Anybody Seen Dan Lovett?: Memoirs of a Media Nomad

Copyright © 2014 Daniel J. Lovett, Sr.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014904639

ISBN: 978-1-4525-9418-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-9419-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-9420-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014904639

Balboa Press rev. date: 5/9/2014

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Dan The Platter Man

Chapter 2 Surveying The World At Noon

Chapter 3 Stan The Man’s Last At Bat

Chapter 4 The Old Scotsman

Chapter 5 Most Fun On The Radio

Chapter 6 Baseball Under Glass

Chapter 7 The Beatles Have Landed

Chapter 8 Dee Jay

Chapter 9 First 12-Bagger On Tv

Chapter 10 The Little Lord

Chapter 11 Ali, The VC And Me

Chapter 12 Prelude To March Madness

Chapter 13 By The Numbers

Chapter 14 The Baseball Graveyard

Chapter 15 The Face Of Houston

Chapter 16 Dressed For The Arrest

Chapter 17 Four For Foyt

Chapter 18 A Houston Faceoff

Chapter 19 The Battle Of The Sexes

Chapter 20 Strippers On The Sidelines

Chapter 21 Dante And Dickey

Chapter 22 Houston To Nyc

Chapter 23 Jerry Rivers

Chapter 24 Evil Evel Event

Chapter 25 Get Your Kicks With Pele

Chapter 26 The Frightful Five

Chapter 27 Cock A Doodle Doo

Chapter 28 Ringmaster Roone

Chapter 29 Shuttle Sam Off To D.C.

Chapter 30 A Plug In The Post

Chapter 31 The Cost Of Being A Loud Mouth

Chapter 32 Cosell

Chapter 33 David Hartman, David Hartman

Chapter 34 Miracle On Ice

Chapter 35 The Thrill Of Victory

Chapter 36 No Mas

Chapter 37 The Shoe Knew

Chapter 38 The Golden Boy Is Back

Chapter 39 The Golden Girl Is Gone

Chapter 40 First All Sports Talker

Chapter 41 A Gorilla In The Weather Office

Chapter 42 Shake The Stick

Chapter 43 Montana Is Naked

Chapter 44 Fumble

Chapter 45 D.c. And Me

Chapter 46 Joltin’ Joe

Chapter 47 The Honolulu Hotshot

Chapter 48 The King And I

Chapter 49 The City Of Roman Numerals

Chapter 50 Donna ‘D’ And Mary ‘C’

Chapter 51 Holy Toledo

Chapter 52 Big Bad Boss

Chapter 53 The Second Coming Of John Glenn

Chapter 54 Short Takes

Chapter 55 Oops! The Bloops

Chapter 56 The Producers

Chapter 57 Doctors Of Weather

Chapter 58 News To Amuse And Abuse

Chapter 59 Sir David The Lion King

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

K.C. Endsley is an Indianapolis native based in Houston, Texas since 1982. His background includes entertainment, sports and personality feature writing. K.C. is an accomplished writer, equal to the master chef, who turns a bland dish into a delicacy. I have known Endsley for over a decade and appreciate his depth of the written word. Without him, this book would lack the interest, I hope you will enjoy. K.C. is not well-known for his quote, Once you’ve read Webster’s, everything else is plagiarism.

DEDICATED TO

Jesus Christ, who saved me and loves me to this day.

To the most wonderful and forgiving woman in my life

Olivia L. Buvinghausen Lovett (a.k.a. The Buv), my wife.

To my children, Kelly Kay and Zachary William,

The most pleasurable rewards of my life.

To Frances Kay a sister who always cares.

To Keith, a generous and steady man.

To my grandchildren, Kyle, Kaitlin and Kaylan

The true blessings from the Lord.

And to Nona and DOS

PROLOGUE

Preparing to leave Washington, D.C. on Friday May 9, 1983, for my weekend appearance on ABC World News Sunday in New York, I receive a call from a friend in Manhattan, telling me I had finally made the headlines. For what?, I ask. He has no answer, other than to say that my full name beckoned, big and bold, at the top of the back page of the New York Post.

My heart pounds in my ears. My mind races like A.J. Foyt at Indy. The back page of the Post is often, infamously, devoted to scandalous scuttlebutt and scathing scrutiny. Did the law want me? Maybe I won a lottery jackpot!

The intrigue makes for a very thought provoking flight to LaGuardia on the Eastern shuttle. Once on land, I bolt for the nearest newsstand. And there it is. Beckoning, big and bold, in the New York Post.

"Anybody Seen Dan Lovett?", the headline quizzes. I hungrily devour the article about me only to learn that it isn’t about me. Phil Mushnick, who spent 40 years at the Post, had written a story about the flood of sportscasters who poured through New York over the preceding ten years. For some reason, he picked my name out of the lineup of the 49 who had worked on the three network affiliated stations during that decade, including names like Sal Marchiano, Jim Bouton, Len Berman, Marv Albert, Warner Wolf and Howard Cosell. And I am the headliner. Imagine that!

At this moment, seeing my name in big, bold print, it dawns on me. I have made a dent in a career that, like myself, I had never taken too seriously. Sinatra sang if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere. I’ll bet Frankie made the back page of the Post, too.

Of course, the subtle sentiment behind the headline is that I was just another anonymous face in the New York crowd. But no one whose name is beckoning, big and bold on the back page of the New York Post is anonymous.

Many of those names in the article will gain far greater recognition than mine over the years. But on that day, on that page, mine was the one that jumped out.

To borrow a phrase from writer Ken Hoffman of the Houston Chronicle, I have written about and interviewed many during my long slow climb to the middle of my profession.

And so it is that I humbly present the stories of a kid from the spud fields of Idaho who made it all the way to a headline in the New York Post.

Back page headlines of the New York Post in 1983.

"Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border,

coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press."

Walter Winchell/ NBC Blue Network

There is good news tonight.

Gabriel Heater/ Mutual Broadcasting System

Good night, and good luck.

Edward R. Murrow/ CBS

Hello Americans, standby for News!

Paul Harvey/ ABC

That’s the top of the news as it looks from here.

Fulton Lewis Jr./ Mutual Broadcasting System

And that’s the way it is.

Walter Cronkite/ CBS

That’s the story folks, glad we could get together.

John Cameron Swayze/ Camel News Caravan NBC

From the desert to the sea, to all of southern California.

Jerry Dunphy/ KABC L.A.

Good night David… good night Chet, and goodnight for NBC news.

Chet Huntley-David Brinkley/ NBC

Good evening friends.

Dave Ward/ KTRK-TV, Houston

Good evening I’m Roger Grimsby, Here now the news.

Roger Grimsby/ WABC-TV, New York City

These signature statements by radio and television news anchors made them uniquely recognizable to their listening and viewing publics. They aren’t merely trademarks; they are broadcast birthmarks. Many announcers used them to open their broadcasts; others to close them.

In New York City, the most recognized local TV news anchor was Roger Grimsby, who began his nightly news program by addressing his audience with the immortal words, Here now the news.

Grimsby was an orphan, raised by a Lutheran minister and his wife in Duluth, Minnesota. He was the original face of Eyewitness News on WABC-TV when it first aired on October 17, 1968. Bill Beutel would join the wry and sometimes acerbic Grimsby as a co-anchor in 1970.

Roger was the first person I met when I joined WABC Channel 7 in 1974 as the lead sports anchor on Eyewitness News. Also in the daily cast was a weather bird named Tex Antoine, along with a developing news star in his own right, Geraldo Rivera. Joan Lunden, Doug and John Johnson, Roger Sharp, Melba Tolliver, Bob Lape, Gloria Rojas, Anna Bond and Roseanne Scamardella were also among the contributors to the highly popular local news program.

The Eyewitness News format was the brainchild of Al Primo. He originated his blueprint for the new look of local TV news in 1965 as the news director at KYW in Philadelphia. As Primo would say in those days, Philadelphia is the tryout city for Broadway. He took his branded newscast to New York City in 1968, where it propelled WABC-TV to the top of the ratings almost overnight. Local TV stations from coast-to-coast quickly imitated the Eyewitness News concept.

Grimsby became a great friend. He helped me to preserve my sanity. He inspired me to conquer the challenge of working and residing in New York City. He was not only an intriguing man, but a brilliant one, with sharp writing skills and a unique way of delivering his well-chosen words on radio and TV. He was the envy of local TV news anchors across the country during his era.

A population of over 20 million in the Tri-State area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut had access to Grimsby’s nightly newscasts at six and eleven o’clock. His viewership in the late ’60s, from those two shows in the New York City metropolis, was greater than that of the network news broadcasts by Walter Cronkite on CBS, Huntley-Brinkley on NBC or Bob Young on ABC.

Grimsby was the first local TV news anchor in the U.S. to earn $1 million dollars a year, but his legacy transcends money. Grimsby was a pioneer in local TV news in this country. This book is a tribute to him and his eighteen years at WABC-TV. Here now the News.

TAKE TWO

It appeared I was headed for an entertainment career as early as 1947. I was six years old. My sister, Frances Kay, was only three, but she was the vehicle for my first foray into show business. I taught her how to dance for nickels and dimes on the sidewalk in front of the large bay window of the Ponderosa Café in Custer, South Dakota. She was a cutie, with a beaming smile and flowing locks of blonde hair. When customers departed the Ponderosa, which was owned by our grandpa Bill, they would drop coins in the tin cup I was holding as little Kay danced away on the sidewalk. Little did I know then that promoting my dancing sister would facilitate a lifetime in show biz.

My journey to the media mecca of the Big Apple began in the remote reaches of western Idaho. After chops-honing stops in Missouri and Texas, I boarded the A-Train of news stations in the nation’s largest TV market.

CHAPTER 1

DAN THE PLATTER MAN

…The D.J. with little to say but lots to play on the big K…

1959. What to do after school?

Payette, Idaho is a single-stoplight town on the banks of the Snake River. Across the river from Oregon, it is a million miles from New York City as the career flies.

It is the hometown, and will be the resting place of baseball Hall-of-Famer Harmon Killebrew. Hammerin’ Harm, or The Payette Pounder, as he was known in this small community of the Treasure Valley. The Washington Senators plucked him out of Payette High in 1954 with a $50,000 contract offer. He debuted in the majors, six days shy of his 18th birthday and played for over twenty years in the American League. His bulging forearms, built by Payette County farm work as a child, snapped his bat through the strike zone for 573 career home runs. That was an AL record for right-handed homers set back when a steroid was a misspelled heavenly body. (Suspended juice dispenser Alex Rodriguez later broke the record.)

Payette is also the home of KPID, a 250-watt radio station licensed to broadcast during daylight hours only. That is where I press my nose up against the big glass window to watch the guy inside talk into a microphone and spin 45-RPM records.

That’s what I want to do.

I don’t want to be a sales clerk at Farber’s Department Store after graduation. I want to be Dan the Platter Man, the D.J. with little to say, but lots to play on the Big K’, coming your way, live, the flip side of five."

My passion for radio comes to fruition during my junior year at Payette High, after I beg the station to allow me to do a weekly five-minute show on high school news. My paydays from KPID amount to five bucks a week. It is in cash. Five dollars is a pocketful for a teenager in 1958. A five spot will fill the tank of the 1933 Chevrolet coupe my grandmother had given me, provide for a couple of burgers at the Snack Shack, and make for a sensational evening with my girlfriend in the rumble seat of the Chevy at the Gay Way junction drive-in movie. Five big ones. I am more than thrilled to get it, even though I make more setting pins three nights a week at the Gay Way Bowl near Fruitland, Idaho. (I kid you not. Gay and fruit have no social connotations at the time.)

Shortly after my graduation, my sister Kay and I are off to visit our dad in Missouri, where he is running a Clark gas station in Jefferson City. He moonlights by making and selling homemade sandwiches to support his drinking habit.

During our visit, I stop to check out one of the two local radio stations in Missouri’s capital. Curt Brown, the program director of KWOS, could have simply given me a quick tour of the thousand-watt station and sent me on my way. But Brown is looking for an announcer. He offers me an audition. I read a Bayer Aspirin commercial in exactly sixty-seconds, without error. Brown offers me the job for $75 a week. I don’t know if there is a lottery in Missouri, but I hit it.

Sister Kay and I are on the Union Pacific train back to Idaho within days. Life begins moving quickly and I marry my high school sweetheart, Roanna Huffman, a week after returning to Idaho. We become Mr. and Mrs. Dan the Platter Man. My mother pays for the rings and puts $200 in my pocket so we can cover the trip to Missouri. I have new wheels to make the journey. It’s a 1949 slope backed Chevrolet with vacuum shift.

It is June of 1959. Twelve days after my high school graduation, I am leaving the potato patch in the Gem State for big doings in the Show Me State. I can’t wait to put Jerry Lee Lewis on the turntable at K-WOS and tell my listening audience how a "whole lotta shakin’" is goin’ on.

I don’t just spin platters. There is the matter of reading the news, every hour on the hour, throughout my nightly shift. Gathering stories for broadcast requires me to hustle back to the wire room, which is next to the rest room. I can visit both of them with the aid of an appropriately lengthy musical selection; something from the Greatest Hits collection of I.P. Frehley, as it is known in industry lore.

I rip the news copy from the Associated Press machine while Les Elgart and his orchestra cover my absence, bouncing their way through a six-minute set from "My Fair Lady," with a vocal tossed in by Peggy Lee. Good stuff, but not something an 18-year-old will openly admit to.

There is something fascinating to me about reading the news, especially when you add a line or two of your own to enhance the wire copy, which is already branded by someone else’s bias.

The Missouri capital sure does show me. It shows me how to improve upon my craft, leading me soon to bigger things where everything is bigger Texas.

First radio job on KPID, Payette, Idaho, 1958.

KWOS Radio, Jefferson City, Mo., 1959.

CHAPTER 2

SURVEYING THE WORLD AT NOON

…That’s me on the black-and-white TV…

1960. I dip my toe into the wading pool of TV news. No sharks… yet.

I am restless when the summer of 1960 rolls around. I am already looking for a bigger station to further my career after only one year in the business. Youth must be served. Rather than spinning my way through endless years at KWOS radio in Jefferson City, where morning personality Johnny Music is the station’s biggest star, I want a shot at the big time.

Radio Park in St. Louis is my goal. KXOK, 630 AM, blankets eastern Missouri and southern Illinois with 5,000 watts of power. With such popular Top 40 jocks as Danny Dark and Johnny Rabbitt, KXOK is the runaway ratings leader these days. KXOK is so successful that its top competitor, WIL radio, dropped its pop music format in favor of country music. The newscasters on KXOK are also popular voices on the station. Robert R. Lynn and Steven B. Stevens generate gigantic ratings. I will be Daniel B. Daniels when I join the news staff.

Before I can pack for the move, though, I would need to send KXOK an audition tape to see if I could even score such a job.

Management at KWOS gets wind of my intentions. I have been spouting off about how I want to get out of Jeff City, plus I am reading the Help Wanted ads in Broadcasting magazine every week. My conspicuous restlessness prompts KWOS to offer a plan to keep me right where I’m at.

William Weldon is the owner of KWOS radio. He also has the keys to the Jefferson City News and Tribune, plus the local TV outlet, which is located in a cow pasture about ten miles out of town.

KWOS management, with Weldon’s sanction, not only expands my radio gig, but also puts me in the news anchor chair for the TV station’s first mid-day newscast.

Does this mean that I am destined to become the Walter Cronkite of Central Missouri? That’s not the way it is. Not even close.

The idea of appearing before a camera and reading news copy from the Associated Press and United Press International has some appeal to me, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my radio career. Coupled with my radio salary, the additional $50 bucks a week makes it worth my time. I am now one of the early faces in a business just getting its wings, on what would eventually become a great flight into the lives of millions of Americans. Heck, back in 1960 there is an afternoon game show coming out of California, Who Can You Trust, hosted by Omaha transplant Johnny Carson. Two years from now he will become the 30-year host of the Tonight Show on NBC.

My dream of meeting my fate in St. Louis is over. I’m now driving my 1949 Chevy across the Missouri River Bridge to the studios of Channel 13, KRCG-TV, to read the news before a camera each weekday.

Dan Lovett Surveys the World at Noon for Safeway is my television debut. I sit behind an old wooden desk reading copy I had ripped off the AP wire machine only 15 minutes before going on the air.

This is the black-and-white era; no colorcast yet in Central Missouri. There is but one camera in the studio. There are no chroma-key effects like those that will bring showbiz glitz to the local news of the future. I have never heard the word teleprompter. It is just me, sitting at the old wooden desk, my hair in a crew cut, still dark brown and standing stiff with butch wax.

The moment arrives for the commercial break in my fifteen-minute newscast, and the control room fades the lone studio camera to black. It is my cue to get up from the desk and walk to another area of the studio, with the lumbering camera following me. There, standing before a shelf filled with Safeway applesauce and canned corn, I make my pitch for the sponsor.

Today at Safeway, two number-ten tins of Dole applesauce for only twenty-five cents, I blurt into the camera.

My commercial pitch complete, we fade to black again as the camera operator pushes the unwieldy camera to its original position in the studio to finish off the mid-day newscast.

In Washington today, President Dwight David Eisenhower held a press conference in the White House, I announce to my viewing audience, which probably amounts to no more than a few hundred folks, if that. It is big time TV, though, for the kid from Idaho.

Once this daily routine is complete, I hit the parking lot, jump into my banged up Chevy, and drive back to the radio station. There I will slip out of my twenty-dollar J.C. Penney sports coat and become Dan the Platter Man again.

I always had more fun on the radio but certainly wasn’t complaining about the newfound dollars I was receiving from my first exposure on the tube.

TV Guide ad, 1963.

Dan Lovett Survey’s the World at Noon.

CHAPTER 3

STAN THE MAN’S LAST AT BAT

…He will always be The Man…

September 29, 1963. He goes out with a bang, the last of his 3,630.

I am among the working press at the old Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. Stan Musial, at age 42, is going to step up to the plate for the last time.

The drive to St. Louis is 105 miles from Jefferson City. I have convinced Curt Brown, KWOS radio program manager, that I should cover Musial’s farewell. I will record an interview to be aired the next morning. Never mind the distance to St. Louis from the Missouri capital. I would have walked the route in order to link the beginning of my radio career with the ending of Musial’s in baseball.

KWOS is one of the hundreds of stations spanning the Midwest that carry the Cardinals Radio Network. That relationship will allow me to also interview Harry Caray, Jack Buck and Jerry Gross, who share the microphone on the network’s flagship station, KMOX in St. Louis. Joe Garagiola is also here, and he is gracious enough to speak with me about Stan’s career. Garagiola had been part of the Cardinals’ radio triumvirate through the 1962 season before going fulltime with NBC-TV that year. (Hmmm… three men in a booth. Somewhere out there, a guy named Roone Arledge is taking notes.)

I can hear Caray to this day calling Musial’s final career at-bat; I made sure KWOS was recording the broadcast for my audio library.

Take a good look fans, take a good look. This might be his last time at bat in the Major Leagues. Remember the stance… and the swing… you are not likely to see his likes again… Here’s the 2 and 1 pitch to Musial… a hot shot on the ground, into right field, a base hit.

Musial got the game’s first hit in the fourth inning off Cincinnati Reds ace Jim Maloney, who is gunning for his 24th win in the season finale. In the sixth inning, Musial sends another Maloney fastball searing past diving second baseman Pete Rose.

Rose cuts off the throw from the outfield, too late to gun down the fleet Curt Flood, who crosses the plate to break a scoreless tie. Musial stands awkwardly at first base. The shy, unassuming giant of the game would rather ignore, than to acknowledge, a swelling standing ovation. Manager Johnny Keane slowly makes the move to send in pinch runner Gary Kolb. The roar rekindles as Kolb takes the field and Stan The Man steps outside the lines and trots to the dugout for the final time.

Musial leaves baseball just as he had entered it in 1941. In his first game, he smacked two hits and drove in the tying and winning runs for St. Louis in a 3-2 triumph over Casey Stengel and his Boston Braves. He has two hits and the first RBI in this, his final game, which the Cardinals will win by the same score, 3-2.

This is the first of the many goose-bump moments I am to experience at a sporting event. I’m a lucky guy.

Legend has it that, after snagging the relay throw from right field, Reds rookie Pete Rose took the ball over to Musial and handed it to him as he stood on first base. Sportscaster Bob Costas, who was to deliver Musial’s eulogy in 2013, would almost tearfully recount this reverse passing of the torch moment in subsequent interviews. What a great legend it is. A wonderful story.

Rose was born in 1941, less than five months after I came onto this earth. That was the year that Joe Dimaggio achieved his record 56-game hitting streak; the year Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, hit .406 – the last major leaguer to bat over .400; the year that Stan Musial broke in to the major leagues.

Now, on the final day of the 1963 season, Musial walks off the field with a National League career record of 3,630 hits. Rose will get three hits on this day to finish his rookie season with 170. Eighteen years later, Rose will become the only National Leaguer to exceed Musial’s total. Stan the Man will be in the stands that night to see it happen.

The words legend and legendary are too often used for occurrences and people that verifiably existed. The true meaning of the word is more along the lines of a fable or myth. The legend of the Musial ball is truly legendary. A great story that adds a heightened spiritual aura to an event that already had plenty of it.

Another verifiable legend: Musial’s final two hits that day gave him a total of 1,815 at home; the exact same number of hits he pounded out on the road.

After the game I got my interview with Stanislaw Franciszek Musial, Stan the Man, one of the most congenial athletes I have interviewed in my long career.

Musial died at age 93 in 2013.

The day Stan Musial retired, 1963.

CHAPTER 4

THE OLD SCOTSMAN

…Word imagery was his gift…

1964. I get called up from the minors.

In the mid-1950s I would often listen to the radio out on the porch of my Grandma Anderson’s home in Idaho. She would dial in the most popular radio programs of the day, like Gang Busters, a cops-versus-robbers show, which was first broadcast on NBC Radio in 1935. By 1956, when I started listening with Granny, it was on the Mutual Broadcasting System and nearing the end of its 21-year run.

Gang Busters wasn’t the only radio program I listened to in those days. On the Liberty Radio Network, there was an announcer calling baseball games who wasn’t even in the ballpark where the pitching and hitting was taking place!

His name is Gordon McLendon. As Bill Young points out in his book, Dead Air: The Rise and Demise of Music Radio, to McLendon, no canvas was as large as the imagination.

McLendon was a word master of the highest degree. He would recreate major league games, almost daily, from his radio studio in Texas. Taking the first-hand account of a game from a Western Union ticker wire, McLendon would describe the action as he saw it in his mind, adding sound effects, and leaving the listener in awe of the play that had taken place. In his mind.

McLendon was actually at the ballpark on October 3, 1951 when he called the shot heard ’round the world from the Polo Grounds in New York City.

Bobby swings, there’s a long one out there, out to left. Going, going, GONE and the Giants win the Pennant!

McLendon was broadcasting live when Bobby Thomson came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with a pair of Giants teammates on base. Thomson lofted Ralph Branca’s 0-1 pitch over the left field wall to finish off the powerful Brooklyn Dodgers and send the Giants on to the World Series in one of the most electrifying events in the history of sports, and of sports radio broadcasting.

Oh, I know, it is Russ Hodges’ ubiquitous call of that home run that accompanies video highlight clips to this day. The equally stirring description Hodges made was limited to WMCA Radio in New York City and the handful of stations on the Giants radio network. Dodgers’ announcer Red Barber was also describing the game on WMGM radio in Brooklyn.

At the time, McLendon’s was the call heard ’round the world, booming across the landscapes of big cities and small towns throughout America on his own Liberty Broadcasting System network of 450 stations.

Little did I know then that thirteen years after the shot heard ’round the world, I would be on McLendon’s payroll.

I had discovered an ad in Broadcasting magazine. A radio station in Houston, Texas was looking for an announcer, making it clear they wanted a voice that could excite listeners, even if it required adding some sound effects – a McLendon trademark.

I sent my tape to KILT in Houston, one of several stations around the country owned by McLendon, the Old Scotsman. Within a week I receive a phone call from a man named Richard Dobbyn, who says he is the news director of KILT.

News Director? I’m a sports guy! Why would they have the news director call me? Dobbyn proceeds to tell me that the opening is for a newsman, not a sports announcer, but that I would be reading sports stories in the newscast every so often. Dobbyn assures me that reading the news is much more exciting than talking about who won or lost some game.

Accepting the McLendon offer of $700 per month and $250 to cover moving expenses from Missouri, I quickly convince myself that doing the news is the big time, much bigger than reading some trivial sports story. I tell him I will be Deep in the Heart of Texas in two weeks’ time. I am 23 with a wife and two children, Dan Jr. and daughter Kelly Kay, both under the age of four. We are all on our way to the Lone Star state, for my first major market radio gig. The NASA astronauts are still settling into their new digs at the Manned Spacecraft Center south of town. The Bayou City is evolving into Space City.

My head is spinning in anticipation as I cross the Texas state line. I’m going there to be a newsman, sure, but I still love sports. Houston’s National League baseball club has begun its third season. No more long road trips to St. Louis or Kansas City to watch major league ball. The Colt 45s will be right there in my own backyard.

There is also the Houston Oilers, champions of the American Football League in 1960 and 1961. Veteran quarterback George Blanda set a professional football record by throwing 36 touchdown passes in the 1961 season. Up the road in Austin, Darrell Royal’s Texas Longhorns had just won their first national football title by beating Roger Staubach and Navy in the Cotton Bowl.

My hopes are high and my dreams are big. But I could not have dreamed that one day I would be the radio voice of the Oilers after they became part of the NFL. Or that I would meet, interview, and even become friends with many of my idols in the world of sports. Or that I would be covering the first indoor professional baseball game.

I finally pull into Houston on a clear but very hot and humid day in the summer. It feels like a big ole’ cow town to me as I drive in on I-45 South listening to KILT, the Big 6-10. Crossing construction work on the development of Loop 610, I’m thinking, imagine that, a road named after a radio station. Silly me.

I join the staff at KILT in the same week as a University of Houston junior, Jim Carola, who will become the station’s long-time news director a few years later. After a few weeks of getting to know the folks at KILT and finding my way around the city, I begin to feel right at home in Texas. Nachos, BBQ, Lone Star beer and strip joints on every corner.

I love my work and throw myself into it with passion. I guess I’m doing an adequate job. I am chosen to cover several major events as they unfold: the opening of the Astrodome in April of 1965; the arrival of the Beatles in August of that year; and an assignment to cover the war in Southeast Asia in 1966.

The U.S. is still in the early stages of military involvement in the conflict in Southeast Asia. McLendon wants on-the-ground representation for all seven of the radio stations he owns. I am the reporter dispatched to Saigon to fulfill McLendon’s vision.

An article in the Chicago Tribune notes that I am the youngest correspondent accredited by the U.S. government to cover the conflict, at the age of 25. I spend six weeks moving about the war zone, from Saigon to Da Nang, in U.S. helicopters. At one point I am pinned down during a two-day firefight in the Central Highlands near Bong Son. When the smoke finally clears I go on a body count with a Press Information Officer. We find over 100 Viet Cong soldiers, most of them chained to bamboo trees, or other stationary foliage, so they can’t run. They will be there to the finish.

What I think is odd about reporting from Vietnam is how the U.S. government labels it a conflict, not a war. If it walks like a duck…

It is also strange to see so many correspondents cover the conflict in commuter fashion. Up around seven in the morning, they would leave their Saigon hotel room, catch a cab to the airfield, and fly to the Da Nang press center. From there, they would go by helicopter and into the field for a few hours, file their stories, and return to the South Vietnam capital to enjoy cocktails and watch the Saigon Symphony from their hotel balconies.

That symphony is the cacophony of shells bursting just a few miles outside the city, the tracers visible at night across the Saigon River like a fireworks display in hell. After this experience, I have some misgivings about news reporting, and begin to seek an expedient exit from this part of the profession.

McLendon’s family roots in show business enhanced his legacy as an innovator in radio. Barton, his father, owned several movie houses and drive-in theaters in the Dallas area. Gordon, who graduated from Yale and studied far eastern languages, co-produced two cult movie classics in the late ’50s, The Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster.

It is no surprise when the Maverick of Radio, as he came to be known, introduces the first-ever mobile news unit, the KILT News Cruiser. Those of us on the news staff at KILT are often behind the wheel of the unit as it moves about Houston, flashing on-the-spot stories from the circular board on top of the van. It is, essentially, a mobile version of the news ticker at New York City’s Times Square.

The KILT News Cruiser runs a regular beat until the day it does not just provide the news, but becomes the news. That is the day Dobbyn drives it through the front door of a home in a southwest Houston neighborhood. It makes the front pages of both the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle. A few days later KILT is in the news again as the local papers disclose Dobbyn’s abrupt departure as the station’s news director.

Before I left KILT in 1967, Jim Carola told me an interesting story. I don’t think he will mind if I share my recollection of it.

Brad Messer, like Jim and me, had a daily on-air news shift in those days. In 1968, Messer became the news director of KILT. A few months later, Jim says, Brad tells him that some folks at the headquarters for the McLendon stations in Dallas want to phase Jim out. Jim tells Messer that if he isn’t wanted at the station he will leave. He packs and leaves that very day.

While listening to KILT on his car radio the next day, Carola hears a woman’s voice doing the news during his former mid-day shift. Before he can hit the street to look for work, Jim gets an early morning call from Bill Stewart, McLendon’s national program director in Big D. Stewart wants to know what the hell