Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 226

a oai? flatten1: It hasn't done everything it set out to do yet, but it has survived and in a tough and risky business, that's an achievement in itself i by HOWARD RONTAL Uhen WGPR-TV Channel 62 went on the air September 29, 1975, national journalism rose to the occasion. Heavyweights like the New York Times and Newsweek spoke of its "dramatic" potential. Even the network news teams were there to welcome the nation's first black-owned station. President Ford taped a greeting aired that first day. After a year on the air, the fanfare and some of the more ambitious goals have been lost in the dust.

In retrospect the station has done better than some expected simply by surviving. But it has not lived up to all the rhetoric of those first weeks. Whether WGPR-TV fulfills its mission of "serving the total needs of the majority of the people in the community social, economic, and educational," or becomes just an old movie station, or goes off the air rests largely on founder William V. Banks' shoulders. Whatever else it is, WGPR is Banks' baby.

Sitting in his WGPR office on Detroit's East side, Banks, 73, goes about his work at an uncluttered desk with methodical calm. When he talks of the present, his voice echoes the confidence of past successes and the determination to succeed now, a determination that must be sorely tried by WGPR's current problems. Banks, the son of a Kentucky sharecropper, is a self-made man. At 16, he left home and came to Detroit to find work. He spent his first night in Detroit sleeping in a box of packing material.

Working mornings at Ford Motor he eventually graduated from City College (now WSU) and Detroit College of Law. In 1950, he founded the International Free and Accepted Modern Masons the Black Masons in the living room of a friend's house in Canton, Ohio. Today, as the organization's grand master, be can boast a membership and ownership of the 32-story Broderick Towers Building off Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit In 1964, he bought radio station WGPR (FM) for $40,000. Today, Banks says it generates annually. "I stole it," he says chuckling proudly.

Along the way, Banks learned the art of political string pulling and quid pro quo. Banks said Congressman Charles Diggs of Detroit, on learning from Banks that a treaty with Canada forbade the intrusion of an American television signal in Canadian airways, volunteered to contact the Canadian ambassador, a personal friend, and arrange for a new treaty provision that would permit the WGPR-TV signal Later, WGPR accepted Diggs suggestion that he host a black political talk show, taped in Washington, now called "Diggs' Washington Forum" and run as public service programming. "We felt indebted to him," said WGPR bears the Indelible stamp of its founder, Dr. William V. Banks.

An extremely religious man, Banks sees that Channel 62 has more religious programming than any other Detroit station..