Well-intentioned, but ill-fated: The saga of WSNL, Ch. 67, Long Island's forgotten TV station

Like much else about the brief life of Long Island's first commercial TV station, the exact location of WSNL/67's ill-fated transmission tower has been lost to time.

The antenna may have loomed over the LIE service road next to Veterans Memorial Highway in Islandia, or a block west on Blydenburgh Road where the studios were.

This imprecision seems about right because the faulty tower didn't work particularly well anyway.

According to reports at the time — more on those in a bit — installers had turned the antenna the wrong way. This meant that the signal had better reception in Rhode Island than on Long Island.

What those viewers in Rhode Island — also Connecticut and other points north, east and west — saw must have puzzled them. A tiny UHF station that punched above its weight, "Wizznle" (as staffers fondly called it) filled most of the schedule with Long Island-themed shows it had produced itself.

There were two daily newscasts, various talk programs, exercise, cooking and kids shows, and even a homegrown soap opera, "The Fairchilds," about a (dysfunctional) family in Oyster Bay. Watch a promo for the channel here.

Long Islanders had never seen anything like this, and apparently many never did (blame that tower). Here at last was an honest-to-goodness TV station dedicated exclusively, even passionately, to them. From launch, on Nov. 18, 1973, until the last klieg lights were turned off, this lonely outlier pumped out more Long Island-centric programming than any broadcast TV station has ever done. A victim of advertiser skepticism, missing viewers, and a tower that couldn't shoot (or aim) straight, WSNL did not survive.

It went off the air 50 years ago, on June 20, 1975.

A COLORFUL HISTORY

The Quixotic story is as colorful as the station itself. The station's weather forecaster, Pat Pagano, who has been WALK-FM's weather forecaster since the late '70s, says the owners "really felt that there was not anything special as far as Long Island was concerned on TV [and] that everything else was the city proper," or New York's three major stations, which ventured only sporadically out east when there was news to report.

In a recent phone interview, Pagano also recalled that let's-put-on-a-show mandate on steroids. Not long after arriving, he also found himself host of an "American Bandstand"-inspired show called "Rock Shoppe," which featured Long Island groups and the occasional artist who drifted out from the city. Among those was a very young performer named Patricia Mae Andrzejewski — the future Pat Benatar — and another was Patti LaBelle. Both performed outside Pagano's weather trailer. 

The idea for WSNL — the call letters stood for Suffolk and Nassau — came from radio veteran Theodore Granik, a Brooklyn-born lawyer who from the late 1920s on was moderator of a long-running news roundtable program called "The American Forum of the Air."

Granik wanted to program seven local UHF stations around the country with hyperlocal shows, but there was an obvious challenge: UHF, or ultra high frequency, was hard to get. People at home needed a special bow-tie-shaped antenna which they then had to turn in the direction of the transmitting tower. Granik may have hoped cable TV would eventually solve this by carrying the station much as they did the VHF channels. And cable on Long Island was still in its infancy.

Either way, Granik wouldn't live to see the plan through. He died of a heart attack in 1970.

After his death, the station permit was picked up by Suburban Broadcast Corp. (Civil rights activist and Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton was among the investors.) The company broke ground in early 1973.

NEWSDAY GETS IN THE ACT

The interest of Long Island's leading newspaper was piqued.

"Beginning next fall, Long Islanders may get a chance to see something entirely new on their television sets," began the Newsday story from around this time. "When they hungrily tune in their afternoon soap operas, they may discover that John and Elizabeth are suffering through their latest infidelities, not in some mythical village, but in Massapequa [or Oyster Bay]. And when they settle back to watch their nighttime talk show, they may find it is being beamed directly from 'beautiful downtown Hauppauge' [in this case, Central Islip]."

Getting people to watch was the challenge, says Nick Fischer, a cameraman with the station who later spent the rest of his career at WCBS/2. Suburban "handed out flyers on the LIRR trying to get people familiar with the idea that this was a UHF station, and that you had to have a different antenna and point it east."

The much bigger problem was that other antenna. When installers "put the antenna on top of the tower, they didn't align it right. It was supposed to broadcast in an oblong pattern reflecting the shape on Long Island, but they misaligned it so that the western lobe was aimed toward New Jersey and the eastern lobe to Rhode Island."

A few months after launch, Newsday TV critic Marvin Kitman noticed this, too. "There appears to be some kind of mystical blockade, perhaps from outer space, or a shield preventing the signal from getting to such far-off-the-beaten-track places as Mineola, Freeport and Hempstead," he wrote.

In another column, Kitman asked readers if they were getting the signal. Someone from Hampton Bays wrote in to say, sure, he could see "Channel 67 — in TV Guide." Someone else insisted the signal was perfect in Islip Terrace (a few blocks from the tower).

Kitman concluded that the best place to see Channel 67 was "Hartford, Connecticut."

Suburban fought back, first, by filing a $2 million lawsuit against RCA and its supplier for "negligence in initially misdirecting the antenna."

Another $15 million lawsuit was filed against Newsday and Kitman, citing "a willful and malicious effort to mortally injure" Channel 67.

The station went out of business before it was settled.

A FUN PLACE TO WORK, IN THE BEGINNING

By most accounts, Channel 67 was a rewarding place to work.

Larry Cavolina, the station's sports director, recalled that "most of the guys who joined were from New York Tech [in Old Westbury]. We were all buddies who had worked [part time] at Ch. 21 [the Island's public station in Garden City] then found out that this new place would be opening. I went in for an interview and they looked me over then asked if I knew anyone else they could hire, and I said Doug Towey," Cavolina's close friend who was then hired as news director. (Towey, a Hempstead native and creative director of CBS Sports, died in 2009.)

Cavolina — who went on to a long career with ABC Sports and CBS Sports — recalled a freewheeling station with a bottomless appetite for any live sports event — "college, high schools, the Cougars," the minor league hockey team that played out of the Long Island Arena in Commack.

"It was great, really great, because we did it from the ground up," he said. "We were also young enough to have fun doing it."

Besides sports, there were shows like "It's Academic" (a quiz), "Ahab and Friends" (kids show with Ahab, the pirate), "Home Handyman," "10-4 Police Line" and "Black Metamorphosis" (a public affairs show for Black viewers).

There was an exercise show ("Trim and Slim"), also a late-night talk show, "Long Island Tonight," which was Channel 67's own version of "The Tonight Show," hosted by Richard Hall who went on to launch other talk shows.

There were "Long Island Home Buyers" — self-explanatory — and "Long Island Bowling Stars." Someone named "Chef Nicola" hosted a cooking show, while a talk show called "The Nassau Suffolk Woman" may have been the Island's own early iteration of "The View."

There was only one import: an early version of "The Phil Donahue Show," which would first be seen in the metropolitan area on Channel 67.

BEGINNING OF THE END

By the fall of 1974, the station had begun to retrench. When ad sales dragged because of those antenna problems, the inevitable layoffs followed, including Oren Palenik, the host of "Nassau/Suffolk Woman." Out of work, Palenik told Newsday's Ed Lowe that "sometimes I feel as though people look at a person like me and don't understand how rough it can be to survive." Others like Cavolina headed to Manhattan for work and future careers.

Was Channel 67 snakebit? It dropped telecasts of the North American Soccer League just before soccer superstar Pele joined the New York Cosmos. A couple weeks after that, it shut down. The station management blamed the lingering effects of the 1973 oil embargo, which (it claimed) had forced some key advertisers out of business.

Suburban got it briefly back on the air by 1979 with mostly a schedule of old movies. Then bad luck struck again.

On Jan. 31, 1980, a fire broke out at the studios, gutting the control room. WSNL went off the air for good. (There were in fact nine lives to this cat: Channel 67 later became a pay TV station, an affiliate of the Home Shopping Network, and since 2020, has been a digital affiliate of the True Crime Network.)

At least memories — good ones — persist of those long-ago days off the South Service Road. Pagano has plenty of them: "I often think about Channel 67 and all the fun we had. It was a great place to start a career and if it wasn't for Channel 67, I don't think I would have had the one I had."

A couple of years later, Pagano started Metro Weather Service, which still provides custom weather forecasts to stations around the country — with equipment he bought from the bankrupt station, he says.

It was "the happiest time of my life."