Women's Professional Basketball League

The Women's Professional Basketball League (abbreviated WBL) was a professional women's basketball league in the United States. The league played three seasons from the fall of 1978 to the spring of 1981. The league was the first professional women's basketball league in the United States.

Formation and 1978–79 season

The league began with a player draft held in Manhattan's Essex House in July 1978, with eight teams participating. While few of the teams had firm commitments on playing locations (or team names, for that matter), the league planned to play a 34-game season with teams in Chicago, Houston, Iowa, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York City and Washington, D.C. Houston drafted Ann Meyers from UCLA, while New Jersey's top choice Carol Blazejowski of Montclair State University said that she wanted to retain her amateur standing to be eligible to play in the 1980 Summer Olympics. Lusia Harris, a collegiate star at Delta State University, was selected by the Houston team, but was reluctant to commit to playing after hearing the $3,000 to $5,000 salaries estimated by the Minnesota franchise. With its last pick in the draft, the Cornets selected Uljana Semjonova, a 6-foot-11-inch player for the Soviet Union's national women's basketball team who would be inducted as an inaugural member of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in the class of 1999, but would never play a game in the WBL. The New Jersey Gems selected Carol Blazejowski from Montclair State College, but she announced while on tour in Bulgaria with the U.S. national women's team through her coach Maureen Wendelken that she had no intention of playing professionally and that her goal was to retain her amateur standing to be able to play for the U.S. at the 1980 Summer Olympics. Molly Bolin, who grew up in Moravia, Iowa, became the first player signed by any team in the WBL when she was signed by the Iowa Cornets.

WWJ (AM)

WWJ, 950 AM (a regional broadcast frequency), is an all-news radio station located in Detroit, Michigan, United States. The station is also licensed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for hybrid (HD) broadcasting. August 20, 2015 marks the beginning of its 96th year of broadcasting.

Owned by the CBS Radio subsidiary of CBS Corporation, WWJ's studios are in the Panasonic Building in Southfield, and its transmitter is located near Newport. WWJ is the only commercial all-news radio station in Michigan. Co-owned television station WWJ-TV (channel 62) is the only CBS owned-and-operated station without any local news presence (the television station carried news programming from 1997 to 2002 through present-day sister station WKBD-TV and a morning news program that ran from 2009 to 2012).

History

Early years

WWJ, which debuted as the "Detroit News Radiophone" on August 20, 1920, was the outgrowth of interest in radio technology by the publishers of The Detroit News, combined with inventor Lee DeForest's longtime promotion of radio broadcasting.

WLAJ

WLAJ is the ABC-affiliated television station for the Central Lower Peninsula of Michigan that is licensed to Lansing. It broadcasts a high definition digital signal on UHF channel 25 (or virtual channel 53.1 via PSIP) from a transmitter on Baseline Road near Rives Township's Berryville section, along the Jackson and Ingham County line. Owned by Shield Media, the station is operated through joint sales and shared services agreements by Media General as a sister outlet to CBS affiliate WLNS-TV. The two stations share studios on East Saginaw Street/BL I-69/M-43 in Lansing's Eastside section (along U.S. 127). Syndicated programming on WLAJ includes Family Feud, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Maury, and The Wendy Williams Show, among others.

History

WLAJ began broadcasting on October 13, 1990, operating from a converted appliance store. The station was originally owned by Joel Ferguson, the founding owner of the market's first independent station, WFSL-TV (now Fox affiliate WSYM-TV). Ferguson had used the proceeds from the sale of WFSL to launch WLAJ. Before 1990, Lansing had been one of the biggest markets in the United States without a full-time ABC affiliate, even though it had been large enough to support three full network affiliates since at least the 1960s. WJRT-TV in Flint served as the default station for the area from its 1958 sign-on until WLAJ debuted, and WFSL had briefly carried a few ABC programs as well. Other parts of the market received ABC from WUHQ-TV (now WOTV) in Battle Creek and WXYZ-TV in Detroit. As a condition to the station receiving an ABC affiliation, its transmitter had to be located so that there was minimum overlap between the WJRT and WLAJ signals.