On May 22, 1952, Oklahoma Quality Broadcasting Co. – a locally based company founded by M&D Finance Co. owner Ransom H. Drewry, who co-founded the licensee with a group of shareholders that included J.R. Montgomery (then-president of Lawton's City National Bank), T.R. Warkentin, Robert P. Scott (both of whom were minority partners in locally based S.W. Stationery) and G.G. Downing – submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a construction permit to build and license to operate a broadcast television station in the Wichita Falls–Lawton market that would transmit on VHF channel 7. When the FCC awarded the license and permit for channel 7 to the Drewry-led group in December 1952, the group requested and received approval to assign KSWO-TV (for "Southwest Oklahoma") as the call letters for his television station; the calls were taken from the Lawton radio station that Drewry founded in 1941, KSWO-AM (1380, now KKRX). (Oklahoma Quality Broadcasting, which eventually became Drewry Communications, signed on its second radio station, KRHD — named after his initials — in Duncan six years later in 1947; the KRHD callsign is now used by its ABC-affiliated sister station in Bryan–College Station, Texas.)