Dana Melancon stood in disbelief, seeing a place where he had worked for years go down in flames.

The longtime KBTV, channel 4, meteorologist stood in front of the station’s building at 2900 17th St. in Port Arthur while more than five decades of a piece of the city’s history was going up in smoke on Feb. 2, 2009.

By this time, no one was working at the building. The longtime NBC affiliate for Southeast Texas, which had just switched networks to Fox, had moved its operations to Parkdale Mall in Beaumont almost a decade earlier.

“I think we had just ceased having our master control,” said Melancon, now a morning and midday meteorologist at CBS affiliate KFDM, channel 6, as well as channel 4. KBTV now operates at KFDM’s Beaumont studio.

“We still housed several satellite dishes there [in Port Arthur]. We had our weather radar there,” Melancon said. “Whenever the fire department came, there was nobody at the building, so they called our location at the mall. Myself and one other engineer, they called us. I got there first. [Engineer] J.C. Johnson got there after I did.”

Melancon saw “a little bit of smoke” burning out of one of the building’s windows when he first got there. The station stored a huge float for Mardi Gras of Southeast Texas there, but the doors or gates wouldn’t open because power there had shut off, he said.

“As time went on, you started to see flames,” Melancon said. “The entire building went.”

 

PORT ARTHUR’S TV SHOWPLACE

John Garner, who died in 2013, portrayed “Cowboy John” on a live-action children’s program and was a “weatherman” — as opposed to a meteorologist today — at channel 4 in the 1950s and 1960s.

“That station was like a monument to Port Arthur,” Garner’s son, Joey Garner, said. “Port Arthur had their own little TV station. Port Arthur people thought we were hot stuff. We had our own TV station. Are you kidding?”

According to a Feb. 3, 2009, Port Arthur News story on the fire, building owner Julius Gordon wanted to turn the 1950s-built structure into a movie theater but instead made it into a television station. KPAC-TV, named for co-owner Port Arthur College, first signed on in October 1957 and served as the NBC affiliate of Southeast Texas for the next 51-plus years.

The call letters were changed in 1965 to KJAC when the college sold its stake to Jefferson Amusement Company, according to cited information in Wikipedia.

In its early days, celebrities like actress Joan Crawford and original Hawaii Five-O detective Jack Lord paid visits to the station.

Original recordings from the channel 4 studios were hard to come by because cassettes of videotape were used over-and-over for new recordings, since videotape was expensive, Joey Garner said. Any isolated recordings that might have existed before the fire were in the building, Garner recalled his father telling him.

“We got to watch from time to time making commercials,” Garner said. “You see a commercial on TV, and it takes about a minute. Well, it took all afternoon to make that commercial.”

Melancon, a Port Arthur native and Thomas Jefferson High School graduate, was the last station announcer hired at KJAC in the 1980s. Stations today commonly hire independent voiceover talent to announce during newscast openings, promotions and station identifications.

While the TV station is the third oldest in the Beaumont-Port Arthur market, it achieved many firsts.

“Channel 4 was the first for a lot of things,” Melancon said. “Channel 4 and that studio was the first to broadcast entertainment wrestling [in Southeast Texas]. We were one of the first to have a local dance show, Jive at Five. We had a local children’s show. We were the first to broadcast the James commission hearing on organized gambling. It was part of the formation of Port Arthur.”

In 1998, media conglomerate Nexstar purchased KJAC and changed the call letters to KBTV, for “Beaumont Television.” The station’s operations moved to a suite at Parkdale Mall in Beaumont by 2000, according to Melancon, and the Port Arthur studio became a storage house for the station, although some employees continued to work there until 2009.

 

WHAT … OR WHO … CAUSED THE FIRE?

Melancon told The News that Feb. 1 of that year was the last day of station operations in Port Arthur and that no one was working there at the time of the fire. He confirmed that the station’s master control was being turned over to a Nexstar facility in Little Rock, Arkansas, which also has NBC (coincidentally, channel 4 there) and Fox affiliates.

KBTV had switched to Fox a month earlier to air more news, according to encyclopedia notes.

The fire began within the 2 p.m. hour of Feb. 2, forcing the nearby gas station to stop selling gasoline, a store employee told The News.

“I remember the fire,” Port Arthur Police Chief Larry Richard said. “The main thing I remember is, we had four firefighters inside the building when it collapsed. Two of them made it out of the front of the door, and realized the other two were in there and showed them out.”

None of the firefighters suffered major injuries, Richard said.

“That could have had a different outcome,” he added.

Melancon said a huge Mardi Gras float was stored inside the building.

“It was a big boat they converted to a float,” he added. “The problem was they had already shut the power off. The gates wouldn’t open. The doors weren’t open.”

John Garner recovered a door handle from the station with a gold plate engraved “KPAC-TV”. He attached a note on the top of the door handle that ended with: “arson suspected.”

Ten years after the fire, Richard did not recall the cause or any suspects. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were called in to conduct the investigation because of the size of the building, Port Arthur Fire Marshal Paul Washburn said.

A Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the fire was made to the Port Arthur Fire Department on Jan. 25 and have not yet been received.

“I know they suspected a couple of transients were sleeping in the building,” Melancon said. “It’s hard to say. The building was old. It was deteriorating from the floor up. It was a four-story building. It’s hard for me to speculate.

“We don’t suspect anybody let them in. Anybody could have easily got inside. You could scale the fence. There are ways they could have gotten in.”

For now, a decade has passed since a piece of Port Arthur history burned near Memorial Boulevard. All that remains is a concrete slab and a U.S. Post Office mailbox that is still used.

The Port Arthur News is now located five blocks northwest from where a station that broadcast everything from a local children’s show to NBC’s feed of major-league baseball once stood.

How it burned down, interestingly enough, remains a mystery.