other local programming, including the instantly popular noontime Farm Hour, drew viewers by the tens of thousands.

Shortly after it went on the air, WISC was tabbed as a CBS affiliate. By the time the Nielsen Television Network Ratings service began to keep track of such things, only a few years after the station's birth, viewers were turning to WISC for no fewer than ten of the twelve top-rated shows in the country, including Gunsmoke, The Andy Griffith Show and Dennis the Menace.

WISC also produced outstanding local programs to serve the desires and meet the needs of Madison and surrounding communities. These shows were so dominant during that early era that warm memories of them still pop up in Madison's cultural landscape. Middle-aged Madisonians of today, for example, marvel at the hold Circus 3 had on them when they were youngsters. Ventriloquist Howie Olson and his little wooden sidekick Cowboy Eddie debuted on Circus 3 in the late 1950s and soon became as popular as rock stars; the wait for on-set tickets sometimes stretched into months.

In the news department, Jerry Deane served as WISC's first news director and grew into one of the area's most beloved broadcasters. His intelligent delivery helped make Farm Hour one of the longest-running locally produced shows in the nation.

"We began broadcasting when all the cows, not just the Holsteins, were in black and white," he once joked.

Deane's live, one-hour show also broke new ground by introducing Joan Hood as one of the industry's early female broadcasters; Hood's regular Country Cupboard segments earned her a legion of loyal fans.

"There was such an excitement about being in that new business known as television," remembers Bill Dyke, an early WISC broadcaster who later served, from 1969 to 1973, as mayor of Madison. "It created a great awareness of community, and those of us who were part of that early television family gained a kind of acceptance into families that was just wonderful. It was like we were adopted into viewers' families."

During the station's beginning years, Dyke moderated Face the State, WISC's weekly in-house version of the network show, Face the Nation. Dyke interviewed newsmakers and politicians as they came through town, and recalls bringing to viewers his chats with Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Jerry Ford and, in 1960, a young congressman named Jack Kennedy.

The substantial amount of high-quality local programming on WISC then, and now, reflects just how much the Murphys have valued localism from the very beginning. And it demonstrates the strong, extended-family connection they felt to the station's community of viewers, one which continues to grow.

"WISC's local shows -- today those are things like For The Record and regular editorials -- demonstrate their willingness to take on the responsibility of being not just a contributor to the community but a leader in the community," said Laabs. "My guess is that this is ingrained, that it comes from being a family of newspaper owners; when Liz Murphy Burns was young, that's what she was seeing and learning."

Indeed it was. But, along with learning the importance of public service from her family, Liz also developed her own appreciation for the production aspects of broadcasting.

"My dad thought I watched too much television," she recalled. "But my mother was my champion. I overheard a conversation when I was seven or eight and she said, 'Morgan, she's watching different things. She doesn't just watch the show. She talks about the choreographers or she talks about the director or the producer.'"

Liz pursued her interest in television on to college at Arizona State, which is where, she said, she became fascinated with the business side of broadcasting.

Meanwhile, things happened fast at WISC. Within 18 months of going on the air, the station had moved into a much nicer new building on the West Side. New sales executives, news reporters, and engineers soon filled the space. John Gaska, who worked for WISC for nearly 40 years, recalls joining the station in 1962 as an art director.

"I built a 3-D skyline of Madison out of pressed cardboard," he said. "It had a tree line in the foreground, then some houses and buildings, then the capitol dome. It looked pretty good for its era."

The 1960s

At the midway point of the 1960s, Channel 3 (as everyone called it by then) reached more than one hundred thousand homes, bringing the world to people's living rooms and acting as a time capsule of Madison's most tumultuous decade. From Jim Mader's weekend sports scores to on-the-scene coverage of anti-war demonstrations at UW-Madison, WISC viewers watched their lives and changing times flash across the screen.

Liz Murphy Burns spent much of that time far away from Madison. By the end of the decade she'd left college and, true to her independent spirit, struck out to make her mark in broadcasting -- anywhere but at one of her family's stations. She worked first at an Arizona television station, then at the CBS affiliate in San Diego. She married, and bought and sold a Pomona, California, radio station. As the '60s became the '70s, though, Liz found herself headed back to Wisconsin. Her mother needed her. And so, it turned out, did Channel 3.

Did You Know?

Cowboy Eddie was carved by the Mack Brothers, who were actually a father-and-son duo -- and the same carvers who created Edgar Bergen's famous alter ego, Charlie McCarthy.
Howie Olson, who brought Cowboy Eddie to life and served as the popular host of our hit kids' program Circus 3, was born in 1910 -- the same year that the Macks created Cowboy Eddie.
Howie Olson and Cowboy Eddie first performed together when Howie was 5 years old and in a vaudeville act billed as Little Leroy the Boy Wonder.
Cowboy Eddie and Howie Olson appeared together on Broadway in 1941. They also performed overseas, entertaining U.S. troops during World War II.

(With thanks to Jacki Manna, Howie Olson's protégé and Cowboy Eddie's best pal.)

Candid Camera

"If you want to talk about a turning point in WISC's history, it was the union dispute and the license challenge and, within that time frame, the death of Morgan Murphy," said David Sanks, who joined WISC in 1979 and has been the station's general manager since 1990.

Indeed, for nearly three years, while viewers enjoyed watching anchor Lynn Cullen, hipster newsman Tedd O'Connell and wise-cracking weatherman John Digman (who used the antenna of a 1949 Cadillac as a map-pointer), WISC was undergoing more than its share of turbulence behind the scenes.

The license challenge came first, in late 1970, when fifteen people asked the Federal Communications Commission not to renew WISC's broadcasting license. Although such actions were common nationwide at that time, the challenge automatically set off a round of negotiations, and years would pass before the issue was resolved in WISC's favor.

In the meantime, Morgan Murphy, who had put his family's inimitable stamp on Channel 3 from the very beginning, died on February 6, 1971. His wife, Elizabeth, stepped into the chairmanship of the Evening Telegram Company and soon found her considerable family-business background put to the test: she had only just begun to deal with the beginnings of the license challenge when a long-simmering labor dispute at WISC boiled over into a strike.

In all, 24 members of Communications Workers of America Local 5530 walked out of WISC on January 17, 1973. The strike lasted five months, and the station stayed on the air throughout, but the dispute itself wasn't resolved until 1976. In their 1996 book about the Murphys, authors Bill Beck and Richard S. Nickeson note that Elizabeth "skillfully negotiated" the end of the strike. And she did. But the conflict had been hard on everyone at the station -- "just awful" is how some employees remember it still -- especially because of the closeness of the WISC community.

Despite the turmoil, Channel 3 had many successes during the 1970s. Among the memorable moments that viewers still talk about today are O'Connell's coverage of then-mayor Paul Soglin's meeting with Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the debut of what would become two of WISC's longest-running community interest programs, Go For It, with Marlene Cummings, and For the Record, which Neil Heinen now moderates.

Perhaps best of all, though, navigating through the challenges allowed one and all to see a better course on the horizon.

"From that point forward, WISC headed for a new level of commitment to localism, journalism, and good, solid business practices. And there was this realization that in order for the philosophy of the owners to be instilled into local management, you had to bring the presence of ownership to the company," recalled Sanks.

The Liz Murphy Burns Era

Liz says now that she learned on the job, but all evidence suggests she arrived at WISC in 1977 already knowing quite a lot about running a successful television station.

Right out of the gate, she and her mother Elizabeth promoted former operations manager Steve Herling to general manager. In Herling, the Murphys found a strong manager and an experienced broadcast executive. Next, Herling and Liz wrapped up the station's license renewal - in the process hiring Sanks, who was a young, UW-Madison graduate student at the time, to help with the paperwork. Then they moved everyone into the present location on Raymond Road, and turned to meet a new challenge: the rise of cable television. "We moved the entire station overnight," recalls Herling. "Liz and I and our assistant, Sandy Woods, cooked a breakfast of eggs Benedict and champagne for all the people who had worked overnight."

Despite the increased competition for a share of the television audience, WISC thrived. The station expanded its news department and created a news-and-entertainment hybrid called Live at Five. Channel 3 also upgraded to new technology.

"We made a quantum technological leap with the new building," Herling said.

With station operations once again on an upswing, Herling left to run a Murphy-owned radio and television group in Spokane, Washington. George Nelson, a member of the Evening Telegram Company's board of directors, joined WISC in 1982 as a full-time company presence at the station. Gary DeHaven, who would establish the station's Rock County bureau during his tenure, became WISC's general manager during that same year. Both men devoted a great deal of time and energy to the success of important civic projects, taking WISC to new levels of the public service that had long been a hallmark of the station.

"Liz wanted the station to be involved," Nelson recalls. "So we've been at the table for all the major events in this city."

Madison's Civic Center, Overture Center and Monona Terrace number among the projects Nelson has helped guide during his time at WISC. And the station's consistent support of worthy causes, from the Easter Seals Telethon to funding cancer research, is both far-reaching and widely renowned.

WISC's newsroom continued to grow by leaps and bounds. It was during this era that many of today's familiar faces first joined the station: Joel De Spain, Neil Heinen and Katy Sai all signed on in the 1980s, joining Mark Koehn, whose tenure began in 1975. Also an '80s alum is recently retired John Karcher, who likely set a city-wide standard for community involvement with his tireless on- and off-the-air support of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Dane County.

"Those were fun years," recalls Tom Bier, the anchor/reporter who became the station's news director in 1977. "In that year, 1977, we had 12 people in our news department. Through the '80s we added technology and people and tripled the size of the news department. It was a very energetic time."

It was also a time of great transition in the technology of television. As film had given way to tape in an earlier era, so tape gave way to digital in the 1990s. Meteorologists replaced weather forecasters, and weather graphics and radar banished those old, fabric weather maps (and their stick-on sunny or cloudy symbols) to storage closets. Satellite uplinks, closed captioning, portable video cameras, Internet -- the sheer abundance of new-generation equipment opened a world of broadcast possibilities to stations everywhere.

For its part, WISC invested strategically in new developments and rode the leading edge of high-tech television into the 1990s and beyond. In fact, by the time Sanks had worked his way up to the top management position at WISC at the beginning of the last decade, Channel 3's talented technical and on-air staff were already making the most of the new technology.

On Sanks' watch, the station hired many of the anchors and reporters who excel in local journalism today: Gary Cannalte, Eric Franke, George Johnson, Haddie McLean, Toni Morrissey, Jeff Smith, Rob Starbuck, Susan Siman, Pam Tauscher and Steve Van Dinter are just some of the current viewer favorites who joined Channel 3 in the 1990s and 2000s.

Another recent addition to the staff is notable for a special reason: he's Liz's stepson, Brian Burns. Brian now works for Morgan Murphy Media (the broadcast group of the Evening Telegram Company) and also serves as Channel 3's director of new media. One of his initial tasks was to help make WISC the first station in the country to deliver local audio and video to cell phones. Today Brian works with technology that allows viewers to receive WISC news, weather and sports on their iPods and computers through the station's Web site, www.channel3000.com.

"What we do is pretty remarkable considering our market size," he said. "And part of that is because Liz has always wanted to be on the cutting edge when we have the opportunity to, and that's a vision I share with her and everyone at this station."

At fifty, WISC is a station in full. Its early promise has been realized, and the people who work there today do so with the same pioneering spirit and commitment to teamwork that is the Murphy family legacy.