One of the primo advantages of being located right between two giant cities (it’s a location, location, location thing) is that whatever media Dallas and Fort Worth have, Arlington shares. There are certainly minuses to this reality – lots of them – but also a few perks. 

Most certainly this includes television or more aptly, television sets, of which on Sept. 15, 1948, Arlington had exactly one, a tiny black and white Philco situated at the Arlington Radio Shop, its outside antenna pointed westward.

Star-Telegram Publisher Amon G. Carter – he also was the first to bring radio to Tarrant County – sent out the first test signal on his new media gadget, WBAP-TV. The station broadcast a stationary image designed to help TV owners focus their sets. Canned music accompanied the background. 

It was, Carter and the Star-Telegram proclaimed with some fervor, “the first television station south of St. Louis, east of Los Angeles and west of Richmond, Va.”

The Arlington Citizen-Journal the next day reported that “Both the sound and the image came in clearly” on the black and white Philco on its 10-inch screen and accompanying speaker.

Since at that moment there were fewer than 200 TV sets in homes in all of the Metroplex, the consequences of what amounted to a vast sea change in mass communication at the time seemed slight.

But slight it was not. That fall, WBAP began broadcasting three hours a day but would expand dramatically as the world began showing up on TV screens in living rooms everywhere. 

This article was written by Arlington author and historian O.K. Carter, who serves on the Landmark Preservation Commission.