Entertainment and the Arts and the newsmagazine Inside Area 5), Phil Wygant (who worked as an anchor/reporter from 1948 until he was laid off following LIN Broadcasting's acquisition of the station in 1974), Jack Brown (who served as a reporter from 1958 to 1980), Russ Bloxom (who served a lead news anchor from 1967 to 1979) and Jane McGarry (who served as an anchor and reporter from 1982 until she stepped down in July 2012, following her arrest on a misdemeanor DWI charge). KXAS is known within the Dallas–Fort Worth market for its weather coverage; it claims to be the first television station to have hired only full-time meteorologists, when it hired American Airlines staff meteorologists Harold Taft, Bob Denney and Walter Porter as hosts of Weather Telefacts, a 15-minute nightly series that debuted on October 31, 1949, as the first televised weather forecast program in the United States, which in addition to providing forecasts, explained to viewers complicated aspects of meteorological concepts. Taft—the first television meteorologist west of the Mississippi River, who concurrently served as an overnight weathercaster for WBAP (AM), where he was coined as "The World's Greatest Weatherman" by overnight personality Bill Mack—became the most prominent of the three initial meteorologists. He was known for using self-hand-drawn weather maps incorporating isobars and upper-level atmospheric diagrams to illustrate his forecasts, which were eventually replaced by computerized graphics in November 1982, and developed the concept of trained "weather watchers," volunteer observationalists from surrounding counties who gathered up-to-date weather data. His popularity among viewers led to a successful grassroots campaign (which included threats of advertising boycotts by area businesses) urging KXAS station management to retain Taft after plans to replace him became public in 1983. Taft held the record as the state's longest-serving television meteorologist, having served as chief meteorologist at WBAP-TV/KXAS for 41 years until his retirement on August 30, 1991, one month prior to his death from stomach cancer. Harold Taft's memorial service was carried live by Channel 5. David Finfrock, who first joined KXAS in 1976 as a meteorologist for its weekend evening newscasts, subsequently took over as chief weather anchor. Finfrock has since eclipsed the length of Taft's tenure as an on-air meteorologist. In 1993, KXAS became the first television station in the United States to implement a Local Weather Station structure, a network of sensors that relayed real-time weather observations. On June 16, 1966, Channel