People in the northwoods waited a long time for a local television station to call their own. WAEO went on the air in 1966 with a tall, tall tower looming over its studios on farmland in a remote corner of Oneida County. Almost twenty years after Wisconsin’s first commercial television station started broadcasting in Milwaukee, people “up north” could finally get a decent signal from an over-the-air station all the way into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Two years later an airplane tragically crashed into the tower and destroyed it along with the station beneath it. The accident killed the plane’s three occupants. The station came back on the air a year later with a new tower and the first “color only” television transmitter in the country. For more than fifty years, Channel 12 has been the little station that could -- and still can – provide unmatched service to northwoods viewers and advertisers. Living and working in this beautiful part of Wisconsin creates stories that need telling, and Newswatch 12 finds them and tells them because we live and work here, too.