Biography|Ted Turner — The UHF Station on West Peachtree That Became Channel 17

The building at 1018 West Peachtree Street Northwest had already been a television factory before Ted Turner walked in.

WAGA-TV built the studios and a thousand-foot tower here. WJRJ-TV signed on from the same rooms on 1 September 1967, a late and thin UHF independent in a market that barely watched channel 17.

By 1969 the station was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on revenues that barely matched the losses.

Turner was twenty-four when his father, Ed Turner, died by suicide in March 1963 and left him Turner Advertising, a regional billboard firm loaded with debt from a four-million-dollar outdoor buy.

He kept the boards. Then he wanted a medium that could grow.

Rice Broadcasting, which owned WJRJ, agreed in 1969 to a stock-swap merger that put Turner in control of a company still named for Jack Rice. The FCC approved the transfer on 10 December 1969.

The deal closed in January 1970. On 6 April the Commission assigned Turner as licensee.

He changed the calls to WTCG, officially Turner Communications Group, and told Atlanta to watch the channel grow.

The programming was not glamorous. Old movies, cartoons, off-network sitcoms, and, later, Atlanta Braves baseball that he bought the rights to because a live game filled hours he could not afford to buy from Hollywood.

Advisers had warned him the station could lose seven hundred thousand dollars a year. He bought it anyway.

The address is public Midtown, a short walk from Tenth Street, not a private house. The original two-storey studio block is still on the lot, now office space in a rebuilt Midtown fabric, with the old tower long gone from the skyline people photograph today.

This is the room where a billboard heir learned television by running a station nobody else wanted.

Everything that followed — the satellite superstation, CNN, the Braves as a national team — started with this UHF frequency and this Peachtree address.

Photo: Bernard Gotfryd, April 1985, public domain, Library of Congress. Street: Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta, Wallyg, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.