13 Facts About Dorothy Bullitt

Dorothy Stimson Bullitt was an American businesswoman and philanthropist.

Dorothy Bullitt was the first woman in the United States to buy and manage a television station.

Dorothy Bullitt attended the convention as a delegate in her late husband's place, and presented a plank outlawing child labor for the party's platform.

Dorothy Bullitt's father had bequeathed her a considerable number of properties in downtown Seattle, but it was the height of the Great Depression, and the Bullitt properties were losing lessees rapidly as businesses failed and their owners moved out.

An increasingly prominent member of Seattle's business community, Dorothy Bullitt became a member of a number of corporate boards and a regent of the University of Washington, and was named Seattle's First Citizen in 1959.

In 1947, Dorothy Bullitt bought a small AM radio station, KEVR.

Dorothy Bullitt immediately applied to the Federal Communications Commission to change the station's call letters to KING, but KING was already registered to an old merchant ship, the SS Watertown.

Undaunted, Dorothy Bullitt negotiated with the freighter's owner and acquired the letters.

In 1949, Dorothy Bullitt purchased an eight-month-old television station, KRSC-TV, and renamed it KING-TV.

KING-TV became an NBC station in 1959 after Dorothy Bullitt persuaded the more successful network to switch its affiliation from rival station KOMO-TV.

Dorothy Bullitt turned the presidency of King Broadcasting, as the company was called, over to her son Charles Stimson "Stim" Dorothy Bullitt in 1961, remaining on the board as chairperson for several years thereafter.

In 1966, Stimson Dorothy Bullitt himself made the only televised appearance of his career when he delivered an impassioned and controversial editorial against the Vietnam War, long before the American public as a whole began to turn against the conflict's prosecution.

Dorothy Bullitt died on June 27,1989, at the age of 97.