At 487 feet above the ground, one site rises above and tops all of Hickory. It can be seen for miles. Since the mid-1960s, the WHKY broadcast tower has been a recognizable fixture of the landscape. Though television or FM signals no longer radiate from the structure, the tower itself holds its own historical distinction.
It came to Hickory from Texas where the structure was previously used by First Lady Claudia (Lady Bird) Johnson, wife of the president at the time, LBJ. During World War II, she inherited enough money to buy a radio station in Austin. A few years later, she decided to expand her broadcast operations into television, over the objections of her husband. She reminded him that it was her money and she could invest it however she pleased. She turned out to be a lot smarter than him on the subject.
LBJ ultimately recognized that fact and got on board. He helped his wife’s growing media empire by securing all the major network affiliations when the station went on the air in 1952. In fact, Claudia’s was the only broadcast station centered in the capital city of Texas for a very long time. When she became the First Lady of the United States, Claudia Johnson had the distinction of being the only wife of a president to be a millionaire in her own right. Even so, her husband was so domineering that he insisted she have the same initials as he and renamed her Lady Bird. (He did the same to his daughters, Lynda Byrd and Luci Baines). You figure out what to make of that.
Back in Hickory during the years of the Johnson Administration, Ed Long was expanding into television, too. Back in 1939, he started the first radio station between Charlotte and Asheville. WHKY AM went on the air in 1940. Ten years later, his FM was also a first for the region, as was the launch of a television station in 1968. By that point, the Johnson tower had been bought by Ed, shipped to Hickory, reassembled to pump out sound and vision.
On Valentine’s Day, February 14, Channel 14 went on the air. The date of the debut was no coincidence. Ed Long planned it that way. During a tour he gave prior to going live, he told visitors that the number 14 had come up numerous times. He got notice of the license to broadcast on the 14th of an earlier month and was assigned the VHF space of Channel 14. He also cited the fact that his home was located at 14 Third Avenue as sufficient karma to begin on Valentines Day.
For a while, the tower pumped out AM, FM and TV airwaves, until a facility on Baker’s Mountain gave the television station reach into the Charlotte market. In 1987, the FM was sold and earlier this year, TV went to Jimmy Swaggart Ministries and has since been rebranded as WWJS. At this point the imposing tower remains, continuing to broadcast WHKY-AM, while video programming is offered via a Youtube channel. These days, broadcasting doesn’t always need a tower.
Photo: Millionaire Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson and her Texas, now Hickory, Tower.
