Early history
Founded by John J. Weigel (the father of Chicago sportscaster Tim Weigel),[3] the station first signed on the air on February 6, 1964, as Chicago's first UHF station. It has been owned by Weigel Broadcasting since its inception. WCIU has spent much of its history carrying multi-ethnic entertainment programming. At its sign-on, channel 26 operated as an independent station; the call letters stand for "Chicago Independent UHF". A minority stake was held by businessman Howard Shapiro, who founded appliance store chain C.E.T. (Chicago Engineers for Television). Shapiro and his brother Gene took over Weigel Broadcasting and WCIU in 1966.[4]
From the late 1960s until 1985, WCIU carried religious programs during the early morning. The station ran The Stock Market Observer—a business news block similar in format to the present-day cable channel CNBC—from about 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. each weekday; the service broadcast from the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, with WCIU originally maintaining studio facilities at the top floor of the Chicago Board of Trade Building on West Jackson Boulevard. After 5 p.m. each weekday, the station ran Spanish language entertainment programming—including controversial bullfighting matches—from the Spanish International Network (the forerunner to Univision). During the weekend, WCIU ran a blend of religious programs, Spanish language programs, paid programming and various other ethnically oriented shows.
From 1966 to 1970, the station aired Kiddie A-Go-Go, a children's puppet and dance program which was hosted by Elaine Mulqueen.[5] Several popular musical groups performed on the show, including The Four Seasons and New Colony Six.[6] In 1970, channel 26 became the birthplace of the groundbreaking African American music program Soul Train, hosted by its creator (and then-WCIU station employee) Don Cornelius. The show later entered into national syndication and moved production to Los Angeles the following year, although WCIU continued to produce a local version of Soul Train exclusively for the Chicago market until 1976, initially and simultaneously with the Los Angeles-based version, with Cornelius himself as host, succeeded by Clinton Ghent, the main producer under Cornelius.[7][8]
After WXXW (channel 20, allocation later occupied by PBS member station WYCC)—the second-to-last television station in the market that continued to broadcast in black-and-white—went dark in 1974, channel 26 remained the only television station in Chicago that still broadcast its programming in monochrome. Just prior to the Christmas season of 1974, the station installed and tested color transmission equipment, which broadcast on a low-power relay station located in Lincoln Park. In November 1974, the color and black-and-white signals traded transmitter facilities for the remainder of the holiday season; on December 31, 1974, the translator was taken offline as channel 26 started to broadcast in color full-time.
In the summer of 1985, the SIN affiliation moved to WSNS-TV (channel 44); WCIU, meanwhile, became affiliated part-time with NetSpan—which would eventually evolve into Telemundo—shortly thereafter. Later in the 1980s, Weigel Broadcasting expanded coverage of WCIU-TV to areas of western Illinois, northwest Indiana and southeastern Wisconsin through translator stations. In 1983, the station signed on W55AS (channel 55, now WBME-CD on channel 41) to relay WCIU's programming into the Milwaukee market. In 1987, WCIU launched two additional translators, W33AR (channel 33, now WFBN-LD) in Rockford, Illinois (which was converted into a simulcast of sister station WYTU-LD (channel 63) in Milwaukee in August 2012, to provide Telemundo programming into the Rockford market, as WSNS provides weak to rimshot signal coverage to that area; Telemundo eventually moved to the station's second subchannel to accommodate TouchVision, followed by H&I currently), and W12BK (channel 69, now MyNetworkTV affiliate WMYS-LD) in South Bend, Indiana.
On October 13, 1988, WSNS-TV announced that it would switch its affiliation to Telemundo after that station's affiliation agreement with Univision concluded on December 31; two months later on December 16, WCIU—whose contract with Telemundo was set to expire the following month—signed an affiliation agreement with Univision, returning the station to that network after two years. The two stations switched affiliations on January 10, 1989.[9][10]
