A Very OK Podcast
Episode 1: “Women In Broadcasting”
March 16, 2021
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to the reboot of A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, and with me is Dr. Bob Blackburn, my predecessor and the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society for 20 years and with the agency for 41 years in total. How are you today?
Dr. Bob Blackburn: I’m doing great, and I love life without having to set an alarm clock every morning.
Thompson: I suppose that’s something we can all aspire to at some point. I’ve got a little bit of time before I get to that period in my life. But we’ve been so thankful for your years of service here to the agency, and I’ve been on the job for a little over two months now and am enjoying it and very, very honored to carry in the footsteps of the legacy that you’ve left here.
Blackburn: Well, thank you. I think one thing you’ll find, Trait, with every passing day, and it really is a daily process, is that you have the chance to learn so much in this job. One, because you meet different people. Like the day you had lunch with someone from the tourism department, learning more about marketing, then you work with legislators from their district, you’re learning about their communities. This is probably one of the great jobs to learn about our community, about what makes it tick, the different sides of all issues. To me, it’s just a gratifying job, of course, full of pressure and lots of tough decisions, as you already know. But in terms of the learning process, this provides an opportunity that just makes life fun.
Thompson: Yeah, I had a scare the other day because I showed up to work and, you know, we have to badge in at the back door before the back door opens for us. And the badge reader said access denied. And I thought, oh man, it’s already went bad on me. I got fired, and I didn’t even know it.
(laughter)
Thompson: But it’s been a great, it’s been a great couple of months so far, and I’m really happy to be here. And one of the things that came about, because I started on January 1, and you didn’t retire until the end of January, and we had a great time together because we had the opportunity to travel together to many of our historic sites across the state. So we got a lot of windshield time where we just had the opportunity to talk about history, and to talk about your experience in the agency, and many of the people that you’ve met over the years. And we even had fun talking about movies and television shows. And I remember one time saying, hey, you know, the conversation that we just had, that’s a podcast, and we should do this together. And thankfully, when I brought up the idea to you, you didn’t run away screaming, but you said, yeah, let’s do that. So here we sit, A Very OK Podcast hosted by Bob and Trait. And we’re going to be covering some wonderful topics in Oklahoma history, and I’m really excited about it. And one of the interesting things about this, in all of our conversations that I learned, is you are hosting a podcast now, but you’ve actually never listened to a podcast.
Blackburn: Right, Trait, I don’t know if you remember the conversation, but we were talking, we got talking about movies, and I have a great brother-in-law who is one of my best friends before he passed away. And one day he made the comment, he said, “Without movies and popular culture, we baby boomers would have nothing to talk about.” But anyway, you and I tended, we started comparing notes on movies, and when you made that comment, I said, well, I’ve never seen or listened to a podcast, but very open to that. And you know, you’re much more in tune with social media and the new, you know, ways of communicating. Of course, I come from the days of writing press releases, and doing speeches, and the books that I’ve done, but there’s so much more that can be done. And I admire the way you’re exploring all of those options and very pleased to come in and be part of this podcast.
Thompson: Well, I’m excited about what we have here. And just for our listeners out there, we are going to, right now, our plan is to release one episode a month of this podcast, and we don’t know what we’re going to be talking about all through the months yet. We’re going to figure that out as we go. And really, it’s going to be what are we interested in and what are those things, those aspects of Oklahoma history that we want to explore that are maybe underexplored? Or who are those people in events that maybe didn’t get as much attention in other places? Or maybe we’ll talk about things that everybody knows about, but we’ll add a little bit of a spin to that as well. And this is going to be a great time for us to talk about one of, you and I, it’s our favorite topics, which is Oklahoma history. And I’m very excited about that. This is March. It is Women’s History Month. This first podcast we are releasing is on women and broadcasting. We have had quite a few women in Oklahoma history who have been pioneers in the broadcasting industry, and we thought this would be a great way to highlight some of them. But before we jump into that particular conversation, I thought it would be great to hear you talk a little bit about the television industry in Oklahoma, how it developed a little bit, and then we can work our way forward.
Blackburn: Right. Really, to set the stage for our conversation today about women bursting onto the scene and really breaking the glass ceiling in the broadcast industry, you have to realize that television goes back to 1949 in Oklahoma. Stations in both Oklahoma City and Tulsa opened that year. In Tulsa, the money was put up by the Skelly organization, Mr. Skelly, an oilman. And in Oklahoma City, E. K. Gaylord, who is the publisher of The Oklahoman, The Oklahoma City Times, and Farmer Stockman and had WKY Radio by the late 1920s. And so he got in early. And one reason WKY was the official designation is that he got in before they split up the licenses W=east of the Mississippi in K=west of the Mississippi. So every other station starts with a K—KOCO, KWTV, KOTV. But here it was WKY. And for that reason, WKY had a head start because FCC was just inundated with applications. And so once they had the flood, they said they shut it down. And so for the first five years, in Oklahoma City in particular, WKY had the entire market. It was a monopoly. The only broadcast you could get, if you owned a television station, was WKY. And of course, they had the money behind the organization. Mr. Gaylord was a pioneer and was an innovator. So, basically, they had all the toys. So if there was a new color camera by RCA, as it was in 1954, he bought it—the first color camera west of the Mississippi River. And they brought in the best talent. A good example of that is Walter Cronkite’s first job in broadcast was at WKY Radio, and others got their, McGee, who later was an anchor on NBC, started at WKY, and they had such a strong program. And when I was a kid in the 1950s, Ernie Schultz, Jack Ogle, these are the people who brought us news on the local.
Now, local news started 15 minutes at a time but expanded, but it was dominated by males, as general society was coming out of World War II. In many parts of the country, people were saying women need to get back into the home, get out of the workplace. But that was changing, and it had been changing since the ’40s. But in the ’50s, women were hitting that glass ceiling. Not many opportunities. There were a few women; Helen Alvarez, in Tulsa, was one of the early station managers. But really on the business side, the production side, the on-air side, women were invisible. It was a male-dominated society. Well, other stations come along. And here in Oklahoma City, 1954, KWTV is owned by the Griffin family out of Muskogee. They still own two stations, one in Oklahoma City, one in Tulsa, and then finally, in ’58, out of Enid becomes what we now call KOCO, and other stations in Ada and Lawton. They were trying to move television broadcasting of the big metro areas. Didn’t work quite so well, consolidated back in the cities, but at least the diversification gave women opportunities, because once you start running a television station, it’s all about business. Where are the viewers? How can you connect them with the sponsors? And then finding the programming that’ll get the viewers to satisfy the sponsors. Well, if you’re number three in the market, you’re going to be a little more innovative and open to something new. And women in broadcast were something new, and women, especially in the baby boomer generation, were getting jobs in newspapers or were getting into radio. And by the 1960s and ’70s, they were really pushing up and about to burst onto that scene. So the television industry, like the rest of society in America, was changing in the ’60s. And you see some of the results of those cultural changes in the ’60s finally coming to fruition in the ’70s. And that’s really our story today.
Thompson: One of the interesting things is, you know, Hollywood tends to mimic what’s going on in the country, or at least reflect it in some form or fashion. And, you know, we always enjoyed, as we were on those road trips, talking about different movies and television shows. What were some of those early shows that might have been something that would have reflected how women were viewed in the workplace, and also in the television industry?
Blackburn: Well, in real life, and how popular culture mimics real life, Barbara Walters had burst onto the scene with ABC, and ABC was usually number three in the ratings and a little more open to innovation. So, here comes Barbara Walters, who started as a journalist and, you know, made her way into television. So, by the ’60s, you had this person on the national scene that seems to be breaking through. And then television and movies start reflecting that. And then the television industry, you’d almost have to say, really, that person is Mary Tyler Moore. And after the Dick Van Dyke Show in the ’50s, where she is the traditional suburban housewife raising the child, and every day, husband comes in the door. Hi, honey. Dinner’s on the table. You know, kind of the “Ozzie and Harriet” kind of approach to that. Well, in her next show, she reflects the changes in our society and using broadcast industry as the platform. She gets a job after a kind of a disastrous love affair, moves to a new city, finds a job as an associate producer in a television station. And of course, she’s surrounded by characters, some of whom are chauvinistic and pushing back, like one of the great characters in all of television history, Ted Baxter. You know, the goofy anchorman who was always mispronouncing names, who was really getting this script from Mary Tyler Moore, who is really the brains behind the operation. And she’s got the gruff boss who is trying to give her opportunities but just trying to deal with this changing world. He would represent that old guard. But Mary Tyler Moore comes off as the sane person, the kind of the center of that universe in the newsroom.
Thompson: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And, you know, as we fast forward into the ’90s a little bit, the attitude toward women in the broadcast room changes a little bit. We have the Murphy Brown character on the long-running CBS television show, and Murphy Brown was this take-no-prisoners; you know, she always knew her facts. She was very hard-charging. And, you know, she was kind of this woman who knew exactly what she was doing, a little bit smarter than the other people around her. And that was a great show on CBS. And then we get into probably one of the shows, the movies that does a great job of spoofing this whole entry of women into the broadcast arena is Anchorman. And that was, that came out in 2004, and that’s one of my favorite movies. And there’s a great scene when the the news director of the TV station comes into, he pulls together all the men who are who are anchoring the news, the sports, and the weather, and they get together and he says, you know, we need more diversity in the news. And they say, well, what’s diversity? And Will Ferrell’s character, who plays Ron Burgundy, this sort of quintessential, hair-coiffed, you know, really put-together anchor man that everybody looks up to. Will Ferrell says, well, I think that diversity is a ship that was used in the Civil War. And the news director says, I don’t think that the television station is saying we need more Civil War ships on the air. But that whole movie explores the dynamic of what happens when a smart, capable woman enters into the newsroom. And of course, much of it is exaggerated for comedic effect. But I suspect that in some of those cases, it might not have been too far off.
And then here in an Oklahoma influence that we’ve seen is Olivia Munn. Olivia Munn grew up in Oklahoma City. Her stepdad was in the Air Force. So they were stationed in Tokyo for a good portion of her growing-up years. But she went to high school here in Oklahoma City, and her mother and stepfather still live here, actually. She was a correspondent on another comedic show, The Daily Show, on Comedy Central. And once again, The Daily Show put a comedic spin on serious news stories. And she was also in The Newsroom, which was the Aaron Sorkin-written show about a cable news network. And Olivia Munn played Sloan Sabbith, who was an economist, a very bright person. And in fact, there’s one iconic scene where she’s interviewing someone in Japan with the nuclear disaster that happened there, and she speaks Japanese. And so she is indicating that the person that’s talking to her, that the translation isn’t coming through correctly, that they’re kind of parsing things out a little bit. And so she finally just breaks out in Japanese on her own to interview the person in Japanese. And so that was a great scene. And she was a great character for the television news back in those days. And so if you haven’t seen any of those, any of those great TV shows or movies, I would certainly recommend it as well.
But transitioning into Oklahoma, we’ve had a great group of women who have really blazed the path here in broadcast and television news, and I think we should start out with talking about Ida B., who is your mom.
Blackburn: Yes. And my mother was one of the fortunate people who found an opportunity because of the growth of the television industry in Oklahoma. In 1958, what became KOCO started in Enid. And in their license, they had to do 51% of their broadcasting, live broadcasting, from Enid; 49% could be somewhere else in Oklahoma City. Well, she saw an ad in the paper one day in 1958. I would have been seven years old at the time, growing up in Edmond, where my dad was a highway patrolman.
Thompson: I wasn’t born yet. (laughter)
Blackburn: And mom was teaching music in the schools, and she saw an ad for hostess of a show called Romper Room. And when I tell that story, people they say, oh, I saw your mom. Well, every market had their own teacher. So she was “Miss Ida,” so I could have been Miss Paula, Miss Jane, whatever it would be. Because there was no syndication, there was no satellite distribution, there was no syndication at the time. So every market had their own teacher. Well, it was a preschool, kind of similar to Sesame Street in an earlier day. Four kids would come in, four and five years old, and mom, as the teacher, would do the program, a one-camera shoot. And for those who are into techie stuff with television stations of the day, you’ll have, for any broadcast, now news and sports and weather broadcasts, there’ll be four cameras on the floor. And now they are remote-controlled. There’s no cameramen moving them around, but there would have been one camera for Mom’s first show.
And at that time, people in broadcast could also advertise goods. So Mom would seat the four kids at the table and give them some chocolate milk. Then she just turned to the camera with a carton of milk and say, mothers, if you want your children to grow up big and strong, get them Borden’s Dairy chocolate milk. And that was the way that show went. She later had a chance to move into more mainstream, and the owners of KOCO, by this time, it’s purchased and moved to Oklahoma City. Dean McGee, an early leader in Kerr-McGee oil and gas exploration firm, civic leader, kind of the father of urban renewal in Oklahoma City, and a leader. John Kirkpatrick, turned out to be probably the greatest philanthropist in Oklahoma City, and a few others buy the station. And they want something that promotes the community. Mom was in the right place at the right time, and they offered her a chance to produce a show at first called At Home with Ida B. Then the Ida B. Show, and it turned out to be a magazine format, similar to what Oprah would eventually do on her local station in Chicago and then go national. But mom was able to stay on the air until 1975, right in the middle of when women were breaking through the glass ceiling. She had done that in 1958, over 3,000 live shows.
And constantly, I meet people who say, I was on your mom’s show, or my mother was on your mom’s show. And at that time, with only three stations, her timeslot was usually nine in the morning. People felt like she was part of their family because people would have the TV on. They’d be doing things around the house. And there was mom, who had a very folksy, She was born in Ninnekah, Oklahoma, so very few people know where Ninnekah is. Bob Hope once asked her that when she was interviewing Bob Hope, she says, oh, about eight miles from Agawam. He said, Ida, that’s funny. And she was always proud of the fact Bob Hope thought she was funny, but she was just a country girl, and who had a lot of talent, and a musician, and a lot of energy. I get a lot of my kind of constant energy from her, and she was always out promoting, selling, finding a new way. And so she was one of those people who kind of spanned the time period we’re really focusing on today, which is more the ’70s and later. But mom was one of those who broke that glass ceiling earlier and kind of used her elbows to make a way for herself and to stay there on top for many years. And it made a difference in the community.
Thompson: Well, in a few minutes, we’re going to talk to Joyce Jackson, who was the first African American female on local television in Oklahoma. And she’s going to talk about how much of an influence that your mother was to her as she was beginning her career in television. As you were talking, I had a question that came up, and I suspect that your mother interviewed some pretty famous people over the years. You mentioned Bob Hope. Did you ever get to meet any of the famous people that she interviewed?
Blackburn: Oh, I did. Two examples. One year, John Wayne got this started. She and John Wayne were friends. John wanted Mom to come to LA to work at his station that he started in Los Angeles there in the early ’60s. And she was a single mom raising two kids, so she didn’t want to leave extended family. So she didn’t go. But John Wayne hooked her up with coming to Hollywood to cover the new movies. And then she’d come back and show the film on her show, which was promoting the movies. Just another way to promote it in the old days. And what she would typically do, she’d cash in her airline ticket, we’d drive out there, and stay with an uncle who had fled during the, you know, The Grapes of Wrath era of the 1930s. And we would stay with him, and she’d turn that into our family vacation. And one year, I got to sit on the set of Bewitched being made, and then right after that, The Flying Nun. I got to be in the same room with The Flying Nun being taped. And Name of the Game, which was a Tony Franciosa show that no one remembers. But one day, probably even more memorable than that here in Oklahoma City, she was taping some spots at the station one night after I had my driver’s license. I had a Volkswagen Bug. She said, Bobby, get up to the station. Slim Pickens is here, and we have a 30-minute delay. You want to talk to Slim? I said, do I?
Thompson: Who wouldn’t?
Blackburn: I was into hunting and fishing at the time. I came up, and he and I talked about black powder guns, about camping, and life. I just had just a visit, like we were talking right now. I’ll never forget being with Slim for over 30 minutes. He was in some ABC television show they were promoting. So yeah, that opened the door to a lot of experiences that I really enjoyed.
Thompson: That’s great. As we’re looking at some other women in broadcasting, you know, one person that comes to mind is Pam Henry. She was the first female anchor at KFOR, and then she later went on to be a producer at Channel 9. We’ve got Pam Olson, who became the first person to, first woman to co-anchor the evening news in primetime in the Oklahoma City market in 1976, and then later went to CNN, worked for the Washington bureau, and was a White House correspondent. We’ve got some great talent. Any recollections for those particular women?
Blackburn: Oh, yes. And with Pam Henry, who was one of my heroes. You know, we talk about people walking onto the stage of history and either dealing with challenges or seizing opportunities. Pam Henry is one of those because she literally, in the ’50s, was the poster child for March of Dimes. She was in a wheelchair. She had always, you know, since a young child, she was limited in her mobility. She never let that stop her. And so in college, on radio, and a print journalist doing stories, and writing, and condensing, and finding out how to take a complex story and then to find the lede and then to build it up into, you know, to a two-minute interview. There’s a talent in doing that. And Pam Henry had that, and overcoming both the physical limitations and the glass ceiling on women, she still was able to break through. And I remember her well on the air, and we later became good friends. She’s probably given four or five presentations here in the History Center since we opened.
And Pam Olson, one of the true talents. And if you talk about a big heart to go along with a great mind and a writing ability that’s unsurpassed, Pam Olson fit that. Pam started, again, as a print journalist learning how to, you know, sniffing out a story. Well, where is this going to lead me in finding the right sources to build this dynamic story? She knew how to do that. Then she got on the air with the Griffin- owned station here in Oklahoma City. And by the way, KFOR was a successor station to WKY. The first in Oklahoma City would change call letters several times. But Pam Olson was so good that networks saw her, and one of the original news directors, program directors, of Turner— TNT: Turner News Network, started in Atlanta. It was kind of the first of the cable stations that was a 24-hour-a-day, full-time news. Well, Ed Turner was from Oklahoma, and Ed Turner was hired by Ted to be the program news director. Well, he knew about Pam Olson, and he said, Pam, I need you to cover the White House. And so for the longest time, here would come this cable station on, 24-hour news, and Pam Olson in front of the White House reporting on what was going on, what was important. And that takes skills, and it’s not reading. When you’re a correspondent like that, you’re not reading from a teleprompter. Today, if you go to a broadcast, pretty much everything is pretty well scripted. But in those days, you had to take your notes, figure out how much time you had, and then hit each of the beats. And to keep that certain rhythm. And both Pams, Henry and Olson, both had that talent, and both showed what Oklahomans could do on the national stage.
Thompson: Are there any other Oklahoma women who, in broadcasting, stick out to you as being important to the genre?
Blackburn: Oh, yeah. Here in Oklahoma City, you’d have to say Linda Cavanaugh. Probably the longest tenure of any female anchor. I can’t prove that. But anecdotally, I think she was on much longer than anyone else. But she comes out of the ’60s, a baby boomer, out of the print of news, then radio, and then television. And she had an Oklahoma accent, so it was very unique. Kind of like my mom, she didn’t try to wash out the Ninnekah out of the way that she did the show. And Linda did not try to suppress her Oklahoma accent, but it was real. And people could identify with Linda.
And in Tulsa, probably the one that comes to mind for me, Karen Keith. Again, Karen, a baby boomer, gets into radio when she’s at OSU working at KOSU, and she has some great stories about these student journalists at these press conferences with people like Governor Henry Bellmon, and the people she’s interviewing get to know her because she’s peppering them with questions. She’s not going to let them get by with a non-answer. And she has some great stories. And so she’s learning how to chase the story, how to get the news, how to deliver it the right way. And then she becomes an anchor in Tulsa. And even today, if you walk with Karen down the street of Tulsa, and it may have been 15 or 20 years since she was on the air, but people recognize her, and it’s like they see a friend because she was there educating them, telling them what was going on, and a trusted figure on television. It’s a powerful position.
Another is Jane Jayroe, a good friend of the Oklahoma Historical Society. All of her collections have come to us. Filled an entire room at her house in Nichols Hills. I’ll never forget. She called me and said, Bob, I got all my stuff. My mom passed away, closed the house in Laverne. Come get it. And so it took two curators, and it took several days to get it. But Jane started her career as a singer, performer, Miss America 1967. And then she showed her commitment to the community. She went to Vietnam at the height of the fighting in 1968 and ’69. She and Linda Cavanaugh both went, and she filmed that. And we have all of that film. And when we did an exhibit on the war in Vietnam, we used footage of Jane Jayroe entertaining, not just entertaining the troops, but connecting with them, going into the hospital, shaking hands, hugging these servicemen, and showing her compassion. And then she later became an anchor on KOCO-TV. Later went to a larger market in Dallas, would come back, and she’s been a community leader ever since. So, many of these women were not just given the chance to be on TV, to read someone else’s words. They were journalists. They had talent. They could connect. They expressed the Oklahoma spirit, and they shattered the glass ceiling. And here come other women. And today, you do not see a broadcast, whether it’s a morning show, a noontime show, a 24-hour network, PBS NewsHour, whatever it might be. Women, and many times, outnumber the men, and women have proven that they have the ability and are just people who can gather the news and then present it in a way that people trust them.
Thompson: You know, I think we should also mention Becky Dixon, because, you know, these, the women we’ve talked about up to this point have been news broadcasters. But sports is something that really connects with people as well. And in reading Becky’s story, she talked about how she wanted to get into television, but she thought sports would be a great niche because it was a little bit less populated with females at the time, that maybe she could find her spot there. And she ended up, she started out at Channel 8 in Tulsa, but she ended up co-hosting Wide World of Sports on ABC with Frank Gifford. And then she went and worked college football with Dick Vermeil and Gary Bender, and even today still produces sports shows and other shows about Oklahomans. And so, once again, very influential person in broadcasting who took the sports angle. I think that, you know, one of the things that I want to mention too, is Karen Keith, who is now a county commissioner in Tulsa, is on our Board of Directors here at the Oklahoma Historical Society. And we’re very, very fortunate to have her involved in what we’re doing.
We’re going now to transition. We had, Bob and I had an opportunity to talk to Joyce Jackson. And Joyce is just a phenomenally important woman in the history of broadcasting here in Oklahoma. And I think you’ll enjoy our conversation with her a lot. She’s the first African American female on local television in the state of Oklahoma. She’s an award-winning broadcast journalist, producer, and a former talk show host for KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City. Going into some of her background, she was also a student of Clara Luper, and she was a part of the sit-in movement in the late 1950s here in Oklahoma City. She’s the founder, publisher, and editor of the Shades of Oklahoma magazine, which is a quarterly publication designed to spotlight the life, culture, and the history of Oklahoma African Americans. And she’s currently a member of the Freedom Center of Oklahoma City Board of Directors, the Clara Luper Legacy Committee, and the Clara Luper Plaza Committee. So we’re really thrilled to have her. She’s a lifetime member of the NAACP, and it’s very exciting for us to welcome Joyce Jackson to be our first guest on the podcast. We have a few questions for you here, so we’ll just get right into it. And the first is just tell us about your experience growing up here in Oklahoma.
Joyce Jackson: Well, my experience was beautiful, was wonderful, because we originally lived in the Spencer area where Dunjee High School is located, and going to class under Ms. Luper, who was my history teacher, was wonderful because every day was an adventure in Ms. Luper’s class. We were learning something new always. Even though she was labeled as the history teacher, we learned history and a lot of other things, and basically, to have pride in yourself, to know that you are as worthy as anyone else in the world. And so Ms. Luper was quite a light for us. And so my childhood was Douglass. At the time that I attended Douglass, of course, Douglass was number one in everything. And so number one basketball team, football team, music, art, everything. And so I loved going to school at Douglass.
Blackburn: And Joyce, I think, the time you were growing up and it would shape the rest of your life and career. And of course, you’ve been a great champion to push back on the walls of segregation. We’ve all been pulling bricks out of that wall our entire lives in our generation. But I think when you were a Douglass, it was still a segregated school, was it not?
Jackson: Absolutely. It was. It was. And what’s interesting is part of my earlier lifetime is to spend time in California, where my father lived. My parents were divorced, and several times when I was quite young, I spent some time in California, and of course, all the schools were integrated in California. And then they come back home and go to Dunjee, which was all-Black, and then to attend Douglass, all-Black. It was interesting.
Blackburn: But I like what you said about the opportunity to, and to me, as we all walk onto the stage of life, things are changing. But Douglass, especially, and Booker T. in Tulsa, provided a stage for personal accomplishment. Like you say, first and almost everything the Zelia Breauxs of the world teaching, you know, artists like Charlie Christian and some of those pioneers that we think of now as standing on the pedestals. You had quite an opportunity with some of the best educators in the country, and the only place they could teach in Oklahoma were in schools like Booker T. Washington and Douglass.
Jackson: Right. Matter of fact, I was sharing with someone not too long ago one of the things that really stuck out in my mind when they changed the music: that the young kids were into rapping, and I realized that the band director at Douglass High School was also a history teacher at Douglass, and he decided that the way to help us remember things about history is to put it to music. And so if you pass Mr. Bufford’s room when we were given a test, then you would hear everybody kind of humming to answer the questions, because he had put all of the history to some kind of music.
Blackburn: And one other advantage in that personal experience is that as a result of Brown v. the Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court in 1954, Oklahoma City school system needed to build a new school for a segregated community, and they built the new building. So it wasn’t many years later that you start attending Douglass, and it was a brand new building with the swimming pool and the auditorium and the theater and all of these facilities in probably the most beautiful part of Oklahoma City, right there along the banks of the North Canadian River.
Jackson: I just feel blessed to have been a part of Douglass’s opening and growing. And because, like I said, the school left such an impression on us because it was just the top of everything. And so we were really proud to say we were Trojans, even today, yes.
Thompson: Now you had, after school, you had a pretty varied career. You were a candy striper at St. Anthony’s, and you were a model for a little while, and then you worked as a workforce trainer. So how did that varied career, how did that lead you into journalism and television?
Jackson: Well, it was all by accident. I was working at OIC, which is Opportunities Industrialization Center, and it’s a center that basically trains people in employment skills, employable skills. People that had been in the military, people that were formerly incarcerated, or people that just didn’t have the funds and the education and was trying to get their life together and find some kind of work. And, so I was working there at OIC when my boss suggested that we call one of the television stations and find out if they would do some training, if they had some positions that they could train people in, and come and assist us. And so I asked my boss, which television station do I call? I don’t know those people. And she said, call the one that’s your favorite. What’s your favorite? And I said, well, my favorite is Channel 5 because they had Ho-Ho the Clown and Pokey the Puppet. And I had a young son, and so we loved looking at that. And so she said, well, that’s the station we’ll call. I said, okay. So I called the station and met John Harrison, who was vice president and also over public affairs. And John was just very cordial and said he would come out and talk to us. And he did. And we started working with Channel 5, and we worked with them for a little over a year. And then John approached me about coming to work for him, and I said, I thought you had to have a degree, because I had dropped out of college at that time. And he said, well, in some things you do, but I’d like you to come out and be my assistant. But I was hired to do all kinds of things. I was hired to give tours. I was a part-time tour guide, a part-time receptionist, and then I was John’s assistant.
Blackburn: Trait, I might add a little bit of backstory here, because that’s part of my youth as well. But John Harrison was the son of Walter Harrison. Walter Harrison had been the editor for The Daily Oklahoman during its golden years of the ’20s and ’30s. He was very close to E. K. Gaylord, who bought into The Oklahoman in 1904. And Walter was a force. He eventually wrote many books, but his son came from privilege. But he joined KOCO and worked with Ben West, who was station manager at the time, and he was in charge of community affairs, and he was instrumental in bringing the first African American broadcaster. Help me, Joyce.
Jackson: Ben Tipton?
Blackburn: Ben Tipton, thank you. Ben Tipton was a broadcaster, came on. And John was also instrumental in attracting a young man to talk about the American Indian community, and that was Enoch Kelly Haney, who had a television show on KO about the same time. And really KO was always trailing Channel 4 and Channel 9, and they were looking for ways to build market. And as Joyce said, her station of choice was KO and partly because of Ho-Ho, and Pokey, and Ida B., and the others. But also that station was reaching out to the minority community in Oklahoma City. And I think, Joyce, you recognized that and became part of that effort and in a transformational generation, not just for African Americans, but for women.
Jackson: Yes.
Blackburn: Breaking through the glass ceiling. And so you were a pioneer in both paths of making a change in our community in the ’70s.
Jackson: Absolutely.
Thompson: One of the things that I read about you is that one of your first mentors at KOCO was Ida B.
Jackson: Yes.
Thompson: And she just happens to be near and dear to my co-host’s heart because it’s Dr. Blackburn’s mother. Can you talk a little bit about her and how she helped you in your career and your relationship with her?
Jackson: Well, when I started at Channel 5, of course, it was during the period where they, of course, had not seen very many Blacks on television. And of course, I got all of the nasty calls and all kinds of comments. But when I started, like I said, I did the tour guides and worked for John, and six months into me working there, John called me in and said, I think I want to put you on the air. And I said, I don’t know how to do that. And so John did a little test run, and when he did that, I cried during the whole session because I was just frightened. And one of the things that I found out later on, many years later, is that they didn’t think that having a Black female there, they thought it would create a problem with Ida B. Ida B. was the star of Channel 5 and did all kinds of wonderful shows and things. But Ida B., when I talk about her sometimes, Ida B. was just very special to me. She was a mentor, but she was the one who reached out to me soon as they put me on the air to start doing the talk show. She would come down and watch, and sometimes she would give me little pointers, and she was the first one to decide that I should do her show when she went on; she did special kinds of travel things. And when she was not there, she asked me to fill in for her, and that was live. Ida B.’s show was live, and Ida was was almost, became almost like a mother figure because she was always in my corner and always encouraging me and being supportive. And so, she was just, she was not only a mentor, she was more like a mother figure, too, because even when I left the station, she was always keeping in contact. So Ida was very special to me.
Blackburn: And I might add, and Joyce, you may or may not remember this, but I know she gave this advice to others, including me, when I would first go on television. She said pretend that you’re talking to your Dad. You know, just look into the camera and think, Dad’s on the other end of that camera, and just talk to your dad and just be, you know, it’s family. And I remember her commenting about you. She respected you. And she really recognized your talent and your passion. And, of course, to be successful in that business, it can’t be just reading a teleprompter. Of course, you didn’t have a teleprompter in those days.
(laughter)
Blackburn: But you have to have passion for what you’re doing, and what you might lack in delivery or structure, if the passion is there, people are going to hear it, and they’re going to feel it, and especially on television. And you had that quality that she recognized early on and became one of your champions.
Jackson: Right. And she, along with John Harrison, suggested that I might consider going back to college to get my degree. But John said, we’re not going to push. It’s up to you. And I did. I went back to school while I worked. I eventually, stopped doing, well, I never really stopped doing the talk show, but I eventually got into the news department. I was transferred into the news department because at first, I was just doing some talk shows. I did four different talk shows while I was there. Now Generation, What’s Happening, Saturday Review, and then when Ben Tipton came to Channel 5, then he did Black Review, and when he left and went to network, then I did Black Review, but I played a part in bringing Ben there, in that it was during a period of time that Ben had been on radio and was very well known in the community, and he resigned and stepped away from the radio station and had some issues because there was some racial issues going on at that time. And so, when John and I talked, I told John that I think it would be great if they reached out to try to bring Ben Tipton to the television station. And John said, okay, I like that. And so John pursued it, and Ben came to work for Channel 5. Yeah.
Thompson: When you were first going on the air, and this is, you know, this is a momentous event here. Did you feel like you were breaking barriers? Did you feel like you were doing something significant at the time?
Jackson: No, I didn’t, because I didn’t realize the impact, and I didn’t realize that I was the first on the air, a female, you know, on the air. So I didn’t at first. But then, when I got the support of the community and people feeling very comfortable with me and being very supportive, then I realized that I did have an impact on our community, and people trusted me. And one of the things that I felt was most important is to tell some of the good stories about the African American community, because during that time, everything that came on was negative. It was always negative news about the Black community. And so I think I felt good about playing a part in making sure that there was some balance to the stories that were told about the Black community, and that they had an introduction to people that were doing lots of things and to a lot of history in the Black community.
Blackburn: And Trait, for our listeners to really understand the significance of what Joyce just said. The times were so tumultuous. The ’70s was a period, you know, so many things going on. But this was the time when the Oklahoma City Public School Systems were being aggressively desegregated with busing, and there were people in parts of town who would sell raffle tickets to come in and bash a school bus; angry people. There was violence on campuses. There were people just going nuts in the community, and the racism was just in the air. And so to have a calm voice like Joyce with the megaphone of television reaching tens of thousands of people to be able to, let’s calm down. We’re all in this together. It’s our community. It’s not your community or my community, it’s our community. And it was one of those voices that helped temper down some of that emotion. And unless you lived through those years, it’s really hard to to dramatize how difficult they were. And today we think we live in a polarized community. It was probably even more polarized on the issue of race then.
Jackson: Absolutely.
Blackburn: And to have someone like Joyce there to help guide us through it, a window. Because I grew up in a segregated community. I went to school with zero African Americans in 1969 at Putnam City— a thousand students. So to me, people like Joyce were a window into another community. And the more I understood, these are people, or heck, they could be my friends. Then you start softening that racial prejudice, and where people start with fear and hate, and once they learn, and that’s kind of where the Historical Society comes in. We need to be teaching these stories so people will understand and reach out and become a better, more united community. And Joyce, you had a very dominant role in that in your career and then thereafter.
Jackson: Right, and I felt, not only because I felt it was kind of my responsibility to be able to make things a little better or to explain how things were being done and how they were being viewed. My personal experience is that my son was one of those kids that was bused, and so that was traumatic for me, as well. The fact that he was bused to an area and he couldn’t join the Boy Scouts because they didn’t have any little Black kids in the Boy Scouts at that time. So it was very personal. But yes, I wanted to do whatever I could do to make people realize we’re all much more alike than we are different. And it was quite a period of time. Yeah.
Thompson: One of the stories that you broke when you were a journalist was the Penn Square Bank failure, and it’s a really interesting story about how all that came about. Can you talk a little bit about that momentous story that you were one of the first people to be a part of?
Jackson: Well, it happened because my husband, at the time, was an attorney, and one of his friends had gotten word that they were going to close the Penn Square. And it was, I guess no one was aware of it at that time. And so when he told me that, I said, are you sure? He said, oh, yes, I’m sure. And he said, matter of fact, they’re going to close it tomorrow. And I talked to my news director, and I said, they’re going to close Penn Square. And he said, what? He said, Joyce, you need to get out there right away. And so we called and called and tried to make an appointment with the president. And we got all kind of excuses. First, he wasn’t in. And then when we called again, he was tied up in a meeting. And then when we called again, and my boss said go. And so we went and we covered the story, and it became the biggest story well, not just in Oklahoma City. It became a national story because it was Chase Bank involved with Penn Square.
Blackburn: Trait, for some of our listeners again, who may be a little younger than me, at least, to explain how big a story this was, and this is the short version. But in Oklahoma, the oil patch was in a recession in the 1950s and ’60s. The domestic industry was dying. But then we come up to deep gas, people like Robert Hefner III discovered there’s gas down there, three miles deep. A lot of natural gas, but it was capped in the price of interstate shipment. So there was a federal congressional set cap on the price of natural gas. So no market for it. Well, finally, by the late 1970s, in the rush to deregulate the economy, they partially deregulate natural gas because people in Chicago, in Pittsburgh didn’t want to freeze. They wanted cheap, and so they deregulate for deep oil. All of a sudden we have all of this gas. Well, the price increased by tenfold. The boom is right here in Oklahoma, the heart of the pioneers finding the gas, and more money was flowing in to fund these. Some of these wells were $1 million or $2 million each at a time that normally you drill a well for $100,000, but these were a million or more. So here comes the money from Chicago, and Amsterdam, and London, and Seattle. And these banks are buying loans from this little neighborhood bank called Penn Square. And suddenly, it’s like this big bubble. And then Congress deregulates gas, natural gas, for all natural gas. There’s a recession that reduces supply, and it crashes. And it’s not a slow decline, but it crashes overnight. And the marker that all of us historians use for the day it collapsed was a fall of Penn Square. This is national! This is not just Oklahoma. And Joyce was there on that day that history is happening right before her.
Jackson: Yes, yes, it was quite a day because people, of course, the word was getting out as we were doing our story, and people were flooding to the bank to try to withdraw their funds. But the bank had been closed down, and it just kind of reverberated. I mean, it was unreal.
Blackburn: And one thing that I appreciate about Joyce, she was giving voice to the common man. Of course, Penn Square, like society in general, the big boys who had millions in deposit, they got that out early. They knew about it. They saw it coming. The people who were really hurt with a middle class investors who said, oh yeah, I want that 12% CD that their bank, or they were trying to get money to loan out to the patch. Those were the people in line. Those are the people Joyce was interviewing, and they tend to get forgotten in the history books. You read about the big pioneers and the the Goliaths, but in this case, it was the common folks who were being stung by this more proportionally. And Joyce was one of those reporters who wanted the voice of the common person here and is not just of a certain section of town. It was all people who were struggling and investing their money, hoping to send their kids to college. And that’s who Joyce was reaching out to at that time.
Jackson: Right. A lot of people lost their homes, and it affected our community, I’d say, for over a year or more, because a lot of new housing that had been built was just shut down.
Blackburn: It began our second Great Depression, is what I call it in my speeches. The business community was toxic real estate, toxic banking, toxic oil and gas for ten years. And three years later, First National Bank, the largest, most entrepreneurial bank in the Southwest—at one time, bigger than any bank in Dallas—fails. It started with that story that Joyce sniffed out and followed.
Thompson: Well, it’s certainly been a pleasure talking with you today, and thank you so much for coming here, and talking to us about your life and your experiences. And thank you for all of the contributions that you’ve had to Oklahoma history. You are certainly a treasure for our state and for everything that you’ve done, and we just appreciate you so much.
Blackburn: Thank you, Joyce.
Jackson: Thank you.
Thompson: What a great interview. I certainly enjoyed talking to her. It was really my first time to spend a significant amount of time around her, and I just, she’s such a beautiful person. It was great to be able to talk to her.
Blackburn: She has a great heart, a lot of talent. She had two opportunities to go network but decided to stay in Oklahoma, similar to my mom, one of her mentors. She decided, no, I’m going to stay here with my kids and be part of the community. And she’s still on committees here at the Historical Society, on race relations and the Clara Luper Legacy Committee. I went to Washington, DC, with her this last January, or a year ago now with the COVID. It seemed like just yesterday. But she’s this community leader I admire. And one thing I can say about Joyce and some of these other women we’ve talked about is that we realize there’s never going to be another pioneering generation of people who change an industry, and these women changed an industry. The way we look at broadcast news, sports, and our daily lives with the interaction with television. And so that story will never be repeated. So we’ve taken it on ourselves over the last 15 years to interview each of these ladies that we mentioned today, plus a long list of others, print journalists as well, some who are now long gone. But we started interviewing many of these pioneers to make sure their stories were captured. And about eight or nine years ago, we did an exhibit at one of our museums. I still use the word our, although I feel like I’m still part of your organization, Trait.
Thompson: You’re still part, you’ll never not be a part of what we’re doing here. And so I feel perfectly comfortable with you saying “our.”
Blackburn: Thank you. Well, what we did, at our Pioneer Woman Museum in Ponca City that we’ve operated for years, we did an exhibit on women in journalism. We did both broadcast and print, and that exhibit is still up, if people can get there in the next few months. It’s going to be replaced soon. But right now, that exhibit is still there. But that’s what we do at the Oklahoma Historical Society. We collect stories, we preserve them, and then we share them, whether it’s a podcast, or it’s an exhibit, or it’s an online interview that people can get to. That’s what the Historical Society has been doing since 1893, and I think doing it very well.
Thompson: I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you all for listening to our very first rebooted A Very OK Podcast. Thank you, Bob, for joining me on this journey, and we can’t wait to talk to you again on our next episode.
Blackburn: Thank you very much, Trait. Enjoyed it.
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