The station signed on April 18, 1953, with the calls WLOK-TV. It aired an analog signal on UHF channel 73. The station was owned by WLOK, Inc., a company that had former Ohio State football great Lloyd A. Pixley as its president. The station was co-owned with WLOK radio (1240 AM and 103.3 FM). WLOK-TV carried programming from all four networks of the Golden Age of television (NBC, CBS, ABC, and DuMont). It would eventually lose secondary affiliations with DuMont in 1956, CBS in 1972, and ABC in 1982.