WOWT (channel 6) is a television station in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Gray Television. The station's studios are located at the Kiewit Plaza on Farnam Street near downtown Omaha, and its transmitter is located on a "tower farm" near North 72nd Street and Crown Point Avenue in north-central Omaha. WOWT is Gray's only Nebraska station not to be part of its Nebraska News & Weather Network (consisting of sister stations KOLN/KGIN, KSNB-TV, KNEP, and KNOP-TV). History The station signed on the air on August 29, 1949, at noon as WOW-TV; it was the first television station in Nebraska and is one of the oldest in the Upper Midwest. It also claims to have gone on the air earlier than any station in four other Midwestern states—Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota and South Dakota. The station was owned by Radio Station WOW, Inc., alongside WOW radio (590 AM, now KXSP, and 92.3 FM, now KEZO). The owners operated under a United States Supreme Court ruling which had forced the Woodmen of the World, who had founded WOW in 1923, to divest itself of the radio stations because they threatened the Woodmen's tax-exempt status. The station was originally a primary NBC affiliate and secondary ABC affiliate; it lost ABC programming in 1953, when KFOR-TV signed on from Lincoln as an ABC affiliate. However, in 1954, Lincoln was separated from the Omaha market, and WOW-TV resumed sharing ABC programming with KMTV (channel 3) until 1957, when KETV signed on as an ABC affiliate. Meredith Corporation bought WOW-AM-FM-TV in 1951. The station claims it was bought by former Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews in 1954, but this is false as Matthews had died two years earlier. In 1956, after the radio stations dropped their longtime affiliation with the NBC Red Network in favor of the CBS Radio Network, WOW-TV switched affiliations with KMTV and became Omaha's CBS television affiliate. This was part of CBS' multi-year, five-station affiliation deal with Meredith Corporation, as a compensation for Phoenix sister station KPHO's initial loss of the CBS affiliation to KOOL-TV (now KSAZ) before it reclaimed that affiliation in 1994 (KCMO-AM-FM-TV also switched to the network several months earlier). WOWT's most famous former employee is former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, who worked at WOW-TV in the early 1950s in his first television job as host of a program called The