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Channel 2 might want to rub in Vick’s VapoRub to soothe the hurt. The N.C. Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee recently rejected —  for now — a marker honoring WFMY Channel 2 as the state’s first television station to broadcast live, an Aug. 18, 1949, newscast that lasted 4 minutes and 25 seconds.

The committee selected instead a marker for Lunsford Richardson, the Greensboro druggist who invented Vick’s Salve. His son, Smith Richardson, later renamed the product Vick’s VapoRub.

The product gained fame, and was even rationed because of demand during the deadly Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

For generations, VapoRub has been an iconic brand. Lunsford Richardson used the name Vick with 21 cold-related remedies he invented, honoring his brother-in-law, Dr. Joshua Vick of Selma. Richardson moved here from Selma in 1890 to buy with John Fariss a drugstore at 121 S. Elm St. from W.C. Porter.

A plaque on the building, now occupied by a construction company, honors Richardson. Another salutes William Sidney Porter, best known as writer O. Henry, who jerked sodas there as a teenager.

The choice of Richardson for the honor bucks tradition in a sense “because we don’t endorse commercial products,’' says Michael Hill, a state archives and history staff member who works with the marker committee.

But the committee chose to view Richardson as an inventor and entrepreneur, just as it did in approving a marker in 1986 in New Bern for Caleb Bradham, the druggist who invented Pepsi-Cola. (His son, the late George Bradham, owned a Greensboro public relations and advertising agency.)

A site for the Richardson marker hasn’t been pinpointed. The committee prefers downtown’s main intersection, Elm and Market, a half-block from the store site. But it may go further north, next to Center City Park, near the Greensboro sit-ins marker. The sit-ins of 1960 occurred in the Woolworth store on South Elm, across from the old drugstore building.

The marker should be up by April or May, with perhaps a dedication ceremony.

Many Richardson descendants, including a grandson, former County Commissioner Fred Preyer, live here.

Anyone interested in organizing a dedication should contact Hill at (919) 807-7290.

In denying Channel 2, the committee made up of historians didn’t deem the station unworthy, Hill says. Several factors came into play. 

First, although WFMY was first to go live — with mild profanity from a director who mistakenly thought the live connection had failed — WBT of Charlotte had aired a month earlier. But all its shows were pre-recorded.

Also, Hill says, the committee felt it unfair to honor the first in TV when it hasn’t recognized the first in radio, WPTF of Raleigh. The only two radio historical markers are for a Voice of America operation in Greenville and for radio experiments that took place on the Outer Banks.

Hill predicts markers eventually will be approved for pioneer radio stations and for WFMY and WBT. Channel 2’s would stand at East Friendly Avenue and Davie Street, in front of the Greensboro Cultural Center, which in 1949 housed the newspaper that became the News & Record.

The newspaper started Channel 2 in a small white, brick building next door. The station long ago moved to its current site on Phillips Avenue and is now owned by Gannett Corp.

Hill says the druggist and Channel 2 were nominated by Alex Stoesen, professor emeritus of history at Guilford College and a former marker committee member. He did the research with Ansley Wegner.

An irony: Richardson’s VapoRub helped others battle the flu, but not him. He died of flu in 1919.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net