Remember When: The Different Looks of Big 2 News and How It Got It’s Name

The first local newscast I remember as a child was Big 2 News since channel 2 was the first local station in Midland/Odessa signing on for the first time on December 18, 1953. Above you can see the news opens for Big 2 from the 80s to today.

As early as I can remember my grandmother used to watch Big 2 News religiously because back in the 70s her reasoning was that Big 2 did news about Midland (because it was KMID), channel 7 did news about Odessa (because they were KOSA), and back in the day channel 9 was a Monahans station and no one that we knew watched them, so we didn't know if they did Monahans news or actually did Midland and Odessa news. The call letters for channel 9 at that time were KMOM, which stood for Monahans, Odessa, Midland.

Get our free mobile app

Around 2001, I got a job as a production assistant at Big 2 and found out the history of why Big 2 was called "Big 2."

Big 2 got its name because when the station first started out it was located in a hangar at the Midland Regional Airport (now the Midland International Air and Space Port) until their building was completed a couple of years after they signed on.

To identify which hangar had the station in it, they painted a huge number 2 on outside of the hangar itself and anyone who had to go to the station was told to look for the hangar with the "Big 2" on it and that's how the nickname was born.

The name has been dropped a couple of times, but soon after each time it was dropped, the Big 2 moniker was returned to the newscast and to the station because the history of the station preceded any new moniker anyone could come up with.