WITH THE STATION now being sold, I had to find a successor. I had three people in mind. One was John Conomikes from the ABC station in Pittsburgh, who was a terrific guy; Ward Huey from Dallas with the ABC station there; and Joe Dimino, who was at the time with the Storer station in Cleveland. All three of these executives were fabulous broadcasters. John had worked at the ABC station for almost his entire professional career. He was working under a person who was not going to retire for about another year when I offered him the job. He accepted and then went back to the Board to tell them he was going to resign. They told him he wasn’t going anywhere and then quickly moved his boss out and put him right in as the President of Hearst Broadcasting. This was a great deal for John and a big loss for me.
I then went to Ward Huey who was in a similar situation, working for a person who had been there for years. Ward was waiting for him to retire. He accepted my job offer and then went back to resign. They told him, “No way.” They moved the other guy out and put Ward in his place.
Joe Dimino was a very strong contender in my mind for the position, but logistics did not work out. Joe is one of the most talented and creative television executives I have ever met. To this day, he and I have remained very close friends, stay in contact on a frequent basis, and see one another just about every summer on Cape Cod.
John Conomikes, friend, writes:
“Bob and I first met in 1975 in California at an ABC Board of Governors meeting. We had dinner together and soon realized that our pasts were very similar: we both grew up in Pittsburgh, both our parents had moved away from Pittsburgh, we both went to Taylor Alderdice School, and we both went to Staunton Military Academy—Bob being five years ahead of me. We also shared similar likes and dislikes on a number of things. What are the odds of being at a dinner with a complete stranger and finding that his background is just about identical to yours? When Bob was going back to Metromedia after the sale of WCVB, Bob wanted me to run the Metromedia TV stations, but for personal reasons I turned the job down. Hearst ended up buying WCVB-TV in 1984.
To me, Bob is the ultimate local television executive. He loves the business and somehow he found a way to do a tremendous amount of local programming and news that touched a strong nerve with his viewers. Everything he did was successful. He’s a very bright guy who has always wanted to do the right thing for the station and for the community. He’s feisty, competitive, honest, and fair, but he can be tough. If I was ever in a foxhole in the middle of a battle, I would want him in there with me. People said he was out of his mind to do the program Chronicle, but he proved them wrong. In television, no one has done it the way he has.”
I thought now that since WCVB was going to be a Metromedia station, maybe someone who knew his way around Metromedia might be a good candidate. I suddenly thought of Jim Coppersmith. Jim had been a general manager at WNAC in Boston and was now President of Hubbard Broadcasting. He was well liked, well respected and he was an ex-Metromedia guy. Jim had run WNEW in New York, and was one of the sales managers in New York and LA. He had a lot of real television experience and I thought he would be the ideal guy. He had a great sense of humor and was always very professional. He knew the Boston market and he knew Metromedia. I chose him as the GM for WCVB and it worked out very well. I am very happy that I am still great friends with Jim today.
Jim Coppersmith, President & GM of WCVB-TV (1982-1994), writes:
“Working with Bob Bennett on a daily basis was interesting, exciting, and an adventure in an amalgam of work, joy, and competitiveness like I have never seen before. There was always a two-way loyalty between us and there never was an ounce of phoniness. He gave you loyalty and he expected it back in the same full measure. He once said to me, ‘If I have to choose between loyalty and talent in someone I am hiring, I will go with loyalty every time.’ Bob has Bill Clinton’s charisma and Ronald Reagan’s ethics. His sense of humor is great and his ethics are impeccable. He is a Master Salesman, a gifted leader, and an executive par excellence. He has the rare ability of making a person feel that he or she is truly important to him and that is simply because everyone is important to him. It does not matter if you are the hall porter or the President of the United States. Everyone is looked in the eyes, listened to, appreciated, and recognized; he is very generous in that regard.
Bob is to local television what Bill Paley, David Sarnoff, and Leonard Goldenson were to Network Television and what Ted Turner is to cable television. When he handed over the reins of WCVB-TV to me in Boston, the station was broadcasting over fifty hours a week of local programming—news, sports, children’s shows, sitcoms, magazine shows, a made for television movie for the ABC Network, the Boston Marathon, After School Specials, legal shows, medical shows, and specials on every conceivable subject. We were rebels. We once preempted a World Series game to spend the night covering a hotly contested Boston Mayoral Race. We drove ABC crazy, but we always asked ourselves, What would Bob do?And we tried to do it. Many people have said that while I ran WCVB, I was always in Bob’s shadow. That was partly true because I chose to believe, as did many others, that he was my inspiration. He was and is my true friend and will always be my true friend. He did cast a very long and important shadow. He was a legend back then, and the success he made of WCVB cast his shadow out for miles. Bob spread a lot of sunshine.”
We soon realized that as the new General Manager, it was not going to be an easy job for him to run WCVB his way, since the old General Manager, me, was still around. I offered him whatever advice I could and he was a hands-on excellent station manager. As I think about it now, I was having my own set of problems at this time, dealing with the idea of adjusting to the fact that WCVB was no longer my baby. I still had control of it under my new title at Metromedia, but it was no longer day-to-day. I soon realized that I really loved running a television station more than running a group of television stations. From that standpoint, it was a bit difficult for me to accept. But I was very proud of what we had done at WCVB and to this day have never stopped talking about our accomplishments. WCVB was an unusual situation. We had the odds stacked up against us when we started and we achieved far in excess of what anyone of us had ever dreamed.
For the people who had been with WCVB and were now working for Metromedia, there was a lot of uncertainty and in some cases, bitterness. They had lost their station to a big entertainment media conglomerate and here I was, still sitting in there with them. Some thought the excitement we once knew was now gone. It took a while for that feeling to end and for a new camaraderie to be established at the station.
Around this time, Marjie and I bought a condominium in the Ritz Tower in Boston, right next to the Public Gardens. We loved it. It was within walking distance to just about everything and we moved in with great enthusiasm.
Now I had a new job, President of Metromedia Broadcasting Group.
Honorable Bruce Selya, a friend, writes:
“I first met Bob over thirty years ago when I was a practicing lawyer and he was at the zenith of his career, moving from WCVB to Metromedia. We had an immediate affinity because both of us were highly competitive, but not much for pomp and ceremony. Bob is the sort of fellow that in his leisure prefers jogging suits to more fashionable gear. We spent a good deal of time walking, talking, and critiquing current events back then. We also became doubles partners in tennis. Neither one of us was a very good player, but it didn’t take me too long to understand that Bob hated to lose at anything. Our most frequent opponents were two fellows our age who were much more proficient at tennis than we were. But they rarely beat us because Bob was so fiercely competitive and fearful of losing that we would eventually take over each match—I must admit, with some goading from me.
Our friendship continued when I became a Federal Judge in 1982. Bob was, at that time, particularly fascinated by a string of organized crime cases that I was called upon to handle. I could regale him for hours on end with stories of the Mafia and la Cosa Nostra, and he in turn would regale me with stories of show business. Bob was fascinated with a mobster by the name of Frank “Bobo” Marrapese. I believe that the most appreciated gift I ever gave him was a mug shot of Bobo, which he displayed in his office for several years. Bob was always a fascinating character to me in terms of the fact that he was like the lantern around which the moths circle. People from the entertainment world frequently came to our remote corner of Cape Cod, where my family and Bob’s family have summer places, to pay homage to Bob and his wife Marjie.
Bob was instrumental as a friend in helping to guide me through two very serious times in my life. The first was when I received a diagnosis that I had a series of progressive eye diseases that would eventually impair my vision to a very great extent. It’s difficult to imagine who among your friends you can bring yourself to talk to about such a critical lifecycle event as the threatened loss of vision. Though I have been blessed with many friends, I found that Bob was someone with whom I could discuss the subject frankly and honestly. Bob would not allow me to feel sorry for myself. His attitude was comprised of two components: first, that I should never forget how fortunate I had been to have had useful vision for long enough in my life to accomplish what I had accomplished, and secondly; as long as ways existed to defy or circumvent this impairment, that he was confident that I would have the will to find those ways. That was very good advice and strong counsel. I have found that although my vision did get as bad as was forecasted, perhaps even worse, I am still able to work productively, and I think my overall attitude is good. I do not feel the least bit sorry for myself. That is due in part to Bob and to other friends like him who have helped to keep me on the straight and narrow.
The second instance where Bob has had a profound influence on my life, and in this case, may have actually saved it, began one time when Bob and I were out for one of our usual walks near his home in Newport Beach. We were walking across a bridge and I mentioned to him that I was having mild gastrointestinal problems. He noted that I seemed to be breathing rather heavily and he didn’t like my pale color. He asked me if I had seen a doctor about the problem. I told him that I had not. He made me promise that before I left California, in fact immediately, I would call my doctor in Rhode Island and schedule an appointment for when I returned. When I arrived back in Rhode Island, I went to see my GI and he promptly called in a cardiologist. Within a few days, I was undergoing open-heart surgery. I have only Bob to thank for his perspicacity and refusal to take no for an answer. He made me make that phone call and I received immediate medical care, luckily before any cardiac event had occurred. Now, thirteen years later, I can honestly say that the walk with Bob was one of the most fortuitous events that occurred in my life.”