Like many young people then and now, I struggled a bit with the idea of what to do with my life. I knew that I wanted to go to college, of course, that was a given, but what to study was problematic. I say that in hindsight because at the time, the decision wasn’t all that difficult. I admired my father and his work as a minister. A lot of people admired him. So, I entered college with the idea that I would eventually follow his path and become a minister. In retrospect, I can see I made that decision partly out of desire and partly out of a sense of obligation or doing the right thing. Countless oldest sons have followed their father’s example and taken up the same line of work. Maybe I was doing the right thing; maybe I was doing the easy thing.
Regardless, I enrolled at Texas Lutheran College (now University) in Seguin. Seguin is the seat of Guadalupe County, about an hour’s drive from Austin. I lived on campus and was close enough that I could go home as needed or desired on weekends. I didn’t do that very often. Much of my motivation for going to TLC was to get away from home. I wanted to experience more independence, that is, dormitory life, so I opted not to go to the University of Texas. It was, and is, an incredibly fine institution. As you will see, much of my life later on would be shaped by its influence, but being a so-called townie held little appeal for me. Broadcasting had brought the world to me and enlarged my vision of what was possible. Fifty miles south of Austin wasn’t that far, but at least it was a start.
Similarly, pre-enrolling in seminary—I had to get a bachelor’s degree before I could formally attend—was another kind of start. It got me moving in a direction. Whether that would end up my final destination was uncertain. I was a Christian, of course, but whether I had a calling beyond devotion was still to be decided.
One of my anchors at TLC was again music. I sang in the choir. That brought me great joy and deepened my love of choral music as well as classical music. I majored in sociology and had a double major in history and Christianity. I also dabbled in radio. Seguin had one radio station, KWED 1580, down near the far right end of your radio dial. Stan McKenzie owned and operated the daytime-only station. He hired one, sometimes two, TLC students a year to work the weekends. I wanted one of those jobs, but for both my sophomore and junior years I didn’t make the cut. Still, I hung around hoping to learn a few things and to show my dedication.
My junior year, Willie Staats was one of those chosen. He recently retired as chairman of the LSU economics department and is a huge SEC football fan. The other guy was Don Mischer. He eventually went on to work for ABC, producing Barbara Walters’s specials and Howard Cosell’s late-night variety show, ironically named “Saturday Night Live,” and later the Oscars. I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad about falling short in those first two years. Radio people have a thing about voices, of course, and I was disappointed my junior year not to meet or exceed Stan McKenzie’s standards with what I was told was a lovely deep baritone. That year, I lost out to Larry Kramer, a guy whose basso profundo voice would have served him well in the Metropolitan Opera. It rattled rib cages and lampshades all over Seguin.
Finally, by my senior year, my perseverance paid off. I got the job, earning $1.05 an hour. At the beginning of the school year, my job consisted of showing up at the studio just before sunrise. I was shown what switches to throw and what dials to turn and what meters to monitor. Sounds more complicated than it was, but switching on a radio station gave me a thrill of power that’s difficult to explain. Other aspects were even harder for me to understand, but I did them out of rote memory. Most of the weekend programming was remote—church services, primarily—and I had to unplug and plug in various cables. As I said, I didn’t understand much of the technology, but I could follow relatively simple instructions. I sat there all alone in that studio from sunup to sundown, and it was like I was back in Everett. Instead of watching those guys at KRKO, I was one of those guys.
I got my first paid on-air experience at KWED doing station identifications, saying no more than “This is KWED in Seguin.” As far as I was concerned, I was relating Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Eventually, I got the opportunity to disc-jockey for three hours on Sunday afternoon. I went from switch boy to radio personality pretty darn quick and I was beyond thrilled. After I got word of my big chance, I told everyone on campus I knew—dorm mates, fraternity brothers, friends, classmates—to be sure to tune in the following Sunday.
I got to the station earlier than usual the day of my first show, Playhouse of Hits. It was scheduled to go on from one to four. I wanted to get some practice in. I’d worked the turntables before. All the commercials we played were on vinyl, so I was used to counting cuts and setting the levels on the potentiometers (or “pots”). Still I was going to be hosting, and I wanted to be sure that things went absolutely perfectly. All morning, while the church services played, I rehearsed. By the time one o’clock rolled around, my mouth was as dry as the Sonoran Desert and my heartbeat was presto. The theme or introduction music I chose was Percy Faith and his orchestra’s “Brazilian Sleigh Bells.” (If you don’t know who Percy Faith is, do a quick Google search for top hits for a few years in the early to mid 1960s and his name will be all over those lists.)
I cued up the record, hand steady, and got it perfect. The sound started immediately. I let a ringing cascade of notes loose for a full ten seconds. I lowered the pot, bringing down the volume. I piped open my microphone and I said, using my best golden-throated tones, “Good afternoon and welcome to the Playhouse of Shits.”
I felt my testicles retract and adrenaline rush through me. I recovered and kept up my patter. At the first commercial break, I knew what I had to do. Thankfully, my boss Stan McKenzie understood and he reassured me that something like that happened to everyone at one time or another—just usually not in the first ten seconds. Funny thing is, I remember those first ten seconds but very little of the remaining two hours and fifty minutes. I had a great group of friends and they didn’t give me too much grief. The next morning, I went to class and the snickers and pointing weren’t too bad—I heard “Playhouse of Shits” tossed at me and whispered in my ear the rest of the week. As tends to happen with things like this, some other campus mishap overtook mine in a week or two. I should make it clear that all the ribbing I took was of the good-natured, Lutheran variety.
Despite that faux pas (“faux pooh”?) I loved my time at TLC. Years later, in 2009, I was invited to sit on the board of regents of what became TLU, and the school holds a special place in my heart. I was too busy to ever attend a meeting in person until early 2018, and when I did, I was welcomed with open arms as a kind of prodigal son. I graduated in the class of 1962 before packing my bags and making another prodigal son move by heading to Rock Island, Illinois, to attend the Lutheran School of Theology, part of Augustana College, the same seminary my father had graduated from.
Unlike my father, I moved to the area of Illinois and Iowa at the start of the summer well before classes began. The Quad Cities consist of, ironically, five different municipalities. They are clustered on the east and west sides of the Mississippi in Illinois and Iowa. Rock Island is among the five. I’d worked my way through college, using monies I’d made doing a variety of jobs from the time I was thirteen—bagging groceries, operating a soda fountain, lifeguarding, laboring for a carpenter, along with my radio DJing. I decided that I needed a good summer job to help pay for my seminary tuition. I was fortunate to get a job at radio station KROS in Clinton, Iowa, about thirty-five miles north of the Quad Cities. My experience at KWED ultimately ended up serving me well.
I was hired on for the summer to serve as an announcer at this nice little local radio station that signed on the airwaves at sunup and signed off at midnight. I took up residence on the second floor of the Clinton YMCA, just across the street from the studio. For $8.50 a week, I got a tiny room, a single cot, and a mini-refrigerator. In there I kept cans of Spam, jars of peanut butter and jelly, and Ritz crackers. From June to the end of August I kept myself fed on sandwiches and little else. Given my cramped quarters and the small table I sat at, and the even smaller chair I sat on, I felt a bit like one of the giants that Lemuel Gulliver encountered in Brobdingnag.
I wasn’t full of myself, but my chest definitely expanded a bit. I was working full-time. I was away from home. I was no longer living in a dormitory, where most of my needs were taken care of by others. I was working in radio. Sure, I played a minor role in a minor-minor market, but I was learning about station operations and engineering and getting a few minutes of airtime as well as doing station identifications and the like. You would have thought that my stroll across the street to the F. W. Woolworth building and my climb up to the second floor of that structure was the same as me crossing Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to get to Rockefeller Center. This was the excitement I’d been looking for. I worked the four-to-midnight shift, and as I left the studio each night, the quiet, darkened streets of downtown Clinton smelled of promise.
I knew that my time at KROS would end in August, so I kept applying for other radio jobs in and around the Quad Cities. Even though I was going to start seminary for the fall term, I still wanted, and needed, to work. With five small cities, each with its own radio stations, my chances seemed good. Just before Labor Day, the station manager at WOC in Davenport, Iowa, a man named Bob Gifford, called to invite me down for a lunch interview. Over soup and sandwiches Bob told me he wanted to hire me to work the nine-to-midnight shift as a disc jockey. Without thinking much, and not negotiating terms at all, I accepted. I don’t recall my exact wages but they weren’t much, probably no more than fifty dollars a week. That wasn’t nearly enough to put a dent in my expenses. In order to make up for any shortfall, I got a second job, working in the kitchen at the theological school. I’d get home from DJing music to make out by, grab a few hours of sleep, get up before sunup to get to the cafeteria’s kitchen, and then hustle off to my eight o’clock class in classical Greek.
By mid-September 1962, one thing had emerged from the fog of my sleep deprivation and the steam rising from the industrial sinks: I didn’t have the calling that it took to complete theology school. The siren song of disc jockeying was an alluring one, but my decision to leave seminary was based on an honest realization that I really didn’t feel a true call to be of service in the way my father had. The discussion with my parents about my decision was, all things considered, easy. My father understood that I couldn’t lead a congregation if I had doubts about my ability or my faith. I knew that it hurt him to know the latter. He was unshakable in his beliefs and I wasn’t. He faced that with other congregants and he never took anyone’s crisis in faith as a sign of any failing on his part. He took his role seriously but knew that matters of faith and fidelity to that faith were personal choices. He could lead but he couldn’t coerce.
For my part, I felt as if I was letting him down, but I wasn’t racked with guilt, mostly because of how he handled my revelation. I’m firmly convinced that even if my life hadn’t turned out the way it did, my father would have still supported me and my choice. He was that wonderful, and that wise, a man. I had made a commitment to attend seminary for a year and I honored that, keeping both of my jobs as well.
As I pulled out of Rock Island in the spring of 1963, I left one other thing behind besides a potential career—my “La.”
Let me explain.
The evening before I went on air at WOC in Davenport, Bob Gifford and I had a brief meeting.
“LaVerne.” He looked as if he’d just bitten into something disagreeable.
He went on, “Take a seat.”
I did.
“LaVerne,” he said again, drawing my name out. A look that was half smile, half grimace spread across his face. He shook his head slowly.
I feared the worst.
“I just don’t see it. I don’t hear it.”
He looked me square in the eye and said, “I can’t put you on the air.”
My heart fell and my mind raced.
An eternity lapsed.
“ ‘LaVerne’ just won’t cut it. You go on tonight as Verne. You understand?”
I nodded and left the room breathing easy for the first time in minutes.
I’ve been Verne ever since.
I suppose I’ve put this off long enough. As much as I wondered why I was burdened with such a mouthful of a moniker as Merton LaVerne, I felt doubly burdened by the fact that my parents named my siblings David, Dan, Tom, and Sharon. I’ve consciously not referenced them by their names before waiting for this moment when my name was the equal of theirs. While I’m at it, I also recognized that I should (and do) count my blessings.
Despite my name change, my mother continued to call me LaVerne for the rest of her life. Both my parents loved the name and I loved them for understanding what I’d done and for keeping true to what they felt. Best of both worlds.
ON MY RETURN TO AUSTIN, I moved back in with the family. I didn’t feel great about that but necessity won out. Even before I left Rock Island, I’d started searching for job opportunities. I wrote to the program director at KTBC in Austin and asked for a summer job. I was hired as an FM disc jockey as a replacement for regulars out on vacation. I wasn’t earning enough to afford a place of my own. Toward the end of that summer, the veteran sports director for the TV station, Dan Love, decided to move on. I saw my opportunity and decided to toss my hat in the ring. I loved sports, and though I hadn’t covered it in any of my previous radio jobs, I thought I could manage it. With nothing to lose, I went to the office of the station’s program director, Cactus Pryor, and offered up my services. Cactus looked me over and said, “We hired you for the summer. Aren’t you going back to school?”
Once I cleared that matter up he said he was willing to see what I could do. I was given two hours to prepare a three-minute sports segment. I would then have to perform that live in front of Cactus and the station’s president J. C. Kellam. I went after that task like my life depended on it. At the appointed time, I sat in the studio with those two men in a viewing room one floor above and delivered the best rendition of the copy I’d written to a single camera. I imagined them as they sat there stone-faced. I nodded and thanked them for the opportunity and went back to doing my regular job, which that day meant running the board for other on-air talent.
Toward the end of my shift, I got word that Cactus wanted to speak with me. He told me that I’d done well—real well considering it was a first effort. Not quite good enough, though. They had another guy in mind and wound up hiring him to do the weekly TV broadcasts. Cactus offered me the weekend shift. I took it. Gladly. Between that and them retaining me to continue to do a five-to-nine shift as a disc jockey, I was going to earn a living wage.
Barely.
Come March 1964, I was hired to do the sports director job full-time. The other fellow hadn’t worked out. I was going to earn a living wage.
Barely.
That’s how, at the age of twenty-three, I was at the station on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. I was working the control board at KTBC-AM-FM-TV in Austin, the radio-television station owned by Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird. The station was officially in Mrs. Johnson’s name, but the vice president had a big impact there and was pretty hands-on, from what I remember.
I had a number of roles at the station: I was the weekend sportscaster on television, and management also had me working as a disc jockey (“Catch The Verne Lundquist Show from five to nine P.M.!”). I also occasionally ran the radio board. On that particular afternoon I was running the control board for our radio news block, making sure the sound levels were adjusted accordingly and the microphones were on. I remember we were airing the agricultural report, which was on tape, when I got a phone call from my boss’s daughter, Nita Louise Kellam, who was also a high school classmate of mine. She was calling to tell me that her father had given me the night off and that they were going to let somebody take my place as the DJ that night so I could be her escort to go hear President Kennedy speak. We weren’t dating; it was simply a chance to go hear President Kennedy speak. As I was on the phone with Nita Louise talking about our plans that night, Hal Nelson, who was one of our newsmen, came barging into the control room. It was shortly after 12:30 P.M.
“Put me on the air immediately—the president has been shot!” shouted Hal.
I did as I was told. I was twenty-three years old.
The rest of the day became one of the most memorable events of my life. The station was located in a five-story building in Austin at Tenth Street and Brazos Street, and within thirty minutes, we had Secret Service agents combing the building. I saw them at every elevator door on every floor, because at the time, no one knew if this was some sort of coup. In the newsroom, on the second floor of the building, we switched to CBS News. I was watching Walter Cronkite when he took his glasses off with a tear in his eye and announced, at 1:38 P.M. Central Time, that the president had been declared dead.
We were all pressed into service that day in some way, and here I was, just a disc jockey and a weekend sports anchor. But I went back into the newsroom and said, “Is there any way I can help?” KTBC was a CBS affiliate, and CBS Television was flying in a secondary White House crew that had not been traveling with President Kennedy in Dallas. The correspondent they sent was a man named David Schoumacher, who had a photographer and an audio guy with him. I was assigned as their driver that night. The four of us got into the car and we drove to Johnson City.
I remember we didn’t leave Austin till 7:30 P.M. or so. The drive to Johnson City was about sixty miles. What they were searching for was backup material, because who knew how long Cronkite would be on the air? We got to Johnson City around 9 P.M. and all of us were obviously in a state of shock. Schoumacher and his group had a list of contacts they wanted to find. There were people who were high school classmates of Vice President Johnson that we contacted, but the one I really remember was A. W. Moursund, who served two terms in the Texas legislature and was a member of Johnson’s inner circle. We were in his home for an hour. People were in mourning, but Schoumacher and his staff were very gracious and accommodating. We were welcomed by strangers and there would be coffee or iced tea waiting for us. It took time to set up the camera gear and sometimes it felt like an eternity. Then Schoumacher sat down across from LBJ’s people and interviewed them. I listened very carefully to how he went about asking the questions and how the conversations would evolve. The questions were intended to elicit some sense of the character of LBJ, what he had been like when he lived in Johnson City, and these were people who had grown up with him. The purpose of the trip was to flesh out who this guy was and to do so through the words of people who knew him well. Back then, we did not know our vice presidents the way we do today. Keep in mind these were primitive days of television: there were no satellites, no color television. We spent the night traveling from home to home, and David would interview anybody and everybody who could tell him anecdotes or background stories on the man who was suddenly the president of the United States.
Here I was at the time, a twenty-three-year-old sports anchor and part-time disc jockey. To say that I did on-the-ground reporting would overstate my role. I was a chauffeur—and willing to do it. We drove back to Austin around 4 A.M. and I took the CBS newsmen back to their hotel, which was within a block of our TV station.
It was my first foray into a broadcast with national reach.
THE REST, AS THEY SAY, took forever.
Not quite forever, but at times it sure felt as if I would never move up in the world of broadcasting.
I enjoyed being around Cactus. He was a regional legend as a comic. I got a chance to go to one of the corporate gigs he did to perform at a national sales meeting. Before the main dinner, they held a cocktail reception hour. Cactus attended that in the guise of a Danish diplomat—he was a wonderful mimic and his accent could have fooled anyone. He circulated among the attendees and gathered a few facts about those people. Later, as the entertainment for the evening, he got up and spoke. Not dropping his faux persona, he told jokes and worked in facts about those he’d “interviewed” earlier. I laughed along with the rest of them. I’ve done my fair share of personal appearances since then, and I love to regale an audience, but my shtick pales in comparison to Cactus’s.
I liked being in Austin but it was a small market. I enjoyed getting to know the coaches of the various UT teams and spending time at that beautiful campus, going out into the field to shoot my own film, covering high school football in all its Texas Friday night lights glory. To this day, I’m still amazed by the size of those crowds and the quality of the stadiums. While in high school, I was invited by Lou Maysel, the sports editor at the Austin American-Statesman, to assist him at the sports desk on those Friday nights. I manned a phone and took calls from coaches or someone else affiliated with the high school football team. They’d let me know the scores and I’d write up a brief summary of the Hutto Hippos beating the Taylor Ducks 17–14 in a real barnburner decided by a last-minute field goal that squeezed just inside the right upright. That experience helped hone my writing skills and fired my imagination.
But my main beat was the UT men’s teams. Darrell Royal was the football coach then, and I would immediately idolize the man. At first I wasn’t allowed much access to him. He did a Thursday night show for us during the season, but Cactus handled that on-air assignment. Instead I was on baseball. One of the first baseball interviews I did was with head coach Bibb Falk. Maybe Bibb should have worn a bib. He was a tobacco-chomping, expectorating machine. He looked and spoke as if he hadn’t woken up on the wrong side of the bed, but with the bed on top of him and with a large man jumping on it. I was still a young pup, and I decided to offer up an easy question to lubricate the process.
“Coach Falk, what do you think of your team’s prospects for this year?”
Bibb Falk didn’t bat an eye. He shifted his chaw from one cheek to another. Looking out from the dugout to some distant point beyond the outfield fence he said, “I’ll tell you one thing, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”
That didn’t make it on-air.
I was undeterred by that early stumble and kept my nose to the grindstone. I had a long-term relationship with UT that I cherished then and now. It went all the way back to when I was in seventh and eighth grade. I spent home football game Saturdays walking up and down the steep steps of Memorial Stadium lugging a tray of sodas while working concessions. I’ll always associate Longhorn football and the fervid nature of its fans with the sensation of a crowd’s roar working its way up from my sneakered feet to my spine. Those lovely afternoons were workdays, but they felt more like play days for me, adventures. I’d cast a glance at the field now and then, and the green grass against that backdrop of mostly white shirts was stark and beautiful. The 1952 season, the Longhorns came out of the gate strong, but after going 2-0, back-to-back losses to Notre Dame and Oklahoma made things look bleak as the team dropped out of the national rankings entirely. That Notre Dame game was the first college football game I saw in person. The 14–3 loss to the Fighting Irish reduced the raucous throng to a silent procession filing out of the stadium. Fortunately the 49–20 shellacking they suffered the following week against hated Oklahoma took place in Dallas and so I wasn’t there to witness it. Fans always took losses hard, and I remember someone at school muttering that week that the bronze statue of Democracy atop the north end of the stadium had leaked a few tears. Can’t say I blamed her. The team recovered, winning its next seven, including a shutout of Tennessee in the Cotton Bowl. They wound up ranked tenth in the nation. Good but not great.
By the time I came on board at KTBC in the summer of 1963, UT football fans were about to celebrate a national championship—their first. That 1963 team went undefeated and capped the season with a titanic matchup of number one (Texas) versus number two (Navy) in the Cotton Bowl. I have to admit that the sentimental side of me wouldn’t let me have ill feelings toward Navy. After all, the Cotton Bowl in Dallas that year was held a few weeks after President Kennedy, a naval veteran himself, had been shot in that same city. The games go on, as they should, but at least in my mind, some of the joy of the 28–6 victory over Roger Staubach and the rest of the Midshipmen diminished a touch.
Later on, Roger and I would have a long association; eventually the two of us talked about that game. I’d watched it on TV with the great Lindsey Nelson doing the play-by-play. I can’t remember the name of the fellow who did the pregame show, but he had both coaches on before kickoff. Navy’s Wayne Hardin got the first question and he rambled on and on, clearly relishing having a national TV audience. The poor interviewer kept looking into the camera and back at Coach Hardin. Darrell Royal was in the shot also, and he stood there politely, though his arms-folded posture suggested he wanted no part of the deal. When he was asked for his comment, instead of addressing his remarks to the man with the microphone, he faced the camera head-on and said, “We’re ready!” He trotted out of shot and I truly appreciated his brevity.
Roger Staubach wasn’t crushed by that defeat and the loss of a possible national championship. He felt that Texas was the better team and deserved its victory. He was more disappointed by an earlier loss that season to SMU. He felt the Midshipmen had underperformed against an inferior opponent. He could accept losing, but a loss resulting from underpreparedness was unacceptable. I’m sure that many players who haven’t attended a military academy feel the same way. Knowing Roger, and seeing how he prepared and performed later on, I think that there is a special flavor of work ethic that military guys cook up. They seem a breed apart, imbued with an ethical sense of duty that I can relate to.
Darrell Royal was cut from the same cloth. As much as I admired him instantly, he gave me a reason not to very early in my career at KTBC. One evening, three of his players went to the Villa Capri hotel in Austin. That hotel, now closed, looms large in UT football lore. It was the site of a weekly postgame gathering for the media, fans, and staff. Somehow these three guys got it into their drunken minds that it would be fun to go to the Villa Capri and run along the hallway knocking on doors well into the night. One poor hotel guest opened up his door and got smashed in the face with a punch or punches and was fairly seriously injured. The players were arrested and charged with assault. The story was headline news.
The day after the incident, I was instructed to run the story at the top of the broadcast. I did what I was told to do. After that six o’clock show, I went home. I was living with my family then. The phone rang and my mother picked it up and told me the call was for me. I got on the line and a woman asked me if I was Verne Lundquist. I replied affirmatively.
“Hold on, please. Coach would like to speak with you.”
What followed was Darrell Royal engaging in a five-minute harangue in which my suitability as a journalist was questioned. I also came under attack for undermining the coach’s program, sullying its reputation, and rumormongering. I may have even been accused of anti-American activities and communist leanings. I was still very much a young pup in the business but I wasn’t going to back down, especially after Coach Royal said that the story wasn’t newsworthy. I told him that I disagreed strongly. I did. That kind of assault may not have led the news if it were Joe Schmoe who’d done the attacking, but these were three UT Longhorns. If you were in a prominent position in that town, you were going to get treated a bit different from so-called nobodies. That’s just how it was. If you wanted the fame and the glory and the notoriety, you had to accept some of the downside of that.
A slammed phone was the only reply I received.
Fast-forward to the off-season, following that Cotton Bowl victory. The three alleged assaulters had a pretrial hearing of some sort. We dutifully reported on that. The show ended; I went back home. The phone rang. Mother answered. I got on the line when informed that the call was for me. The same woman’s voice that I vaguely recognized from before. Coach Royal spoke, his tone even. He told me that he’d been wrong the first time we’d spoken. He owed me an apology and he made good on that debt. I don’t think it was winning the national championship that softened him. He was a good man at heart and it was inevitable that his sensible and caring nature would even poke its head up through the cracked earth of a stressful incident and season. I thanked him and in later years developed a nice friendship with him. In fact, he would eventually become one of the dozens and dozens of broadcast partners I’d have.
The Longhorns entered the 1964 season ranked number four in the nation. Ole Miss earned the top honors but by week one they’d dropped out of the polls and Texas had climbed to number one. Then came a heartbreaking 14–13 loss in a rivalry game that had national championship repercussions. Those border war games are always intriguing. Though Texas dominated the series between the two, the interstate rivalry gives it an added dimension. Arkansas was the only team outside of the state of Texas in the Southwest Conference. They used that outsider status to their advantage as a motivational tool. Texas was uppity. Arkansas got no respect.
The 1964 game was a classic. Led by head coach Frank Broyles, the Razorbacks beat the Longhorns in Austin. Arkansas fans remember Ken Hatfield’s long punt returns. I was in the press box for them, and like a lot of Texas fans, I remember a two-point conversion failure that was the difference in the 14–13 game. Many say that victory was the turning point in Arkansas’s football program. I don’t know about that, but it still boggles my mind that following that epic win, Arkansas did not allow another point the remainder of the season—five straight shutouts! Under their brilliant coach, Frank Broyles, Arkansas finished the regular season undefeated. So did Alabama, thanks to the exploits of its quarterback Joe Namath. Texas rebounded from that loss to the Razorbacks and faced Alabama in the Orange Bowl. Most fans remember that game because of Tommy Nobis’s stop of a Joe Namath fourth-and-inches run near the goal line with the team holding on to a 21–17 lead. Some Texas fans say, and I agree, that that tackle was the greatest in the history of the Texas program. Others will debate that, and that’s part of the fun of being a fan. I also know this: sports fans love to have these kinds of arguments and make these kinds of proclamations. They also love trivia. Can you guess two prominent figures in Dallas Cowboys history who were on that Arkansas squad? Future owner Jerry Jones and future coach Jimmy Johnson.
That being the case, the 1964 season was a veritable feeding frenzy. With its loss, Alabama was no longer undefeated. Arkansas went on to win the Cotton Bowl 10–7 over Nebraska to stay undefeated. The final polls were a jumble. The Associated Press named Alabama number one based on its regular season results. The Football Writers Association of America, voting after the bowl games, gave their Grantland Rice Trophy to Arkansas. The National Football Foundation named a 9–1 Notre Dame team, which did not allow its teams to participate in bowl games from 1925 to 1968, its number one selection. Pick your poison, I suppose. For college football fans, this scenario will sound all too familiar and like too much fun.
For me, and for Texas Longhorn football, even better days were ahead, including back-to-back national championships and the kind of national notoriety every program longs for. Those were great times to be on the campus and covering those great teams.
Not even driving to work that awful day in 1966 and hearing gunshots ring out as Charles Whitman fired from atop the Main Building tower on campus could diminish my appreciation for what the UT offered.
But I had my ambitions beyond Austin. Some of my desire to move on to a bigger stage had to do with an experience I had in the summer of 1964. This was shortly before I got the full-time sports director job. Three former college roommates and I planned a road trip out east. J. C. Kellam, the general manager of the station, was okay with the trip. He even offered to make some calls to set us up for a few fun stops. I was earning enough money to afford a flashy white Chevrolet convertible with a red leather interior. We headed out of Austin with a plan to make a large loop taking us as far north as Niagara Falls.
One of our early stops, on June 21, 1964, was in Meridian, Mississippi. That same night, three young men who were helping the cause of civil rights and who had traveled south during what became known as the Freedom Summer were abducted. They were kidnapped and murdered after leaving Meridian to speak to congregants in nearby Longdale whose church had been burned. Three days after we pulled out of Meridian, the bodies were discovered in an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi. When we heard radio reports of their murders we grew somber. Still, we recognized how fortunate we were to have the opportunity we did, to enjoy the kind of freedom denied to so many others.
Because LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson owned the station, we were told we’d be given a private tour of the White House. LBJ’s press secretary, a former UT student and KTBC radio guy, Bill Moyers, met us outside the West Wing to apologize. Neither the president nor he was going to be able to spend any real time with us. Instead, he turned us over to LBJ’s trusted aide, Walter Jenkins. That same day, we toured FBI headquarters. J. Edgar Hoover still reigned over the office, but his number two man, Cartha Libby, led us around the facility. The real highlight of all of this was a complete surprise. I was given a number to call at CBS in New York City. I found a pay phone and dialed the number. At first I thought that the traffic noise and the general hubbub that is the streets of Manhattan were playing tricks with me. The female voice on the end of the line said, “Walter Cronkite’s office, how may I help you?”
Well, you can start by picking my jaw up from the sidewalk.
Once I identified myself, she told me that he was expecting my call. A moment later that familiar voice nestled in my ear.
A few hours later, we all stood and watched as he strode out of his office, got his makeup done, and then sat behind his desk. An enormous black-and-white camera was wheeled out in front of him. We watched as he intoned, “And good evening, I’m Walter Cronkite.”
The lead that evening was the story out of Meridian, Mississippi.
That trip pushed me once again to set my sights to bigger horizons. Hoping to make a real name for myself, I twice auditioned for a job at WFAA in Dallas, the ABC affiliate there. Both times I didn’t get it. I was pleased that for the first time in my career, in 1966, someone came calling to offer me a job. WOAI, the NBC affiliate in San Antonio was looking for a newsman, someone to anchor the six and ten shows. I would also have to cohost an afternoon show called, somewhat oddly, The Early Evening Report. I looked forward to the challenge of making the transition from sports to hard news. It was also better money. Each year I’d been at KTBC I’d gotten $25 per month raises, but I knew that wasn’t enough. I wasn’t a great negotiator and had no agent, so I accepted what I was given. But at age twenty-six I had a kind of tunnel vision, imagining a parade of $25 a month raises until I was in my fifties.
In 1966, when I walked in to my boss’s office to let him know that I was leaving for San Antonio, he nodded and asked me, “What are they paying you?”
“Seven hundred and fifty a month.”
He pursed his lips and said blandly, “You’re making the right move. No future in this business for a four-eyed sportscaster.”
Yikes. That was my going-away party.
The highlight of my time in San Antonio, in retrospect, was interviewing a Texas state congressman by the name of George Herbert Walker Bush. The lowlights? Well, almost all the rest of it. WOAI was my first real exposure to the “if it bleeds it leads” style of reporting. Many evenings and nights we led with a story of a horrific car crash, complete with images from the scene. I didn’t have the heart for it. Instead of images of higher ratings and burgeoning advertising dollars, my mind filled with visions of the broken bodies of the victims, their shattered families, hospital rooms, and tearful scenes at funeral parlors. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I can get sentimental on occasion. That’s true. Tears will well up in my eyes at the first sign of emotion. That was the case to a lesser extent when I was a younger man, but I’ve always had that vulnerability. I recognized even then that I ran the risk of hardening my heart. If that was the price of doing hard news instead of sports in order to advance my career, well, then that was a price I wasn’t willing to pay.
Sure, I wanted to tell stories, but I always hoped that they would uplift people, not make them fearful or sad.
After a while, I thought if we led with one more car crash and horrific images from the scene, I was going to have to get out of there. And I did, eleven months into a twelve-month contract. I had learned a lot at WOAI about video production and writing and delivery. I was grateful for the opportunity to learn what I didn’t want to do as well. I suppose that it was a case of being careful what you wish for but I also learned that you had to be true to yourself and who you are. That’s been one of the guiding principles of my professional career. If you tried to fake it; if you tried to create a false image of who you weren’t, then you were doomed to eventual failure if not as a television personality but certainly then as a person. I didn’t know it then but later on I began to see that my ethos would serve me well at times and hold me back at others.
I was going to have to learn to be okay with that.