"was the first radio station in the Deep South to subscribe to full day and night news wire service--INS." Smith died in 1937 and his wife, Eloise, inherited the station. She remarried several years later, becoming Eloise Hanna. In 1940, she became full owner of WBRC, in an era where it was rare for a woman to serve as a radio executive. In 1941, with the enactment of the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement (NARBA), WBRC moved from 950 to its current home at 960 AM. It also increased its fulltime power to 5,000 watts. FM and TV stations In 1946, WBRC introduced the first FM station in Birmingham. But few people owned FM receivers in those days and management decided to end the FM experiment, taking WBRC-FM off the air two years later. (A new WBRC-FM at 106.9 MHz signed on in 1959.) In 1949, WBRC launched Channel 4 WBRC-TV, Alabama's second television station. Because WBRC had been a long-time NBC affiliate, WBRC-TV originally carried NBC TV shows, with secondary affiliations with ABC and the Dumont Television Network. The stations were sold to Storer Broadcasting in 1953. Four years later, the stations were sold to Taft Broadcasting. MOR, Top 40 and AC The advent of television in the 1950s caused network programming to shift from radio to television. By the early 1960s, WBRC was one of two Middle of the Road (MOR) stations in Birmingham, airing a mix of popular adult music, news and sports. It continued in that format until 1972, when Taft Broadcasting sold WBRC-AM-FM to Mooney Broadcasting. Taft retained ownership of WBRC-TV until 1987. As Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations at that time prohibited stations with different owners from sharing the same call letters, Mooney changed the call signs of the radio stations to WERC and WERC-FM--a nod to the old call letters. WERC was christened "96-ERC" and it flipped to Top 40, launching an all-out assault on the market's leading contemporary hit station, 610 WSGN (now WAGG). For much of the 1970s, WERC and WSGN were two of the most listened-to stations in Birmingham. The beginning of WERC's demise as a Top 40 powerhouse came in 1977, when its own FM sister station was relaunched as contemporary hit radio (CHR) station WKXX, "Kicks 106" (now WBPT). By 1980, 960 WERC modified its format to full service, adult contemporary music coupled with a sizable news and