General Assembly approved Act of Arkansas, Acts 1961, No. 198 (as amended under Arkansas Code § 6-3-101 to 6-3-113), which created the Arkansas Educational Television Commission as an independent statutory corporation and aimed to develop a statewide public television service that would "provide instructional, educational television for schools and the general public […] and to help with the preservation of the public peace, health and safety." The legislative language indicated that such a service was necessitated to help prevent the spread of communism in the state, as "counter-measures to such subversive influences [were] necessary to the continued existence of constitutional democracy." The bill—signed by Governor Orval Faubus—tasked the commission with providing educational television programming to Arkansans on a coordinated statewide basis, with the cooperation of the state's educational, government and cultural agencies, and allocated funding for the planning and operation of an educational station to serve Little Rock and other areas of Central Arkansas. Longtime State Senator R. Lee Reaves (D–Warren) was appointed to serve as founding executive director of the Arkansas Educational Television Commission, Arkansas State Teachers College president Dr. Silas Snow was appointed as the commission's chairman, and Fred Schmutz was appointed as program director. The commission board was to have eight members appointed by the governor for a seven-year term, including two members from the state education system (one of whom must be a public education official, and one of whom employed with an Arkansas college or university), representing each of the state's congressional districts. The process of bringing public television to Arkansas began on May 22, 1963, when the AETC applied for a construction permit to build an educational television station on VHF channel 2 in Little Rock; the FCC granted the channel 2 permit to the commission on July 28, 1965. Subsequently, on September 23, 1963, Donrey Media donated the construction permit for defunct NBC affiliate KFOY-TV (channel 9) in Hot Springs to the AETC for $150,000, funded in part through a $100,000 gift from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. The permit was not used, but the channel 9 allocation was relocated to Arkadelphia and designated for noncommercial use in 1965. KETS in Little Rock was finally able to sign on the air over channel 2 on December 4, 1966; it was the first educational television station to sign on in Arkansas, and the nation's 124th non-commercial educational television station to sign on. (The station