A Very OK Podcast

Episode 37: “Television Comes to Oklahoma”

June 18, 2024

Episode Transcript

(upbeat music playing)

Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. And with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, it’s great to be with you. Although I was with you just a few hours ago. We, you invited me to come play pickleball with you, and I’m going to inform everyone out here, this podcast is now a pickleball podcast. So, yeah, we’re just going to be talking about our favorite dinks and dunks and doinks, and you guys can take a siesta for a few minutes while we do that. I’m just kidding. But Bob and I had such a good time this morning. Here’s what I know about Bob, is I would much rather be on his team than playing against him, because when we played together, we won 11–1 this morning. But he beat me when we were, when we were on opposing sides.

Dr. Bob Blackburn: Well, it was a lot of fun, and thank you for coming, Trait. It’s always good to be with you and to hear the good news about the legislative session, some of your accomplishments over there. I’m proud of what you’ve been able to do for the employees, for the people who gather the information and preserve it and share it. And so, I’m proud of what you were able to accomplish this year. The legislature, that’s a hard sell over there for history when they want things in their districts and they’ve got big issues with education and public safety, but here history comes. But you’ve been successful at getting them to understand the importance, and so congratulations.

Thompson: Well thank you, Bob, I really appreciate that. And for those of you who may be wondering what he’s talking about, the legislature passed the budget a couple of weeks ago, and Governor Stitt signed it within the past few days. But one of the accomplishments we were able to get into the budget, and I take, you know, the modicum amount of credit for this, but we have a great team at the OHS, but we have legislators who really do understand the importance of our mission here to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s history and culture, and they place a value on that. And, of course, we’re constantly communicating with them and letting them know what we’re doing in their districts and around the state and the purpose that we serve here at the OHS. But it is to their credit that they have received that message. And so one of the things that we were working on, we started last year, didn’t quite get it over the finish line last year, but thankfully it happened this year. We were able to get it within our budget, $1 million for pay raises, and those pay raises will be distributed across our organization, and that’s really, really important. Because, folks, I want you to know how hard our staff works. And, Bob, you know this from your experience here. You know, we are a small staff here. You go to any of our sites, and there’s nobody that has the luxury of just sitting around and kind of whiling away the day that you think, you know, if you think of bureaucrats, you think of people that are just looking at the clock and hoping the day goes by.

Blackburn: The directors are on the tractors.

Thompson: Yeah, yeah. No, this is a case where if you’re a site director, you may be cleaning the toilet that day. You may be leading a school group tour, on top of all of your regular duties, which is assigning responsibilities to the folks who are working out there and making sure all the paperwork is filled out and making sure that the budget is done, and so our staff works incredibly hard. And quite frankly, they are underpaid. And we wanted to try to make that a little bit more right. Now, we’re not quite where we need to be yet, and we’ll continue working on that. But we’ve made a big step forward, and I’m very excited about what we were able to accomplish. And so today we have a great topic to talk about today, and I’m really excited about it because we have, this year is the 75th anniversary of television coming to Oklahoma. And with the advent of WKY television on June 6, 1949, the moving pictures come into everybody’s living room, and this was a major step forward for our state. This is something that, and here in Oklahoma City, where we’re making this broadcast, WKY television was the first to do that. And so we’ll be talking about this throughout our time together today. But I wanted to start out like we do occasionally from time to time. Bob, do you have any favorite movies or television shows that have the news or television as a theme of the show?

Blackburn: Yeah, of course, that’s very personal to me because I grew up around a television studio. As I mentioned before on this podcast, my mom, was a Romper Room hostess educator in 1958 and was on the air for 3,000 live shows till 1975. So I literally grew up around television. It’s always been of interest to me. And whenever it’s depicted by the artistry of producers, either a movie or a television show, I usually take notice, and I understand the challenges, especially of newscasters in the broadcast industry, because it’s so different from the print. You know, a print writer, print producer may have a thousand words to tell a story. If you’re on television, you’ve got 60 seconds to capture the story and to present it. And so I’ve always watched that, and then what stories do you cover? What depth? What angle? That’s always been of interest to me. And two, one television, one movies, really comes to my mind.

One of the movies that struck me as a great movie was Broadcast News with Holly Hunter, William Hurt. And, of course, if people haven’t seen that, William Hurt is the pretty boy who kind of comes along at a time when they’re looking more at physical features. But he’s got some talent and some potential, but he’s never proven himself. And here’s Holly Hunter, this hard-driving, just nuts and bolts, straight ahead, emotional person who wants to cover news the way Edward R. Murrow would have covered it. You know, in the traditions of Walter Cronkite. And you get this ebb and flow of, are they really going to cover the news and tell the story, or are they going to make it pretty and nice, and, you know, just to draw ratings? And pretty much the same theme in a TV show called Newsroom, produced and mainly written by Aaron Sorkin. I’m now watching that again. I watched every episode when it first came out in 1912, excuse me 1912.

(laughing)

Blackburn: I live in the 20th century, but 2012 to 2014, and I’m watching that again. And the principals are always digging in, you know, is it ratings? Is it the truth? Are we serving the community? And even though it’s all profit-driven industry, there’s a sense of service, and that’s at the heart of this drama. And of course, everyone loves drama. And you really get it with this television show of Newsroom. So I recommend that to our listeners as well.

Thompson: Yeah, it’s one of my favorites as well. And longtime listeners of the podcast will know I’m no stranger to Aaron Sorkin. He’s one of my favorite directors and writers. Of course, The West Wing being probably one of my all-time favorite TV shows. But I love the Newsroom because it’s, of course, Aaron Sorkin usually tries to create an idealized version of what he’s portraying. And so The West Wing was an idealized version of how politics should work. The Newsroom was this premise where he would, he would look back at different news events and say how would he have liked the news to have been covered, you know, and take out the entertainment value. Take out the search for ratings. But just the hard news, how would it have been covered? And so, and so many great scenes in that, in that show. My wife and I quote a scene always back-and-forth because at one point, he says he’s putting himself in charge of morale, and everything he’s doing, He’s trying to get the morale up. And so occasionally I’ll walk around the house and I’ll say, I’m putting myself in charge of morale here. But I’ve always been a fan of Sorkin’s writing, and this is, so many great actors on this show. Jeff Daniels, who’s incredible. And then Oklahoma’s own Olivia Munn plays an economics reporter on the show as well. And one of the great scenes with her is when she’s interviewing a, it was after the nuclear plant explosion in Japan, of course, which was a real event. And she is interviewing someone who is in charge of that nuclear plant, and she just decides to go rogue and start speaking directly Japanese to him because she is part Japanese, and she is fluent in Japanese in real life, and they brought that into the show, and that was a great scene as well with Oklahoma’s own.

I love another Sorkin show called Sports Night, and this is a great show. Really took place during this time, so it was filmed from 1998 to 2000. And it’s two friends who also have a SportsCenter-like television show, and all the things that go into the things that they’re portraying and their friendship and high jinks and all that. Felicity Huffman is one of the actors on that show, but that really takes its cues from back in those early late ’90s, early 2000s from when SportsCenter was such a big deal. When you had Dan Patrick, you had Keith Olbermann, you had Rich Eisen, you had Stuart Scott, and they were coming up with all those catchphrases, and those were fun shows to watch. You know, the big one, that being, you know, Stuart Scott with the “boo-yah,” you know, so that’s one of my favorite shows. Of course it’s Sorkin, so it’s well written. And if you watch it, you’ll see a lot of those same, they call them Sorkin-isms that show up in that show. And then he recycles them again in The West Wing, and then you’ll see them come into The Newsroom television show again.

And of course, just to go on the silly end, I love the show, the movie Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Will Ferrell created a character for the ages there, and this is a 1970s newsroom in San Diego where they’re getting a female reporter for the first time. And I remember the station manager coming in and saying, you know, because of diversity, we’re bringing in a female reporter. And they start bantering around the room, all the men saying like, well, what is diversity? And Ron Burgundy says, well, I think it’s an old wooden English ship. Ron, I don’t think we’re talking about an old wooden English ship here today. So that’s a great comedy. And, of course, one of the other famous scenes is when, he’s at, they’re at a party at Ron Burgundy’s house, and he’s on the diving board, and he says, I have an urgent and breaking news announcement. Cannonball! [laughter] So that’s a fun one. That’s a fun one. And as a bonus, I have to mention another great, great one that’s decidedly more serious. But Good Night, and Good Luck, which was about the years during the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy and the, you know, trying to find out who was communists and Edward R. Murrow taking a stand to challenge McCarthy and expose him for being a fearmonger. Clooney wrote that and directed that as well.

Blackburn: That’s a great movie. Everyone should see that. That should be an a civics lesson in college.

Thompson: Yeah, it’s a great movie. It’s filmed entirely in black and white, So it really sets the scene there, and that’s a good one. So getting on to the topic at hand, I really want to talk about, how did we get television here in Oklahoma? And you can’t really talk about it without talking about the Gaylords. E. K. and E. L. Gaylord, and Bob, I thought it’d be great if you could talk a little bit about those gentlemen, the kind of visionaries that they were, and how this all, you know, how they got started in Oklahoma, and then coming into bringing television here.

Blackburn: Right. If you study Oklahoma City history and even Oklahoma history, the impact of the Gaylord family is phenomenal. Still going on with the Thunder, with Clay Bennett’s leadership role there. But E. K. Gaylord moved from Colorado Springs, Colorado, where his brother owned a newspaper, to Oklahoma City to buy into a newspaper in 1903. By 1909, he was good enough and smart enough that he was owner and created the Oklahoma Publishing Company that was broader, and he later would buy other newspapers other than The Oklahoman, which was the first one. He would eventually buy The Oklahoma City Times. He would start the Farmer-Stockman. He would have Orbit, a little newsmagazine format, but he started a communication empire with print, which was the only source of news until the 1920s.

Well, the 1920s, along comes radio technology, which comes out of World War I, where they’re developing radio as a way to communicate to fight a war. And so all these technicians spread around the country, and they’re all starting these little radio stations and this new industry starts. Well, E. K. Gaylord, who was kind of a visionary in many ways, looks, he says, well, that’s going to be a place to advertise. Well, why don’t I buy this station, and then we’ll advertise on both radio and the print. And so he buys WKY Radio, and he adds toys. He builds a station out on Britton Road, the high point in Oklahoma County. Walter Cronkite comes to work for him at WKY Radio because he had the best stuff, expansive mobile units, doing everything, just a very innovative station.

Thompson: Cronkite was a play-by-play announcer in the late ’30s for the OU football team.

Blackburn: Yeah, and of course, the story there is that Mr. Gaylord was listening to an OU game at the office one day, and Cronkite had told him he knew about football, and he’s sitting there saying he’s got the ball, and he’s running down the court. You know, he’s used the wrong technology. And of course the rest of it is history. But the Gaylords are there, and along comes E. L. E. L. was born about 1919, is raised in Oklahoma City. He knows about WKY Radio. He knows the radio business there. It’s a very civic-minded family. They were primary supporters of the Oklahoma State Fair, even today with Clay Bennett. Bennett Event Center is named for a member of the extended family. But he, E. L. and E. K. are working, looking for any opportunities, and along comes a new technology. Came in out of World War II, with largely radar. You take radar, and the same technology can be adapted for television, and so television, which really had been invented in the ’30s, was suppressed during the war. But coming out of the war, FCC said, okay, apply for a license to have local television stations. And so E. K. Gaylord said, okay, staff, go get them. And so the radio staff put together the application, and they get in with the first batch of applications. So they’re issued a license for WKY-TV to match WKY Radio. And it’s “W” at that time because all the stations in the country were “W.” Well, it would soon thereafter be everything west of the Mississippi would start with a “K.” Everything east would be “W,” but he got in early.

Well, there were so many applications, the FCC freaks and they say we’re closing down the application process. So, Oklahoma City had one television station from June 6, 1949, to 1954. So almost five years of having a monopoly in town. And it was this moment in history when everything comes together. You have a monopoly, so you have time to develop your programming, time to develop the business model, the time to build a staff and with the Gaylords and their deep pockets in terms of profits from the newspaper, profit from the radio station, profit from the trucking company, they started Mistletoe Express to deliver newspapers around the state. These are incredible business people who have the resources. They didn’t have to go to the bank to borrow the money to start. And they said, whatever toys you need, get them. If there’s a good person out there, hire them. And so they put together this staff that goes on the air. E. K. Gaylord, the dad, is the first to speak on radio in Oklahoma on June 6, broadcasting from the old Municipal Auditorium. Today, we call it the Civic Center.

Thompson: On TV.

Blackburn: On TV. Excuse me.

Thompson: Well, when you’re talking about, it’s easy when you’re talking WKY because you have to be, are we talking TV or radio? Yeah, I knew what you meant, but I wanted to clarify for everyone.

Blackburn: Thank you for catching me there. But they basically take radio programing and put it on the air. So Wiley and Gene, that is a country and western band. They just have a TV show. They take The Serenaders, which is a quartet of singers. They come on, have their own show. They take radio personality Danny Williams, and they let him do an interview show where he’s interviewing somebody. The only difference is, is that he had interviewed on the radio. Now he’s interviewing with the camera on him. And so you take that format, and news was not part of it at the time. They didn’t think news would be a big deal. So, the really negligible time spent on news.

But they’re developing the content. They’re developing the technicians who know how to light. They know what technicians can do with the sets. They know they can get the right scriptwriters to do the news. They can get the right people to start the weather and the news finally. And so they’re putting together the team, they build a station out on Britton Road next to the radio station, and basically they dominate. And at the time, children’s programming, especially, was very popular because at that time, FCC allowed broadcasters to advertise products on the air. So if you watch Captain Kangaroo on CBS national feed or Howdy Doody, a national feed I watched as a kid, or the Mickey Mouse Club, you they could advertise products, and so you’d have their products embedded, and that was a way to influence the kids. Mom, I want Kix, you know, for breakfast or mom, I want Borden’s chocolate milk. And so children’s programing was very profitable at the time, and WKY started with their own versions of children’s programming.

One of them, the earliest, was Space Science Center with 3-D Danny, Dan D. Dynamo, and he was a Buck Rogers–type character. Danny was a charismatic person. I got to know Danny well. I convinced him to give his 3-D Danny uniform to us. At one point he was mad at me because he said, I’m gonna have to give you that. So, you know, he used a different term, uniform. I said, yes, sir, you are, because it’s part of our history. So we have it today. But 3-D Danny went on the air, and us kids would rush home from school, turn on the TV on WKY to watch The Adventures of 3-D Danny going out in space. And then they started an interview show with cowboys. Of course, cowboy culture was huge at the time.

Thompson: Oh sure.

Blackburn: In the 1950s and the days of, you know, Shane the movie and Stagecoach, and you get all these great movies. Well all of us young kids in the ’50s wanted to be cowboys, and so they started a show called the Circle 4 Ranch. Channel 4 was the call number on the dial for WKY. So the Circle 4 Ranch with Foreman Scotty, and he was personable, charismatic, and it was a kids show. He had a kids on. He would interview, and he had a birthday horse, Woody, that we now have in the collection.

Thompson: So if you were at the at the show and you had a birthday, you got to sit up on Woody the Birthday Horse, right?

Blackburn: And some of the stage, after we got Woody the Birthday Horse, we were making a reproduction for an exhibit where people could really sit on it because every kid my age, I’m now 72. Every kid, even E. L. Gaylord’s daughter, Christy, thinks she sat on Woody birthday. And then she probably did because her dad owned the station. I thought I did, but I never did. But we all imagined that we were on that horse. Some of the stage managers told me they had to change the original saddle blanket to vinyl because the kids would get nervous and wet their pants on Woody the Birthday Horse.

(laughter) But it was a popular show, and they’d show cartoons and they’d have adventures and then Foreman Scotty and Xavier T. Willard, who was Danny Williams, who’d come over to the other side of the studio, and they’d have these adventures and they’d fight the bad guys, and John Ferguson, who would be more famous as Count Gregore, would often be the bad guy. They had Cannonball, that’s another person at the station. And if you look at it now, it’s kind of hokey. It’s kind of homemade. But as kids at the time would rush home, and instead of watching The Mickey Mouse Club, we’d watch these shows. So it became part of our culture.

The newspeople like Ernie Schultz, what Walter Cronkite was to me as a kid on national news, Ernie Schultz was locally. I trust that guy. He’s a real journalist. He’s a real newsman. Jack Ogle had that sense of command of the space. He was good, good-looking guy. His kids, of course, modern viewers know his sons and granddaughters who are on the air and the Oklahoma market. And then you had Ross Porter and then later Bob Barry and Bob Barry Jr., Jim Williams, and the weather, and it was like they were in your living room with you at the time, back in the black- and-white television days before you have so many choices. You had three stations in town, plus OETA eventually, but it was like they were part of the family. And you’d welcome them in when you’d turn them on that TV. And so for us Baby Boomers who grew up with WKY-TV, it has a special meaning. It was part of our lives. It helps define when we did things and how we did it, how we related to other kids in the schools. And of course, my mother being in the television industry with the magazine format, she was part of the community. So I had so many opportunities to do things around town because she was part of it. And so television was something special at the time, and it’ll never happen again. We will never have that same medium the same way. And the impact on the culture of the community and the way the community thinks of themselves, a sense of community, supporting what’s going on and bringing people together. TV was that glue that held us together in those early days and WKY was very profitable. It was a special place, a pioneer station in so many ways.

Thompson: Yeah. I want to go back to what you mentioned when TV first came, because I think it gives a sense of who E. K. Gaylord was and what his mindset was, which his mindset was we’re not going to do it cheap, and we’re not going to do it halfway. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it well and with quality. On November 3, 1939, there was an announcement in The Daily Oklahoman newspaper about television coming to Oklahoma City. People had heard of this technology, but, of course, but at that point, television, televisions weren’t available. People really didn’t have them in their houses yet. This is very, very early on. And so at Municipal Auditorium, they had, they set it up in the main auditorium there. That was their stage. They had seven large crates weighing 7,500 pounds for all of the equipment to be able to produce the first TV images in the state of Oklahoma. And they would bring people in to do these demonstrations, and thousands of people would come in to see this. And one of my favorite quotes that I read about this and doing the research is that E. K. Gaylord said, “I was talking to John Black, who is the owner of KOCY Radio, and he said there will be two channels assigned to Oklahoma City. We’re going to file for the first, and you need to file for the second, but there will only be two. And Mr. Black thought for a moment and he said, no, I don’t think this thing is going to work out. People are too busy these days to sit around and stare at a box. I think the future is going to be an FM radio.”

And it gives a sense of the kind of visionary that he was. And I can certainly understand the mindset of Mr. Black there from KOCY, because, you know, with radio, it could be, I guess a little bit more of a portable thing. Although it was pretty common for people to sit around and listen to the radio at that time. And of course, FM radio, I mean, no slouch itself. It went on to be important. But boy, he was such a visionary in bringing television and then, when they actually went to apply for their license, P. A. Sugg was the station manager at WKY. And he said, “We went into television when everybody else was losing money. And I remember going up to see Walter Dam at WTMJ in Minneapolis and George Burbank at KSD in St. Louis, and they all told me they were losing money. But Mr. Gaylord, who was in his 70s at that point, said, ’We don’t care if we lose money. We think the people of Oklahoma City deserve television.’” So this wasn’t a money thing for him. This was, we are a progressive state. We’re progressive city, and the way to put us on the map is that we’re going to embrace all of the latest technologies. And as you mentioned, there were way more people applying for an FCC license than they had bandwidth available at the time, and anybody who had gotten their application in before the deadline got a TV station, and all of those extra applications, it took them four years to sort everything out. So as you mentioned, WKY was the only TV station in the Oklahoma City market for four years. And so, they were able to choose at that point, NBC, CBS, ABC, and DuMont, which was another television network at that point. They could choose the all of the programming from each of those stations that they wanted, and they essentially got a four-year head start. And they finally were able to start broadcasting on Monday, June 6, 1949, at 7 p.m. So that is the first day. So June 6, 2024, was the 75th anniversary of the first television broadcast in Oklahoma.

Blackburn: Well, it’s one of those turning points in our history, as most people remember in their history classes in high school or college, is that you studied a lot of wars because wars are typically turning points. Things are never the same after. Television is the same thing, even more so than radio. Now radio had a major impact. But television was probably one of the biggest cultural changes, even if you throw it in the basket with movies. Television was in our homes, and the TV and on those radios, it was on all the time. And TV had a huge impact on the economy, connecting consumers with producers, which, in the heart of free enterprise, is adding value to something. And then finding a buyer and a seller and putting people together, driving the economy, promoting special events, letting club people come on and talk about rotary or the women’s book club or whatever it might be, or Oklahoma City ballet. It gave a voice to a community that was really not there before. And so TV, so people should put down June 6, 1949, as one of those turning points in our history.

Thompson: Absolutely. And in case you’re curious, country stars Wiley and Gene had a short segment, as did The Serenaders, which was a western vocal group. And, WKY, Ken Wright, who is the organist who worked on that Kilgen Organ, which we now have in our collection here at the Oklahoma Historical Society. He performed on accordion because they did this first broadcast, and for several years afterwards until they got their studios built, at Municipal Auditorium. And of course, they couldn’t be hauling that giant organ down there and all the pipes and everything like that. So he performed on accordion, and Jane Hall sang for that first broadcast. And in those early years, you know, 1949 into 1950, you could only watch television from 7 to 9 o’clock on Sunday through Friday evenings. That’s it. That’s all the programming they had until they started to build up. And of course, you know, get more programming from other stations. In February of 1950, they added Saturdays so that now you could watch television on Saturdays. And if you, all the commercials were live. So everything was done right there in the studio. There was no taped commercials at that point. All of the programs from the network arrived on 16-millimeter film that had been recorded from the face of the playing television back in wherever, New York, Los Angeles, wherever it was coming from. And so the quality was not great. It wouldn’t even be until 1952 that the transcontinental video cable reaches Oklahoma City. So we are talking about early pioneering technology, and they’re kind of just figuring out all this stuff on the fly.

Blackburn: Yeah. And I made my television debut on one of those live commercials. Of course, it was on another station, KOCO, my mom’s station, but she was doing a live commercial for Kitty Clover Potato Chips. Now, unless you’re from my generation, you never heard of Kitty Clover, but it was a locally owned potato chip company, and so I’m a little 12-year-old sitting there munching potato chips while my mom is talking about Kitty Clover Potato Chips. So that was my television debut in 1963.

Thompson: That is great. Please tell me there’s video of that.

Blackburn: Oh no, there’s not hopefully. A chubby little Bobby Blackburn.

Thompson: Oh, boy. What I wouldn’t give to see that footage for sure. The station first made a profit in 1951. They made a whopping $18.64, and P. A. Sugg threw a party to celebrate that cost him $200.

(laughing)

Thompson: So, this is, these are those early days. And, of course, you know, you move on to how do you cover the news? You know, the cameras back then were these giant cameras. And it was very, very difficult. To cover a tornado in Fort Smith. Johnny Shannon, he had to charter a flight and borrow a 16-millimeter camera and 100 feet of film, and then they had to come back to the station and develop it. And so these first things, even the first new set was totally black to allow a viewer to focus on the newscaster only. Gaylord thought that everybody, they didn’t want all these images getting people distracted. They just wanted the newscaster in a black studio. And of course, that’s certainly not the way it is today. We’ve got you know, all kinds of things scrolling. We’ve got logos, we’ve got marks, we’ve got the inset pictures. But back in those days, it was just a black studio and a desk. And they would, yeah, sometimes they would tack up their copy to read as they’re on the air. And a lot of times, they would just have it in front of them and kind of look down and up as they were broadcasting to the camera. So those early days, and one of my favorite stories, and, Bob, I want to take this part to mention the book, if you want to talk about the book for a second that’s out now about WKY.

Blackburn: Sure. Of course. Coming out of the television industry, I’ve known a lot of the pioneers in television my entire life at all three stations. And I’ve worked with all three very well, but especially a lot of people from WKY. One of the early pioneers there was a man named Gene Allen, and Gene Allen was not there the very first broadcast. But in the early years, he joined as a scriptwriter. He would write scripts for newscasts. He would write scripts for television shows, documentaries. He helped discover this huge collection of film shot by Bennie Kent out of Chandler at the turn of the century and saved it, and they used that. But Gene is a real kind of a historian in many ways, as well as a gifted scriptwriter. Well, by, oh the last ten years I would think, Gene and I had been talking. Gene was writing his memories of WKY Television, and he was meeting with other of the early pioneers. They’d get together for breakfast or dinner or something, a little reunion, and he was collecting these stories. Well, he told me he had a manuscript, so he sent it to me when I was still here. So more than three years ago, because I’ve been retired three years and three months. But I saw the manuscript. Well, I don’t know what to do with it. I recommended a Chronicles article. Nothing happened.

Well, Gene kept working on it till finally, about a year and a half ago, that Gene and Greg Robertson, one of his good friends and a friend of ours who helped us get the Kilgen Organ, called me and said, Bob, we still got this manuscript. We got all these photographs. Can you help us turn it into a book? So I think, how can I do that? I don’t have the money to publish it myself, and there’s no local publishers. So it dawned on me, the 75th anniversary was coming up. So talk to Wes at the time. Talked to you. You were here at the time. And I said, how about if I apply for a grant to see if we can support the book, to do a photo exhibit, to do a reception, to draw attention to this important turning point in history. And it’s not promoting KFOR. It’s promoting a turning point in history, was the whole point. You said yes. Wes said he would work with us. So I wrote out a grant application to the E. L. and Thelma Gaylord Foundation. Christy Everest, longtime president of that foundation, good friend of mine. We’re same age. Leadership class together. And over the years they helped us get the OPUBCO photograph collections. So many things they’ve done for the state of Oklahoma and for us. And so I reached out and did this application for the grant, and we got it. And through the Friends of the Oklahoma History Center, Samonia Byford, kind of my go-to person there. And so this all came together.

So I took the manuscript, edited, found the designer Skip McKinstry, who’s designed a lot of my books, and Greg Robertson helped a lot of ways. Others stepped up with photographs, but we produced a book, The Vision and the Dream: WKY-TV Comes to Oklahoma just came out last week, delivered only. There will be 900 copies for sale. So if people want a copy, and to remember the impact of WKY in early television history, is for sale here at the Oklahoma History Center, you all may wholesale it out. I don’t know what, but we hope to have a reception where people can see the photographs and the photo. I don’t know if you want to plug the date on that, but I just viewed those photographs earlier, and your staff is doing a great job putting that together.

Thompson: Well, and yes, as you mentioned, we’ve got a photo exhibit that we’re going to be commemorating the 75th anniversary, and that is going to be coming out on July 25. You can go to our website, okhistory.org, and find more information about that. But we will have Gene here, who wrote the book, and I’m hoping will be able to get some KFOR personalities here as well to open this up. But this will be a great new photo exhibit here within the Oklahoma Historical Society, here at the History Center. And I imagine it’ll be up for the next six or eight months before we move on to a different exhibit.

Blackburn: Well WKY/KFOR has been so important. They were leaders in producing syndicated shows. Buck Owens, who had Oklahoma connections. His folks were from Oklahoma, and his sister told our staff a couple of years ago that Buck really thought of the family as an Oklahoma family. So Buck Owens would come back to WKY to produce his television show. When I was a kid, Buck Owens was huge, and it was syndicated across the country. And that led him to Hee Haw, along with another Oklahoman. But we also had The Scene, Ronnie Kaye was on WKY Radio, started The Scene, the radio show or the TV show, a dance show, kind of like American Bandstand, but it was so well produced, so well done at WKY, it was syndicated across the country again. And so the technological differences in that station and others, they were able to produce. But WKY and KFOR have been innovators and saving lives with weather, reporting what’s happening at the Capitol, around the state, what’s important to us locally. It’s made a difference in the life of the community.

Thompson: Before we get to our guest, I want to talk about weather because it’s so important to our state and keeping people safe. And Harry Volkman was the state’s first weatherman, And he had served in different roles at KFOR and was recruited, or I’m sorry, at WKY, And he was recruited to be the weatherman because at this point, just get this. He had taken a few meteorological classes in college and so they said, okay, you can do this. And so all the equipment he had to work with was a large map of the US, a shortwave receiver and some headphones, and a teletype machine that was tied into the weather bureau. And that was it. Now this is interesting history where weather forecasting intercepts with Tinker Air Force Base, because Tinker came here, and it was a major hub for the air force, because they loved that it was halfway between Los Angeles and the East Coast as well. We’re kind of smack dab here. One of the things they didn’t take into account is these things called tornadoes, which can cause a lot of damage. So, by the late 1940s, they established the severe storm center at Tinker Air Force Base. And by 1948, they had developed the beginning stages of what would become an early warning system for storms, but the weather bureau didn’t want people panicking. And so they forbade, you know, anybody broadcasting any of these tornado watches, tornado warnings. They said, we don’t want to throw panic into the public. So it was actually, it was actually against the law for someone to say that because inciting panic. And so one of the things that they did is P. A. Sugg, who I mentioned before with station manager WKY, he assigned a reporter to go out to Tinker Air Force Base and do sort of a day in the life of the Severe Weather Center. And it was a day when there was severe weather, and so they issued a tornado warning. And, so, McGee called Volkmann and, Frank McGee, I’m sorry, was the reporter that was assigned, and he was out there, and he called the weatherman Volkmann and said, hey, this is what’s happening. And Sugg told him, put that on the air right now. This is in 1952. And Volkmann said, no, I’m going to get arrested. This is against the law. And Sugg said, no, go ahead and do it. I’ll take the blame for it. I’m the one who’s given the order. And so that was the first time that we issue a tornado warning over the television system. And of course, now, look at where we are. You know, our weather forecasting and warning people about severe weather is a major, major public service that’s offered by our television stations here all throughout Oklahoma.

Blackburn: Yeah, that’s where it all began.

Thompson: And so and then, of course, I’d be remiss also, the first color program to air on a local station was once again WKY-TV, April 8, 1954. And they were airing color television long before many other stations in the country. So you see this trend time and time again that WKY, which later would become KFOR, was setting the stage and saying, we’re going to do it bigger and better, and we’re going to be the innovators on this. And of course, I don’t want to, all of our stations across Oklahoma do such a good job today. And, and we have a wealth of riches when it comes to great reporters, great anchors, great weathermen and women. And so, but the genesis of that is WKY television.

So. Well, Bob, I am very excited about our guest that we have today. And of course, we’ve been talking about WKY and the great history of this important television station in Oklahoma being the first to do so many things, and we have a great person with us. Wes Milbourn has been vice president and general manager of KFOR since 2012. He’s been at the station for 33 years. He returned to Oklahoma City after serving as the general sales manager of WOWT in Omaha, Nebraska, since 1997. He worked as a local sales manager of KFOR from 1991 to 1997, and prior to that, he was with KWTV in Oklahoma City. He began his broadcasting career in 1967 at the radio station KMAN in Manhattan, Kansas, and in 1978 moved to Oklahoma City as an account executive for WKY Radio. So you could say WKY is certainly in Wes’ blood. He received his bachelor of science degree in journalism and mass communication from Kansas State University, and I have the pleasure of being in rotary with Wes. And I can say he is an unabashed Kansas State fan, and any time he has an opportunity to kind of rub it in when K-State beats OU or OSU, he loves OU and OSU, but he likes the purple more. But he is an unabashed K-State fan. And so, Wes, I’m just so thrilled to welcome you here to our podcast. Thank you for being here.

Wes Milbourn: Well, thank you for the invitation. My pleasure, my honor to be with you. And, there’s another guy sitting across the table I don’t want to forget. That’s Bob Blackburn. And, you’ve already read my resume. Are we done?

Thompson: That’s it, that’s it. We just wanted to talk about how great you are.

Blackburn: Well, Trait, while we’re on that note, I’ve known Wes well over 30 years because I was.

Milbourn: Maybe longer than that.

Blackburn: It could be longer than that because I’ve been around the television community forever. I’ve always had an interest. We started building the TV collection in ’89. That’s 1989. I don’t go back to the 1889. (laughter) In 1989, I started building a TV collection, and I’ve always reached out to the TV community because that’s a good way to get out to the people, to let people know what we’re doing on collecting history, saving history, preserving history, promoting, educating, and Wes has always been a great ally and a friend. We have so many artifacts. We’ve been able to work together, so some of the artifacts are long-term loan out to the station. One day I was at the station and told one of Wes’ stage people, I was waiting to go on air with Linda Cavanaugh that day, and I was just sitting there waiting. The guy was talking to me. I said, man, we’re short something for Saturday Night Live Wrestling with Danny Williams. And the guy said, well, right there against a wall are chairs that were on that set with the WKY stencil. So I call Wes. I said, Wes, I need one of these chairs. He said, take it.

(laughing)

Milbourn: Look out for flying chairs!

Blackburn: Look out for flying chairs! So that’s the kind of partner Wes has been to the Historical Society and a community leader in so many ways. So thank you for all your service.

Milbourn: Well, thank you. Thank you. A pleasure to be here. And thank you for what both of you do for the history of Oklahoma, not only in broadcasting but in all facets. And I know recently you had a roll out of the former first ladies’ gowns, inaugural gowns, and that was here last week, wasn’t it? The debut.

Thompson: That’s our new exhibit that we have up here on the third floor of the History Center, and it’s called Inaugural Impressions, and one of the great things about our collection is we have, ball gowns from most of our first ladies going all the way back to our first first lady, Mrs. Haskell, back in 1907. And, a lot of these dresses are very rare, and you don’t see this kind of clothing anymore, but we really wanted to highlight not just a fashion show, but the role that our first ladies have played throughout the history in terms of not only embracing whatever social causes that they might have embraced, but how they have shaped policy over the years here too. And so, a little plug, this exhibit was just put up a week or so ago. So, it’s a great exhibit. I want everybody to come see it. Some of these dresses are so fragile that this may be the last time that they’re ever displayed, so it’s an exciting opportunity for people to come learn a little bit more about some of the women who have shaped our state’s history.

Milbourn: And we had four of them doing a panel discussion led by former Governor David Walters at rotary. And I tell you what, Donna Nigh, she’s a hoot. She is a hoot. She is very spunky. And, that was a great, great, great, great program.

Thompson: Wes, I want to start out, and I want to talk about, you know, this is, this year is WKY’s 75th anniversary. And any time, 75 years is a long time to be doing anything. But let’s talk about, you guys had a big celebration at the station not too long ago. You invited me, and I had a chance to walk through, and you had so many of your TV journalists and anchors and people from in front and behind the camera from all throughout the years. And it was so great just in the brief time I was there to be able to hear some of those stories. You know, talk about planning that event and what it meant to your team and the community to mark this important milestone.

Milbourn: Well, thank you. It was a, it is a milestone. And thank you both for being there. You saw our display and tons of people. We’ve been working on it for probably the better part of two years, to put this together and start our planning. You can’t start the week before and try to figure things out, and I’ve got a tremendously good department head team. I had a vision, and they helped me carry out that vision. They all had their assignments. They all had their teams putting things together. And we couldn’t have been more thrilled to not only celebrate the 75th anniversary of WKY/KTVY/KFOR-TV, but also to show off our new facility that many people, many alumni have not seen. It was really designed for the alumni of Channel 4 and family that is currently and employees that are currently working and their families.

Thompson: And I heard a lot of people going through there going, oh, I remember that. That brings back memories.

Milbourn: We tried to bring back a lot of touchpoints. And thank you to the Oklahoma History Center. We brought back Danny Williams’ costume that he used to wear for 3-D Danny. We also brought in one of the first, one of the very first color cameras in the nation. Channel 4 was one of the first colorized stations around the country back in the early 1950s, 1954 I think is the exact date on that, and many of the other television stations throughout the country really didn’t grab that technology until the ’60s. And one thing that E. K. Gaylord did was that he built that television station the right way.

Thompson: Yeah.

Milbourn: And, when you look at our station, I hope he’s looking down and saying, with the news station, folks, Wes, you guys built it the right way. And when we built our new station, that was kind of the manta, was to do what’s right, do it the right way. I’d be approached by, which my department heads also had a significant part in designing their areas and ordering their equipment and all that. And, they’d bring me the price tag and I’d say, no, no, no, no, I’m not. Take price out of it. Take price out of it. What’s the right thing to do? And as a result of that, we have, I think, one of the most tremendous facilities in the nation right now. We built it to keep our employees safe. Okay? Our building before was 66 years old. The infrastructure was falling apart. It was very odd to me that when we had to demolish our buildings, we had to first clean them up and then tear them down. I still have a problem with that, but you have to abate the asbestos that was in the building and take care of that first and then destroy the old transmitter building and then eventually our our other building. But it was built to protect our employees.

As you know, we have severe weather. This past year already, Oklahoma has experienced over 100 tornadoes, and we want to be able to keep our employees safe when that bad weather starts coming down Britton Road. And our facility is all concrete and metal and built to withstand and EF-3, EF-4 tornado.

Thompson: Wow.

Milbourn: The windows on the building are 200-mile-an-hour projectile-resistant, and Studio B that we set up Danny’s Day in, is a kind of a cocoon within the cocoon. The whole station’s built to withstand an EF-3 or EF-4, but that studio is kind of a double protector and probably can withstand an EF-4, EF-5 direct hit. And so proud of how that all came together. And I think Mr. Gaylord would be equally as proud because that’s how he did it. He wanted to be a first in this and first and that, and we were first here in this marketplace to build this kind of standalone television station.

Blackburn: And Trait, I might add a connection between what they’ve been able to pull off with the station, as the location was the location chosen by E. K. Gaylord for his first radio station, WKY. So as WKY went from a hobbyist-type setup to needing a real building with a real transmitter with the tower. That’s a high spot in Oklahoma County out there.

Milbourn: Antenna Farm.

Blackburn: Antenna farm.

Milbourn: Apparently the highest elevation of the city. I don’t know how can, we’re pretty flat, so But apparently that’s the highest elevation of the city, and that’s why all the towers were built out there and why he they pretty much bought Gaylord Farms out there.

Blackburn: And so Mr. Gaylord, of course, buying a lot of land. Gaylord Farms, Gaylord Dairy was over by where Hefner was, so the family was buying land out. But when they got into radio, that was way out in the country. That was very far from downtown Oklahoma City. Today it’s kind of in the middle of the metro area, but it was out in the country, and what Wes has done is saying, no, there’s a tradition here. There’s legacy. Let’s build on that legacy. Let’s not abandon and go and start over brand new, new image and all. That legacy is there, and at that party, you know, you felt it because you’ve been around these people, and Trait, you saw it, is that when Count Gregore or you know, John came out, he played Count Gregore.

Milbourn: John Ferguson.

Blackburn: Yeah. John Ferguson, you saw Butch and Ben and you see all the Ogle family. They felt like that’s part of their lives. The memories connect all of those people, whether they were behind the consoles or lighting. I talked to the lighting guru from the early ’50s. He was there. These people have a sense of, this is my station. This is part of my life and my story. And what Wes did is brilliant, say we are going to just go to the same site, build on that tradition, and then go first class as the Gaylords would have had it. And when Wes told me, he made the same comment to me about hopefully the Gaylords are looking down, I put that in the book, The History of WKY, when I did a tribute to the Gaylord family. I quote Wes in there thinking the Gaylords would be happy.

Thompson: And since we’re here, let’s just go ahead and mention that the title, there’s a new book out that’s done by Gene Allen, who’s a longtime staff at WKY and KFOR. It’s called The Vision and the Dream: WKY-TV Comes to Oklahoma, and that’s a brand new book that is now available. Quick plug, available here for sale at the History Center in Oklahoma City, and I was looking through that book and do a lot of research. Folks, if you have any nostalgia at all about WKY, you want to get this book, because first of all, the pictures in it are worth it just for that. The photos that they’ve been able to to dig up here, but also just those early stories that, you know, there’s probably not a lot of people left from those early 1949, 1950 days at WKY.

Milbourn: You know, we had one.

Thompson: Yeah. Charline Caruthers, 97 years old. She was there.

Thompson: Isn’t that great?

Milbourn: We had Lee Allan Smith was there. Bob Dobson, who got his start and married his his wife at WKY, went on to NBC greatness.

Thompson: That’s phenomenal.

Milbourn: And, so yeah.

Thompson: But not a lot of folks left and so to capture these memories in this book.

Milbourn: And John Ferguson too. So there’s only a few left.

Blackburn: He was hired as an announcer.

Milbourn: When we did our 65th anniversary, Russell Pierson was there, and I think at that point in time, he was 102.

Thompson: Wow!

Milbourn: Dear Russell, I tell you, Russell and I met early on at WKY Radio, you know 930. To me, WKY Radio had the best fidelity of any AM radio station in the country and just had a real bassy, full volume versus tinny, like many AMs are. And one day I was at the International Fitness Center, which is long gone. That’s over there at basically Hefner and May, and saw Russell and here I am, a young 25-year-old punk, and I’m working out, and I think I’m strong and all, and so I saw Russell in the locker room, and Russell’s like 77 at this point. Okay?

Blackburn: Seems young now, doesn’t it?

Milbourn: Sure does. Like real young! And, so I said, Russell, hey, how are you doing? I’m doing fine. And he says, well, how are you doing, Wes? I’ve been working out. And I said, what have you been doing Russell? Well, I just got done with a short run. He just finished ten miles.

(laughing) And, as you know, he was a track cross country star, at Oklahoma State University. And that really put me in my place, I tell you. I went from a cocky little 25-year-old pumping iron, and he did 10 miles at age 77, and I just thought that was phenomenal. And I got a big kick out of that.

Thompson: Wes, as you think back through the years, and of course WKY and KFOR’s long history here in Oklahoma City. Are there a few moments in there that you’re especially proud of that this station was able to accomplish?

Milbourn: Wow. There’s so many. You would see that proudness in the lobby as you walk in, after you look at the history. We have a history display case of the artifacts that you have loaned us here from the History Center. And right around the corner from that is our Emmy case, loaded full of Emmys, and national Emmys as well. And so very proud of really that. Is there any one story? Probably not, because there’s so many of them. Most recently, Ali Meyer was nominated for a Peabody Award. That’s the highest award, for the Glynn Simmons story that she did, and basically it was because of her working on that for 20 years that got Glynn Simmons out from being incarcerated for almost 50 years, 48 I think is the exact number on that. And it’s because of her that he got out of jail.

Thompson: Yeah.

Milbourn: And out of prison and a tremendous nomination for the Peabody. There’s so many events that have happened. One thing that kind of stands out to me is, April 19, 1995, the Murrah Building bombing. And when that went off at 9:02, we are eight-to-nine miles north of downtown, and it felt like it was in our building. And this is a big television station, 66,000 square feet, and it rattled us, and we’re nine miles away. We thought something happened to our building immediately. And so we just started looking around, and we looked out our south windows and saw the plume, smoke plume. And so what was proud of that is I took my sales department and I said, you’re not salespeople today or for the near future, we’re going to be news people, and we’re going to go down there and help them out in any way that they need help. And so our television station, I always have prided myself on not being silos, all of us working together as a team to produce the best news, weather, and sports and information that we can, and we all came together. And I can remember I was ordering scissor lifts and portable generators. We went downtown, right before the second bombing threat came in. All of the account executives and all the sales department were helping out news. At that point in time, I don’t think any news department in the city had enough people to do everything. And so that was a real pride on, on, pulling people together and working as a team.

Not too many years after that, May 3, 1999, the tornado, same thing. The same thing. That tornado that devastated Moore, Oklahoma, with the highest ever recorded wind speeds ever on the face of the Earth at 308 miles an hour. Originally they wrote 318, but they downgraded it to 308, and no other tornado had produced anything like that on the Earth since then. Again, we came together. I can remember, who is now retired, Admiral Greg Slavonic and I jumping in one of the news vehicles, probably dangerously, because we loaded up the rear end of it with five-gallon cans of gasoline to hit all of our live points that we were around the city and to make sure that they had fuel for their generators, to make sure before we got to them, we’d stop at a restaurant and get them food, and that’s the kind of unity that we had and worked. I can remember Jon Hansen seeing us and waving us through to get to probably ground zero of the tornado, and with our reporters there and our live trucks, even saw Devin Scillian down there. And if you recall, Devin Scillian was here in Oklahoma City during the bombing and was on the anchor desk when it happened, did a lot of reports nationally for NBC, for us obviously at NBC. And he was noticed, by a station in Detroit, Michigan, KDIV, NBC affiliate there and got hired away to a larger market. We produce a lot of people here in this television station, that go on to bigger and better things, larger markets, and Devin still keeps in touch with us.

Blackburn: That all started with Frank McGee in the early days when newscasters, When I was a teenager, Frank McGee was one of the anchors at NBC.

Milbourn: Walter Cronkite.

Blackburn: Yeah, and Walter Cronkite on the radio.

Thompson: I’d like to go back to something you mentioned. You mentioned the 1999 tornado. It’s obviously, living where we live, that weather is a huge deal here in Oklahoma, and WKY was the first station to issue a tornado warning.

Milbourn: That’s correct.

Thompson: Way back in the early 1950s,

Milbourn: Illegally, by the way.

Thompson: That’s right.

Milbourn: Illegally.

Thompson: And I want to talk about that because, you know, just as a general observer, I think it looks like weather has been one of those things that the technology has advanced the most. And so we start out without having any computers, without really having anything. Radar maybe. But now we’re to the point to where, you know, the things that your team can predict are mind boggling. And now we know three or four days a week ahead of time, if it’s looking like on Tuesday, a week from now, the conditions are going to be ripe to develop these storms, and more often than not, they’re right. Now the storm might not hit exactly where they think it’s going to hit, but it usually comes to pass. And so can you talk about the station and its commitment to weather over the years and investing in weather technology? Because I would have to imagine this is a huge part of your budget every year.

Milbourn: And it is, it is. Yeah. Harry Volkman, yeah, broadcasted because he felt like there was lives in danger, and they were in 1954, Woodward, Oklahoma. Correct?

Blackburn: That was in ’49.

Milbourn: That was in ’49. So, Harry, in ’54, saw another tornado coming down the pike and issued a tornado warning. And back then, only government entities were allowed to do that legally, but it saved lives. And if you noticed, in some of our historical vignettes that we’ve done, we’ve got somebody on microphone from that era saying it saved lives.

Thompson: ’52, ’52. So I went back and checked my notes.

Milbourn: Oh, thank you, thank you. I tried to commit all this to memory, and it’s just.

Thompson: It’s hard. There’s a lot.

Milbourn: From there, if you watch some of the old, our vignettes that we did, he had chalk and was writing temperatures by hand on a chalkboard.

Thompson: Can you imagine? And there’s some of that old equipment that’s in our display at the front of the station. But, fast forward to today. Yes, weather is super important, and I’ll put, I will put, put any television station in Oklahoma City, any television station, mine, the competition, up against any major market television station, and we will blow their socks off. And weather is a big factor of that. Weather is a big factor of that. Mike Morgan, good grief, has been with us forever since the ’90s, and the technology that we have now is able to really, like you were saying, forecast it. Sometimes that certain things move it one way or the other, but we get a lot better handle on it than right at the last minute. And our job and our license is to protect and inform the public, the state of Oklahoma. Well, that’s happening out and, you know, Elk City or out in Woodward or down in whatever, Enid, Oklahoma. That’s not here. Well, our viewing area is roughly the western two-thirds of the state of Oklahoma, the western two-thirds.

Thompson: Yeah.

Milbourn: We have people counting on our information, life-saving information, to keep them safe. And yeah, it’s not over, Mr. Smith, it’s not over your house, and I know it’s not affecting you directly, but I’ll guarantee it’s affecting other people directly. And that’s what we’re here to do is to make sure that they’re informed and that we do our best job of of offering the information so they can make life-saving decisions on their own and taking cover.

Thompson: It’s always a little disappointing to me that, you know, you hear people that complain and, you know, oh, they said there was going to be a big tornado today, and nothing happened. Like, well, nothing happened to you, but in Sulphur or in Barnsdall, it happened.

Milbourn: Or Marietta.

Thompson: It affected people’s lives, and so I always get frustrated when I hear people talk that way.

Blackburn: When Wes first finished the news station, he had me out for a tour. Was that four of five years ago?

Milbourn: Seven years ago.

Blackburn: Seven years ago? Time passes. But I remember we were doing the tour, as we walked outside, he wanted to show me there’s a big canopy behind where a lot of the weather vehicles, and most of them had hail damage. And those employees of KFOR are out there in the middle of the danger, reporting to save lives. So they’re in the hail. They’re trying to stay out of harm’s way, of course, but they’re out there right in the middle of it, and you could see it on those trucks. Look at that hail damage. You probably don’t have to get that fix. (laughing) Just live with it. But that that impressed me when you gave me that tour.

Milbourn: Thank you.

Thompson: Wes, have you ever ridden along with one of those crews?

Milbourn: Oh, yeah. I’ve driven an Interceptor 4.

Thompson: Whoa. Okay.

Milbourn: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It is actually an Interceptor, a police Interceptor, and it’s built to withstand the hard ruggedness that we have out in the field. And in fact, those Interceptors are built to withstand a 70-mile-an-hour rear-end collision. I don’t know if you knew that.

Thompson: I didn’t know that.

Milbourn: And the wheels are, you’re able to go over a curb at 40 miles-an-hour. So I’m not telling my folks to do that, but the car is equipped to be pretty rugged and safe for whoever’s in there. We usually have a driver, and we usually have a meteorologist in there, because you can’t really drive and do all the computer work and everything and pay attention to what you’re doing, So it’s two-person, two-person crew.

Thompson: Talking about sports, because once again, this is another groundbreaking area that WKY, they started broadcasting OU football games, and then, you know, and those were just the home games. And then they started going and taping the away games and broadcasting those. And so over years, sports has become such an important part of any news broadcasts. And it’s what, you know, my son, he’s 16 years old, and all he cares about is what’s the latest NBA score? Who got traded in the NFL? It’s a huge part of what we do. Can you talk about some of the great sports personalities that have come across WKY and KFOR over the years?

Milbourn: Oh, sure. Bud Wilkinson obviously comes to mind. When I was at WKY Radio, I moved here in 1978. Grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, born and raised there. Started at KMAN Radio, 1350 on your radio dial in the heart of the Blue Valley. It’s time now for the Telecreek Report, brought to you by Cahill Engine Service. If we had the control board in front of me, I could still run it.

Thompson: He’s got a great radio voice, folks. I’m a little jealous.

Milbourn: And I’m told I got a great face for radio too.

(laughing)

Milbourn: But, I had a really fortunate career start at age 15, and a little bit on that and I’ll get to the, to the sports here, so I have an older brother Tom who just recently retired from being a news anchor for all of his career and currently lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and has been there for like 25, 30 years. And I’m at home at the house, and he’s working. He’s six years older than I am, so he’s working at the radio station. So my parents asked me to give Tom a call to see when he’s going to be home for dinner. So I call the radio station. I said, is Tom Milbourn there? And the gentleman and answered it said, who? I said, is Tom Milbourn there? Tom Milbourn? Yes. Okay. Just a minute. Well what happened, the person that answered the phone was the general manager, Lowell Jack, and Lowell Jack thought it was Tom pulling a funny on him because our voices sounded the same. And he said, let’s get him in here and have another Milbourn behind the mic. And so at age 15, I was behind the mic, rocking and jocking, joking and stroking, spinning those platters and doing news, weather, and sports and did that for nine years and moved into sales after that for a couple years at that station because they had a sales opening and probably nobody else knew the programming and knew the station any better than I did. So I got a nice early start there.

Had a buddy who I met in college, so I worked there during high school and college, by the name of Tom Cheatham. And the Cheatham family is well-known here in the community. And they advertised in community with Gene Cheatham, and all the Cheatham boys went to K-State. Tom is the youngest. So Tom and I were competitors in our classes. He was a pitcher at Kansas State University, on the K-State baseball team. I love sports, I love broadcasting, he loves sports broadcasting. We hit it off. So not too long after graduation, Tommy gave me a call, said we got an opening at WKY Radio. You need to come down and apply. And so at that point in time, Rob Adair was ready to start the Oklahoma State Cowboy Sports Network. WKY Radio was a flagship station for that. So I went down, applied, got the job. Back then it was only four salespeople: Tom Cheatham, Wes Milbourn, Carol Blakely and Pat Greaves. And I’ll come back to Pat Greaves, because Pat Greaves is the son of Alec Greaves, who was Chris Daniels at WKY Television doing bit things with Danny Williams and Foreman Scotty. And so the four of us were the salespeople there. Rob leaves about a year later, and I was promoted to be the manager of the Oklahoma State Cowboy Sports Network. And here I’m just mid-20s, I’m just a kid. But here again, broadcasting and sports, my dream job. So I had the opportunity, to get to know, at a very young age, Bob Barry Sr. Okay? Robbie Robertson, rad-i-ooo sports. Remember that? That was his sign off. I’m Robbie Robertson, rad-i-ooo sports.

(laughing)

Milbourn: And then Tom Dorado did my statisticians, and then on the field I had Bill Platt from Stillwater, KSPI up in Stillwater was my on-the-field mic guy. So got to know those people very, very, very well all season long. And on our first, my first game that we broadcasted out of Lewis Stadium, back then where it wasn’t nearly looking like what it is now.

Blackburn: A, erector set at that time.

Milbourn: Yes, and it was hot. It was like 104 that day. People are sitting like this. They’re dripping. They’re dripping. It’s hot. The sun is beating down. And I got word that Sugar Ray Leonard is going to come to the football game. I go, what? Yeah, Sugar Ray Leonard is supposed to be here.

Blackburn: For some very young listeners, he was one of the greatest boxers of all time.

Milbourn: One of the greatest boxers of all time is right. Well, I’ll be darned. About third quarter, here comes an entourage across the west side of the stadium, moving around to the north, and I go, doggone, that’s Sugar Ray Leonard. I’m going to see if I can get him on the radio. So I leave the broadcast booth, eave the press box, make my way around to the opposite side. I’m thinking all the time now, how am I going to get him on the radio? So I go up and introduce myself. Sugar Ray, I’m Wes Milbourn with Oklahoma State Cowboy Sports Network, we’re on the air live, broadcasting the game. We’ve got 30 affiliates throughout the state of Oklahoma. Would you mind saying a few words on our radio station? Well, I said, I tell you what. Let’s go down to the field, and I’ve got some Gatorade for you. Oh, you do? Because it was hot! (laughing)

Milbourn: So it was the Gatorade that was my hook to get him to go down there. And so Bill Platt’s down there, and for the better part of that quarter, he stayed with us on the field drinking his Gatorade, thank you, and visiting with our audience in between plays and feeding it back to Bob and to Bill Platt, and so that was kind of a highlight to have that and kind of a neat story. How am I going to get him down there Well, it’s the Gatorade. It was the Gatorade. (laughing)

Thompson: Do you remember around what year that might have been?

Milbourn: That was the first year Jimmy Johnson was head football coach.

Thompson: Oh, okay.

Milbourn: Yeah, that was when he was first here.

Milbourn: Yeah, yeah.

Thompson: I’ll be darned. And so you mentioned Bob Barry, and of course, we’ve had, Bob Barry Jr. So, you know, some of these great sportscasters that have come through your doors over there.

Blackburn: Ross Porter is one of my first memories, because I loved sports as a kid. I wanted to be a Yankees baseball player when I was 10 years old in 1961, and Ross Porter was a sportscaster at WKY, and every evening I had to be watching Ross for his five minutes of sports.

Milbourn: Yeah, yeah. Bob Barry Jr., sad day in my life when I got that phone call. We’ve lost Kathy Jones, Lee Evans, and BBJ and, that was on the Saturday before Father’s Day, nine years ago. It was June 20. And, you know, we have Brad Edwards too, who passed on us. And we lost BBJ way too early.

Thompson: Yeah.

Milbourn: So as part of our TV station, because he died before we moved in, I tried to involve a lot of the employees, okay, in helping us make decisions. You know, I didn’t want to be the only one. I couldn’t be the one. I can’t do this all by myself. I need a team of people to help out. So we asked, you know, instead of having is a regular newsroom, news conference room, the sales conference room, the general manager’s conference rooms. How would you name these conference rooms? And so we basically had a contest, of sorts. And so the main, the main conference room, our biggest one, as you saw, was called the Legacy Room. And as you know, we got a mural on the wall goes from side-to-side of all those folks. Many of them, not all of them, that are the legacy of the TV station. And you’ll see Oliver Murray up there, you’ll see 3-D Danny, you’ll see Lee Allen Smith, you’ll see Bob Barry, Bob Barry Sr., Bob Barry Jr., the Ogles, and we pay tribute to the legacy in that form rather than having pictures up and down the hall, and they get all crooked and all, we just felt that was a neater way to do it. Well it would be the general manager’s conference room, my conference room, is the Great State Room where we pay tribute to those who did great things for the state of Oklahoma.

Okay, We have the news, the news conference room’s called the Liberty Room. Don’t have pictures, but we have First Amendment rights sayings and freedom of speech. And we want the young reporters to, when they sit down in that conference room, see all that. This is what you’re here to do. Then we have a small conference room, and they call that now, in the building days, it’s a huddle room. Only have six people. Okay? And what better way to honor the Barrys, as to call it the Barry Huddle Room. And so in there, we have pictures of BBJ and senior and them in the broadcast booth and doing their thing, and so those were how we try to pay tribute to them. That’s the only conference room that has a name on it, and we’re very proud of that. Very proud of that.

Blackburn: You know, you mentioned the Great State Room, and I’ve always appreciated your support for this, but Galen Culver’s long-running series, Is This a Great State or What?

Milbourn: Oh, yeah.

Blackburn: He does such a great job and understands Oklahoma so well. I’m sure that’s not a profit center, but it’s a feature that distinguishes your station.

Milbourn: Thank you.

Blackburn: And it must be your support of saying no, we are the voice of the community. Let’s profile little different parts of the community. and when Galen went from tape to digital, he donated, you all donated the tapes to us. We have them here in the History Center today, and someday we’ll get all the digital copies, I’m sure. But Galen has done such a job. At some point, hopefully, he gets an Emmy, if he hasn’t already. He should have. But if he doesn’t, he should for being the voice of a community and profiling individual people, not just the rich and famous, but people who have done these little things that made a difference.

Milbourn: Yeah, he is, he’s fabulous. He is the best at doing that, and just last month was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, and he deserves it. And the year before that, Chuck Musgrove was in there. Linda Cavanaugh was in there. We’ve got a whole list. Tony Stizza is in there. We just a whole list of folks in there.

Thompson: Well, and talking about your staff today, you know, you mentioned Ali Meyer and of course, you’ve got, you know, Kent and Ken Ogle, and you’ve got...

Milbourn: Katelyn.

Thompson: Yeah. And Mike Morgan and Emily Sutton, and you’ve got just such a great staff today who do such a good job.

Milbourn: Thank you.

Thompson: And one of the things that I’m impressed with too is it seems that a lot of stations had gone away from covering the State Capitol and covering politics, and now I know that you guys and a few other stations also are finally coming back and dedicating a reporter to the Capitol, and it’s so important for people to understand what’s happening at the State Capitol. And it seems like, I don’t know if it wasn’t, you know, snazzy or if it wasn’t capturing people’s attention, but I appreciate that you brought that back again.

Milbourn: Thank you. Thank you, and you’re right, we do have dedicated reporters for that. And, you know, there’s a lot of things going on. It’s, you know, this is a presidential election year, but in two more years, it’ll be a gubernatorial election year. Governor Stitt will have termed out at that particular point in time. So we’ll be looking for Republican and Democratic candidates to run for office in two years. Those years are the big year for the TV stations. The presidential years, we really don’t see from an advertising standpoint a much presidential money, if any. Why is that? Well, we have 77 counties in the state of Oklahoma, and every bit of them are red.

Thompson: Oh, yeah. The outcome is kind of decided ahead of time.

Blackburn: Five precincts are not. That’s about it.

Milbourn: So the blue goes, well, we can’t win there. And the red goes, we don’t have to advertise because we already got everybody. So it is important to be involved in the community with state government and keep our folks, keep our viewers informed on what’s important to the state of Oklahoma and to them individually.

Blackburn: And again, that’s a tradition I’ll never forget watching. I was interested in politics when LBJ ran against John F. Kennedy in that primary. I took an interest in that, and I listened to the convention on the radio. But Ernie Schultz, who was the on-air personality with election results.

Milbourn: There you go.

Blackburn: At WKY. So to me, Walter Cronkite, even though a competing station but the Walter Cronkites and the Ernie Schultzs, they were part of my education.

Milbourn: Yep, yep. And now for over 30 years, we have Flash Point, our political weekly show. This past Sunday, that particular show featured Becky and Barry Switzer and a guest co-host on the Democratic side, governor, former governor Brad Henry, Jeff Hickman on the Republican side, and moderated by Kevin Ogle. And that show’s gone, it’s the only state show like that here in the state of Oklahoma. And there’s not many of them that across the nation can say they’ve had a local political show like that go for over 30 years, and we’re really proud of that, and we look forward to that every week. I try to greet and meet everybody that comes in for the taping. It’s usually done like on a Thursday or Friday prior to airtime. And it’s a great opportunity to keep also, again, Oklahomans informed on what’s going on. And when you get Turpen and Todd Lamb going head-to-head, it’s kind of quite entertaining.

Blackburn: Well, and you get both sides of an issue, which people don’t get a lot of time and media anymore. But getting both sides is unique, and it’s refreshing.

Milbourn: Thank you. Thank you. It’s hard to get a word in on edgewise with Turpen.

(laughing)

Thompson: Wes, as we start to wrap up here, one of the things that I’m curious about is the media landscape is changing so quickly now, and people are getting their information from so many different sources. And, you know, television has changed so much. It used to be you had the three stations, and now you have so many entertainment options. What do you see as the future for stations like yours? How are you going to continue to reach people?

Milbourn: Focusing on local, local, and local. To be local journalists, bringing local information to the people that are living here locally in the state of Oklahoma. A lot of things are talked about on Facebook and Twitter, but they don’t hold any accountability for what they’re saying. That’s the real key. They do not really present a true and fair and accurate representations of the facts. They pretty much present what their feelings are, and they’re one side. Well, as journalists, we don’t do that. It is our job to present both sides of the fence. Pro and con, Democratic, Republican, and that’s one thing that they do not do and probably will not do in the future that we continue to do and have done in the past the present, and we will continue to do that in the future at KFOR-TV, Oklahoma City.

Thompson: Wes, I just want to thank you for being here today and taking the time, and these are such great stories of your career and WKY over the years and into KFOR. And, you know, thanks for being such, I know you because we get to talk a little bit outside of your work life because we are in rotary together, and I know your heart for service, and I know your heart for giving back to the community. And I just want to say thank you so much for your commitment to Oklahoma City and the Metro area, and not only in what you do day-to-day in your everyday job, but also in all the things that you do that many people probably never see.

Milbourn: Well thank you. Those are very kind words. Much appreciated. Very humbled. Thank you. Thank you. Bob, great to see you, and just one little quick side note, Ida B.

Thompson: Oh yeah!

Milbourn: Ida Blackburn. I met Ida Blackburn, your mom, in 1978, and always have held her close to my heart, and what a what a great lady. I know she is on the competition, but what a great person, and we sure miss her.

Milbourn: Well you all had a sense of community in the broadcast community. She was very active in women in broadcast.

Milbourn: AWRT, back then.

Blackburn: But she was impressed with you. I remember talking, you know, when I first met you and she said, oh, yeah. Yeah. Mom was in sales by that time. She went off the air in ’75, and so she was in sales. And so you are all out there, but it was a community. You all kind of shared that responsibility to connect really, the supply and demand, free enterprise in its purest form. Putting the demand for businesses who needed advertising and customers and letting the customers know what services and products were there. You all were providing a key part of free enterprise in Oklahoma.

Milbourn: Yeah, well, quite a fraternity and sorority, if you will, of people that were in common cause, and we’re here from the advertising standpoint to help those advertisers sell stuff and that’s.

Milbourn: Yeah, find their customers.

Milbourn: That’s pretty simply put. So anyway, Trait and Bob, thank you. You’re very kind to invite me here, and I hope the ratings go up and not down on your podcast.

(laughing)

Blackburn: Thanks again for your friendship.

Milbourn: Oh you bet.

Blackburn: And your support of the Oklahoma Historical Society all these years.

Thompson: Thankfully we’re not dependent on the ratings. You know, if two people or 200 listen, we still are going to keep doing this because we like it.

(laughing)

Milbourn: Good, good. You know, it’s all about relationships. It is all about relationships and creating those relationships, and I really enjoyed doing that. I really enjoy doing it.

Blackburn: You’re good at it.

Thompson: Well Wes, all the best to you and all the best to our friends at KFOR. And, we’ll see you soon.

Milbourn: Okay. Thank you very much.

Thompson: Well Bob, I loved that conversation with Wes. He’s such a good guy, and I’ve just enjoyed getting to know him over the last few years of my time here at the Oklahoma Historical Society. And man, he had such great stories of some of those great personalities at WKY and KFOR.

Blackburn: Well, I think our listeners can see why he’s been successful. It’s not about Wes. It’s about the people who work there. It’s about the people who watch, and he understands that. His ego, as often happens in the television industry, has never outstripped his responsibility to his own team and to the people who depend on his station, and he’s been a great community leader over the years, a real friend of the Oklahoma Historical Society. We just had a great relationship for many, many years.

Thompson: Well, folks, that’s the end of this broadcast, and we appreciate you listening to us. We’re going to take a break in July, as we have done. We’re taking our summer vacation. And, Bob, I’m sure you’ll enjoy a little bit of a break as well, but we’ll be back in August with another great episode, so we hope you’ll take the time in July to go back and listen to some episodes you might have missed along the way. So with that, Bob, it’s great talking to you and we’ll see you soon.

Blackburn: Thanks, Trait.

Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.

(upbeat music playing)

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