By Liz Beavers
lbeavers@newstribune.info
managing editor

KEYSER — The late Julian S. Smith will be one of three persons inducted into the Keyser High School Legion of Honor during the annual banquet to be held Wednesday, April 8.
Sponsored by the J. Edward Kelley Society of Keyser, the Legion of Honor recognizes those graduates of Keyser High School who have gone on to distinguish themselves in their careers.
Smith, a 1939 graduate of Keyser High School, had a distinguished career in broadcast journalism and satellite communications, having been instrumental in helping Baltimore Channel 45 to evolve from a fledgling television station to becoming one of the city’s most fashionable and well-respected stations.
Smith’s love of broadcasting actually began when he was a student at Boys’ Latin School in Baltimore, where he completed a correspondence course in radio given by the DeForest Training School of Chicago.
This later enabled him to obtain his first class FCC license in 1941 and he began his career in broadcasting later that year when he served as a summer relief studio technician for radio station WFBR-AM.
A year later, he combined his interests in radio and electronics as assistant foreman of inspection with the Bendix Radio Division, where he supervised the inspection of military equipment, transmitters, receivers and navigation equipment.
A stint in the U.S. Navy from 1944-46 saw Smith taking electronics engineering training in several different locations. When he got out of the Navy, he returned to WFBR, where he accepted the position of assistant chief engineer, directing the construction, installation and testing of the radio station’s FM sister.
He also had the responsibility of planning for UHF television during 1952-53. Market analysis which revealed a UHF station would be a poor investment with the imminent onset of competition from VHF stations abruptly ended that project, however.
Discouraged, Smith resigned from WFBR and joined the Institute for Cooperative Research with Johns Hopkins University, where he researched the field if dielectric measurement.
In 1955, he joined the Glenn L. Martin Company, now Martin Marietta, and worked as an assistant design engineer in electronics. Due to his exemplary work on the design and analysis of automatic map-making radar, he was promoted to Group Engineer II and assigned to the Matador Missile Project. A subsequent promotion to Group Engineer I placed him at the head of electronics in the Advanced Design Division.
Other positions followed, including manager of the Advance Concepts Department of the Martin Company, technical director of the Surveillance Drone Program with the Fairchild Stratos Corporation, and deputy director of the System Engineering Department of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company.
In 1952, he joined several other investors in purchasing the Commercial Radio Institute, an electronics school. He taught a number or courses in television and radar, but the school was forced to close due to other colleges competing for his students.
He applied for an FM radio license in 1959, and launched WFMM-FM as a classical and light pop station.
Although there was initially little capital to work with, he literally built the station himself – including constructing the control panels on his dining room table – and turned the venture into a successful station.
After selling WFMM, he began to concentrate on the UHF channel which became Chesapeake Television.
The station’s first telecast was on Easter Sunday 1971, and its programming consisted of mostly old movies. The channel became affiliated with the Fox network in the 1980s, however, and when they launched their “News at Ten” in 1991, providing viewers with a full hour of news as opposed to a half-hour, Fox 45 came into its own as a formidable station.
Smith died in 1993 at the age of 72.
The Legion of Honor banquet gets underway with a social hour at 6 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m. at the Keyser VFW Post 3518.
Tickets are $18 for adults and $9 for children 12 years old and under, and may be purchased by calling Bob Dorsey at (304) 788-3520 or Ed Smith at (304) 788-0384.