In June of 1977, Johnnie and my father agreed to purchase WONO FM in Syracuse, NY, for $340,000. In so doing, he became the first broadcaster to reach the Federal Communications Commission’s then-legal-limit of twenty-one broadcasting stations. At the time, not even communications giants such as CBS, ABC, RKO, Westinghouse and Metromedia, with seventeen or eighteen each, had reached the twenty-one-station ceiling. By this time, his broadcasting group reached 25 million people or 12 percent of the total population of the United States.
There was another area of new electronic technology that interested my father after he reached the ceiling in broadcast ownership. That was the new low-power television stations the federal government had begun accepting applications for in the early 1980s. The stations would have a range of about ten miles from the broadcasting tower, and he applied for forty such stations, mostly in areas where he already owned a publication. He didn’t expect to get many of them approved, but he felt by using some staff from the publications, such as the bookkeeping department, he could begin operation with the addition of little more than a “couple of guys with cameras.” But he never followed through on this because his focus shifted to newspapers.