KMBC-TV, then and now

UPDATE: After I wrote this, a reader sent footage of Larry Moore getting "Baba Booey'd" during Tuesday's live coverage.

I am one of a breed that's not just dying, it's extinct: television critics who educated themselves in broadcast museums. While I was working off my student loans in downtown Chicago in the mid-1990s, I considered myself very fortunate because I could walk five minutes in my shirtsleeves through a pedway from the office where I worked to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, which had a then seemingly priceless repository of old TV shows carefully preserved on master tape. Now, of course, anyone with the slightlest interest in watching Huntley-Brinkley or Steverino in his prime or "The Ben Stiller Show" or just about anything else that mattered on TV (and a lot that didn't) can sample these old chestnuts online until the Rapture.

About a year ago, KMBC took out a space on YouTube which it uses to repurpose its content for people who would rather not use KMBC's website. (Smart idea! But I thought of it first.) The bonus is that every now and then KMBC drags an old newscast out of the vault and slaps it up on YouTube. Here's one from 1977 and, even though I didn't live here, it stirred up a wonderful childhood memory which I'll explain in a moment.

Notice that Larry Moore had a bit of the Cronkite "voice of God" back then. Also, it's my understanding that when weather conditions at the airport made landings difficult, NewsChopper 9 used to touch down right on Larry's hair.

Of course, the amusing portion of this clip is Don Fortune's sports report, where he passes along the news (no video, just a graphic) that the Kansas City Royals finally broke their streak ... their winning streak, of 16 games. The losing pitcher, who had been going for his ninth win in a row, was Marty Pattin. I told Tom Krewson, who passed the clip on to me, that I had a great Marty Pattin story and he said I should read Jim Bouton's memoir Ball Four, because Bouton and Pattin played together on the one-year Seattle Pilots club in 1969.

But my story has nothing to do with knuckleballs or booze. In the summer after the sixth grade, I was in an all-out race with two of my sixth-grade classmates to see who could collect the 1977 Topps baseball card set first. None of us could buy the whole set at once, and what was the point? To this day, I don't get why people buy the whole set. Anyway, thanks to a boost in my lawn-mowing income and some shrewd trades, I pulled into the lead. Eventually I was down to just a single card (#658) standing between me and the full Topps 1977 set: Marty Pattin.

I was neck and neck with Barry Howland, who lived in a house just down the alley from my trailer park and who got the extra cable TV channels before we did, one of which was from Atlanta and seemed to show a lot of Braves games. Barry was in the lead, then I was in the lead, but he only had a handful of cards to collect. Meanwhile up in the Heights was another schoolmate, a tomboy named Terry Visser, and she was lagging behind us. And then one day she told me she had just collected an extra Marty Pattin card. I was thrilled. Immediately I offered her my bag of extra cards, more than 300 of them, which would surely bring her to parity with Barry and allow her to finish second. Faster than you can say Malcolm Gladwell she accepted, and I had a complete set, which I keep in a storage container to this day.

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So that was the "then." Here's the "now." There was a tremendous fire at a petroleum plant in Kansas City, Kansas, this week, on the same night that spectacular storms were blowing through. I happened to step out of work at 9 p.m. and took this picture of the strange convergence above downtown KC, rain clouds, sunset and a million gallons of unleaded:

The next day, I got this brag from the above-mentioned TV station:

Kansas City viewers once again make KMBC 9 News their #1 choice for weather and breaking news coverage. As severe weather pounded the metro and lightning sparked a massive fuel tank fire Tuesday night, more people watched KMBC 9 News. Between 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., KMBC averaged a 9.0/14, out-delivering the closest competitor by 17%. KMBC 9 News ranked #1 at 10:00 p.m. with an 11.3/18, beating its closest competitor by 40%. Meteorologist Bryan Busby and the KMBC 9 News team were on the air all evening to bring the metro the most extensive coverage of severe weather. That storm system produced lightning, sparking a fire at the Magellan Pipeline in Kansas City, KS. KMBC brought viewers extensive coverage with Johnny Rowlands and News Chopper 9 in the air and KMBC 9 News crews on the ground.

Comments

[Mark Roberts]

What a trip! The all-caps graphics ... the hair ... film ... the hair ... swine flu .. the hair! Yet they spent more time on stories then and sound bites actually contained complete paragraphs. Progress?

[Vandelay]

Great clip, thanks Mr. Krewson! Also note that a different clip from the same 1977 newscast features weather star (and every KC schoolboy's dream) Cheryl Jones:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjIZGOUnfmU

The camera clearly loves her, as evidenced by some unusually closeup shots of her face.

[Jeffrey]

And on the very same day of the fire, Don Fortune made a one-day return to the KC airwaves, coming out of retirement to fill in for Kevin Kietzman at WHB.

(I know another columnist at our newspaper wasn't too thrilled about that, but having your old rivals on to guest host is a common practice in other markets -- Chicago comes to mind. --AB)

[Dave]

Your article finally closed an incident in my youth, which wasn't anything I'd thought about in 40 years: The Ed Bouchee baseball card. (look it up on Google)

The video shows Don Fortune and Larry Moore with NO graphics. Is that BAD?

I would really love to have - as an option - a John Cameron Swayze FIFTEEN MINUTE NETWORK NEWS. If any cable network decides to offer AL-JAZEERA ENGLISH, the nets are done...

(Dave, even I would call that wishful thinking ... but it would be nice if they carried AJE.--AB)

[Andy]

> If any cable network decides to offer AL-JAZEERA ENGLISH, the nets are done...

I'll assume this was meant as hyperbole, but I have to wonder if Dave has actually watched AJE. (You can stream it online... I watch it through Livestation.) Maybe you'll find the editorial content more to your liking, but I can assure you they have whiz-bang graphics, enormous video walls, and self-aggrandizing promos on that channel, much like the others.