A local marketing agreement (LMA) was established whereby Granite would provide operational services to WPTA and Malara's other new station KDLH in Duluth, Minnesota. On March 9, 2005, after Granite bought NBC affiliate WISE-TV, it sold WPTA to the Malara Broadcast Group for $45.3 million. At one time (according to Granite Broadcasting's website), WPTA was among the ten strongest ABC affiliates in the country, ranking with WISN-TV in Milwaukee, KMBC-TV Kansas City, and KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City. When WSJV in South Bend (which signed on three years before WPTA) switched to Fox in 1995, WPTA became the longest-tenured ABC affiliate in Indiana.
In late-1998 alongside the launch of The WB 100+ and its cable-only affiliates, WPTA began managing and providing promotional services for WBFW, which used that callsign in a fictional manner since it was a cable-exclusive service. The station was sold again to Granite Broadcasting on September 25, 1989, for $22.15 million. This was because the WLVI-TV and WTCN purchases put Gannett with two stations over the Federal Communications Commission's seven-station ownership limit for television stations that was in effect at the time. On May 12, 1983, Gannett sold WPTA (along with WLKY in Louisville, Kentucky) to Pulitzer Publishing for an undisclosed amount after it purchased WLVI-TV in Boston from Field Communications and WTCN-TV (now KARE) in Minneapolis from Metromedia. On June 7, 1979, Combined merged with the Gannett Company. Under new management, WPTA purchased new cameras and a more modern switcher. On April 4, 1973, Tarzian sold the station to Combined Communications for $3.6 million. In 1964, a 2,226-square-foot (206.8 m 2) addition to its studios was added to accommodate an expanding sales staff. In 1957, the station aired a spin-off of American Bandstand called Teen Dance and the afternoon kids show Popeye and the Rascals. In addition to ABC programming, it also originally aired seven-and-a-half hours of live local programming each week. For this reason, when Tarzian signed on an FM radio sister station to channel 21, it took the calls WPTH at the time, the FCC did not allow co-owned television and radio stations to share the same base call sign if they were licensed in different cities.
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WPTA identified itself as "Roanoke/Fort Wayne" on-air until the license was officially transferred to Fort Wayne sometime in the 1970s.
This was possible because the FCC had by this time allowed a station to have its main studio in a different location from its city of license. Under Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules at that time, the Fort Wayne market was deemed too small to support three full-power stations, so Tarzian's application listed WPTA's city of license as the small town of Roanoke, located just across the Allen– Huntington county line approximately 14 miles (23 km) to the southwest of its studios and transmitter in Fort Wayne.
Upon its launch, channel 21 took all ABC programming from NBC affiliate WKJG-TV (channel 33, now WISE-TV) and CBS affiliate WANE-TV (channel 15). The WPTA call letters come from the long tradition of other Tarzian stations that base the call letters upon the initials of family members of company management-in this case, Tarzian's children, Patricia and Thomas. It was founded by Sarkes Tarzian, an Indianapolis engineer whose company owned Bloomington's WTTV and several other stations in Indiana. The station first signed on the air on September 28, 1957.
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