promised Birmingham Broadcasting funding in 1964 no longer existed in 1976. Hearings were held by the FCC that fall, but one Birmingham Broadcasting stakeholder, Jesse L. Lewis, refused to come; he was serving as the State Highway and Traffic Safety Director, making him the only Black leader of a state agency, and he feared that if he left town, his department would be abolished by the state legislature. The question of financial backing turned out to be the deciding factor when an administrative law judge found in favor of Chapman's bid in 1977. The decision was appealed to the full FCC, which upheld the ruling in March 1979. An attempted appeal in federal court turned out to have been filed one day late, while a petition for reconsideration made to the FCC was also dismissed. Early years With the permit in hand, construction—and new shareholders—entered the picture. The Chapman brothers sold half of the unbuilt station in 1980 to Byron Lasky, who owned Satellite Television & Associated Resources, a company providing microwave-based subscription television service in Birmingham. The tower was erected alongside studios in the city's Goldencrest neighborhood in early 1982, and on April 21, after more than 18 years, WTTO debuted as Birmingham's fourth commercial TV station, with the first program being Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. WTTO gave Birmingham its first independent station and Alabama its second, debuting a few weeks after WPMI-TV in Mobile. In 1983, Lasky acquired the remaining half of WTTO from the Chapmans. During this time, the station extended its cable reach, appearing on the system in Anniston in 1985. Channel 21 was programmed as a typical UHF independent, maintaining a schedule reliant mainly on cartoons, sitcoms and movies. From its sign-on in 1982 until 1985, WTTO also carried programming from the Financial News Network. WTTO quickly became known in the market for airing a broad mix of cult films as part of its film lineup (the station also hosted film festivals at parks throughout central Alabama, featuring public screenings of the movies that it broadcast), as well as spoof promotional campaigns for its programs. WTTO quickly became the strongest independent station in Alabama, and one of the highest-rated independents in the United States. WTTO remained the only independent station in central Alabama for its first two years of operation; however, it would eventually gain a competitor in the west-central part of the