Farewell, Fresno

Let me tell you a story. The first time I moved away from Fresno was around Valentine’s Day in 1973. I piloted my hotshot blue ’71 Ford Pinto up Highway 99 to Sacramento – then motored east on I-80 and over the snow-capped Donner Summit into Reno. I headed north on the 395 and – in the darkness of that cold winter night, arrived in Susanville, where I was about to assume my first full-time job in broadcast journalism.

I was 22, and the newly hired News Director at KSUE Radio. I was lured on board for the hefty salary of $500 a month, for which I would work 70-hour weeks and cover every story that took place in that tiny burg – and creatively dredge them up when nothing magically “appeared.” I attended night-time City Council meetings (during one of which the aged city clerk fell asleep and tumbled out of his chair in front of the council’s dais). I covered the Board of Supervisors, the school board and every law-enforcement agency.

I also reported on the Public Works Department, which gave me a great story one afternoon when I desperately needed one. The Public Works director told me he had a big, new, shiny machine of some kind. I drove out to the equipment yard and, sure enough, there it was, and it was big, indeed. I have no idea what it was called. But I remember what I did next – I had that Public Works guy climb onto that thing and start it up. I got on with him and interviewed him, with that giant piece of equipment’s loud engine as background sound for my recorder.

Then I rushed back to the newsroom (yes, little KSUE had a tiny newsroom) and put together a report that lasted at least four minutes. (Remember, I was desperate.) And after that story aired, several people outside the station told me how much they enjoyed listening to it. (Yes, people actually “listened” to radio in those days – especially residents of small towns where the only place to find daily local news was on their local station.)

Radio being what it was – it paid no money, then and now – I went bankrupt a mere four months after my arrival in Susanville. So I returned home to attend graduate school at Fresno State – hoping for a masters degree and a ticket to an academic job that might provide a more secure future than radio or TV news.

So imagine my surprise when – just a few months after I got back – I somehow became the youngest TV reporter in Fresno. But that’s another tale – below. I have lots of them – most of which will never see the light of day. But a few will, now, because it’s time – my time – to “wrap up” things here in Fresno – to move away one last time, this time in retirement. I’m finding it tough to find the proper “farewell” words. Frankly, I’m better at just telling stories.
*****
So let me tell you a story. The reason I was able to go to Susanville as a news director just a few months after graduating from Fresno State was because of one man. Bill Monson taught in the Radio-TV Department at Fresno State, and almost all his students hated him. He was arrogant. He was opinionated. He was a tough task-master in the classroom, and it was hard – oh, so hard – to get an “A” out of him. In fact, no one ever “got” an “A” out of him – they had to work their rears off to earn it.

I encountered Bill in the first semester of my second year on campus. I was lost, academically. My parents had wanted me to attend UC Berkeley and get a law degree. Sorry. I wasn’t interested. I knew exactly what I wanted to do: go to Fresno State and get a bachelors degree in geography. Then I’d get a job just like Mr. Bicknell’s. He was my great Hamilton Junior High geography teacher. He made geography fun (yes, I know it sounds impossible – you’ll just have to take my word for it).

Back then – we’re talking late ’60’s – Fresno State had something called “general education” requirements. That meant you had to take about 30 units in a variety of fields in addition to (and mostly before) you got into your “major” area of study. And one of those general education offerings was a speech class. No, Bill did not teach speech. But that class happened to be in the same building – in the same hallway – as KFSR, the campus radio station.

So I had to walk by KFSR every day on my way to class. And it intrigued me, because I’d been interested in radio as long as I could remember. As a kid, I had often parked myself in front of the old-time, five-foot high radio that sat on our living room floor in our old-time, small house on Arthur Avenue. And what I listened to back then – I had to be no more than 9 or 10 years old – was this wonderful weekend program on NBC Radio called “Monitor.” It was incredible. It featured big-name hosts like Gene Rayburn and Ed McMahon and Henry Morgan and Frank Blair and David Wayne and Barry Nelson and Joe Garagiola – presiding over hour after hour of continuous programming every weekend. And what programming! There was news and comedy and sports and variety and live remotes from around the world – all coming from something the hosts called “Radio Central,” which, by listening closely, I eventually learned was on the fifth floor of the RCA Building in midtown Manhattan.

“Monitor” entranced me. I started dreaming about becoming a member of the “Monitor” family. I practiced saying, as the hosts did when they went into station breaks, “It’s 17 minutes after the hour, and you’re on the Monitor Beacon.” YESSS! I wanted to be on the Beacon – I wanted to HOST “Monitor.”

But then I went into junior high, and I noticed that my fellow intellectuals did not know about, or listen to, “Monitor.” Their transistors were locked into rock radio – to KYNO or to KMAK. So, because I wanted to be as “hip” as they were – I begged my parents to get me a transistor – which they did – and I started taking it to classes. Short-sighted teachers there frowned on kids playing their transistors while they were talking, of course – so I’d listen between classes, during lunch hours and after school. And darned if I didn’t get to like KYNO and KMAK, and darned if I didn’t get to know and like the DJ’s. On KYNO, Sam Schwan and Dick Carr and Les Turpin and Glen Adams and Ed Mitchell held court, while on rival KMAK, it was “Sunny” Jim Price, Fred Kiemel, “Big Daddy” Dave McCormack, Frank Terry, “Little” Tommy Maule and Steve Jay.

Yes, I listened all week to rock radio. Got to know the songs – and the guys and gals who sang them. Got to know and love the local DJ’s. But weekends – well, weekends were always different, and I always returned to “Monitor” to hear “big-time” network guys.

Yet by the time I got to Fresno State, I knew I had no chance in broadcasting. My parents pooh-poohed the idea of getting into such a “low-class” business – the law, they said, that’s the future. Get a law degree.

So naturally, because I was a typical teen who did not want to – and hardly ever did – listen to my parents – I decided to “show them.” There would be no legal degree for this Hart boy. No, sir. I’d get a GEOGRAPHY degree – become a teacher – and still be able to listen to KYNO and KMAK and, yes,“Monitor.”

But back to that hallway in the Speech Arts Building at Fresno State – the one with both my speech class and the campus radio station. I decided to – what the heck? – see if I could become a DJ on the station. After all, they needed volunteers for all those board shifts, and I’d listened to radio all my life – what could go wrong?

So I volunteered, and soon afterward had my first air shift – 4 to 6 p.m. Thursdays. We played MOR – Middle of the Road – music. We had to run our own control boards and try to sound “good.” And I was scared to death. That first day on the air, my hands shook as I opened the mic and made my first, ever, over-the-air announcement. I think I said something witty like, “You’re on the go – with Dennis Hart!” Horrible.

But after that first shift – when my shirt was dripping with sweat – and maybe my underwear was, as well – I came away thinking, “Hot damn! I kind of liked that!” So I took the “next step” – taking a beginning broadcasting class – the history of broadcasting. And hot damn, I liked that, too! So I took the NEXT step – I enrolled in Bill Monson’s audio production class. And, brother, it was not easy. Monson had us do increasingly more difficult audio productions – starting with simple 30-second commercials and – at semester’s end – an actual scripted “program” that required a director, an engineer, and a live announcer, all positioned in the Main Radio studio. Our fellow students would listen, down below, in the classroom that “looked up” to the Control Room.

And, hot damn – if I say so myself, I produced one helluva show. It was a take-off on Clement Clarke Moore’s “Night Before Christmas,” and it featured recorded music, live and recorded sound effects, and all of Monson’s other requirements. We had rehearsed like heck, and my crew and I were on top of our games that morning. But Monson thought he’d “caught” us at the end – when my show apparently ended three seconds “short.” Bill had his stopwatch in the air, ready to snap it off with the “I’ve gotcha!” movement he was known for – until I ended that show with, yes, the NBC Chimes! Yep, the same chimes I’d heard for years on weekend “Monitor.” Those chimes took three seconds – and allowed me to end My Great Production on time!

And damn – immediately after that class, Monson called me into his office and said something no one else had ever said: “You could make it in broadcasting.” I was electrified. What Bill did that day was send me on the way to a 40-year career in radio and TV. And he did more than that. Bill became my college mentor. When he began hosting a Sunday night talk show on KYNO (yes, Bill was more than a teacher – he actually had years of high-level broadcasting experience), he hired me as his first phone screener. Later, when he started taking nights (and even one summer) off, I became his substitute host.

For whatever reason, Bill thought I had some kind of future in “the biz.” He never wavered in his encouragement and his prodding. We became friends, and after I graduated, that friendship just kept going. Over the decades, Bill remained a dear friend and confidant – the best anyone could ever have. When I moved out of Fresno a second time – to teach at Iowa State – we started writing letters to each other. As long as I was “away” at various jobs in various cities, big and small – we wrote back and forth. I still have most of his letters, stashed away in one of my “never-to-be-thrown-out” containers. They are my reminders of our incredible friendship that ended only with his death in 2005. At his funeral on California’s Central Coast, I broke down and cried when I stood up and told the crowd what he had meant to me – how he had encouraged me, given me the confidence, to become a broadcaster. I miss Bill to this day. Damn, I miss him.
*****
Let me tell you a story. Ames, Iowa, was the best place we’ve ever lived. And it was the worst decision in the world when Sharon and I left Ames after only two years. We arrived in 1979 after I’d spent five years at Channels 30 and 24 in Fresno. Those were, indeed, five crazy, eventful years. For starters, I met Sharon while I was a reporter at 30. She was a news story – a high school newspaper editor who had gotten into trouble for printing a piece about drug use on her campus. I interviewed her for a Channel 30 story and fell in love with her almost immediately. She was cute, she was smart, and did I say she was cute? And smart?

I met her on Valentine’s Day in ’74, we got engaged the following Christmas Day, and we got married on July 5th. No, I don’t remember why we didn’t make it a holiday trifecta and get hitched on the Fourth. While I was at 30, I covered the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping, a couple of visits from Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter (the president and future president), and the bribery trials of a city councilman. I also had moved “up” into newsroom management as a producer and then assignment manager.

And I had, by that time, earned my masters degree at Fresno State (remember, that’s why I had come back to town), and really, really wanted to teach. So somehow, again, I lucked into a job – teaching broadcast journalism at one of the great J departments in the nation – at Iowa State University. Holy cow! I was a babe – the youngest faculty member in a department of men and women who had some truly distinguished broadcast and print experience. My Iowa State teaching mentor was the legendary Jack Shelley, the WHO Radio and TV news director who, among other things, had covered World War II in Europe, the first atomic bomb tests and Khrushchev’s visit to Iowa. In his spare time, Jack helped found the Radio-TV News Directors Association.

But there were others on that faculty – others with great professional backgrounds. Their names included Beell and Kunerth and Emmerson and Blinn and Boyd and Disney and Gillette – and they had become outstanding teachers. I learned how to teach from them, how to “reach” students and how to “guide” them into, we hoped, impressive future careers.

I had a great time in Ames. I loved being in the classroom and was lucky to become the adviser to SPJ – the campus chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists – just at a time when there was a core group of student members who were as eager to make it work as I was. We won national chapter of the year honors – an incredible achievement by those wonderful kids who – to this day – remain my friends. Yes, echoes of Bill Monson.

While I taught at Iowa State, Sharon attended classes there and became a certified teacher. She also became a producer on WOI Radio’s “Talk of Iowa” program (WOI was the NPR affiliate owned by Iowa State). We rented a duplex at 13th and Marston for a year, then bought a house just down the street on Marston. If we’d stayed, we would likely have had wonderful lives in Ames.

But then came the Winter of Our Discontent. It snowed like heck that second winter in Ames, and worse than that, it got cold – terribly, terribly cold for a terribly, terribly long time. And being too young to know what we were doing, we decided that Cold Weather should, and would, determine our careers. So I went and did it – got a job back “in the biz,” in the warmest spot we could find, to make up for chilly Ames. We moved to Phoenix to work at KPNX-TV.
*****
Let me tell you a story. After leaving Ames, we spent most of the next 15 years “on the road,” toiling in TV. And it was quite a road, indeed. Phoenix was an outstanding place to live and work. Yeah, the weather was hot, but we had a stylish condo in Scottsdale, we went to lots of ASU football games in Tempe, and, oh, yeah – the station was fantastic. KPNX was owned by Gannett, and it spent tons of money to overcome long-time news leader KOOL-TV. We had an incredibly collegial newsroom – the best I’ve ever worked in. Our prime anchors – Kent Dana, Linda Alvarez, Bill Denney and Dewey Hopper – were easy to work with – our reporters were wonderful – and more important than all that, our news director was the finest I’ve ever known. Al Buch had come out of KMJ-TV in Fresno, and I’d met him there when I worked at the competition, KFSN-TV.

Al showed great trust in me – made me executive producer – and I worked my tail off for him. I loved being in that newsroom, adored living in the Valley of the Sun, and enjoyed being part of a really good newscast. So naturally, we left. Al turned down the news director’s job at KNBC-TV in Los Angeles – and that upset me so much (see, I wanted to go with him to LA) – I foolishly took a job I never should have taken – in Detroit.

Yep, it was another executive producing job – this time, in the worst city we’d ever live in. Hated Detroit – which, back in those ’80s, was a dying, burned-out shell of its former self – hated the crime that made so much news there – and hated being there. I will say, however, that Greek Town was nice – though getting lost outside Greek Town after a Saturday night there was, uh, frightening.

So it was on to Buffalo – you see, the man who had hired me in Detroit was another friend who had come from Fresno (yeah – Fresno spawned some big-time news people back then – people who spread out across the nation and sometimes called me to go with them) – anyway, the man who hired me in Detroit went to Buffalo and hired me there. I liked Buffalo better than Detroit. Buffalo was this dying industrial city – but it had lovely old neighborhoods and a decent downtown. And I enjoyed our station – WKBW – the legendary CapCities outlet that was as dominant a No. 1 as any station in the nation. And we had a neat address at that place – 7 Broadcast Plaza. Yeah. Nice.

But when my Fresno-Detroit-Buffalo connection shuffled off to Pittsburgh – we decided enough was enough. Enough rust-belt living. Enough never-ending blizzards. So – with the great help of yet another former Detroit colleague – one who had gotten the boot there and landed in San Francisco – Sharon and I headed for the City by the Bay – the home of Herb Caen, the 49ers and KPIX-TV.

You have to understand that for years, I had longed to live in San Francisco. I had taken a subscription to the legendary San Francisco Chronicle when I was in high school in Fresno. I’d been reading columnists Caen and Art Hoppe and Charles McCabe and Stanton Delaplane and Terrence O’Flaherty seemingly forever. I had often visualized spending far-in-the-future Saturday nights, eating at restaurants that Caen always championed in his columns – Jack’s, Trader Vic’s, Tadich Grill – and spending leisurely Sundays at my far-in-the-future flat on Telegraph Hill.

The reality is that I barely made enough money in those early years at KPIX to afford the rental house we managed to secure on Mount Davidson. It had two bedrooms and no insulation and was in the foggiest-of-the-fog-belts in the city. That house was always cold and gloomy, and we had to burn fires in our fireplace in July to stay warm. As for the job – I was producing the 6 p.m. newscast when we had an earthquake at Morgan Hill one day, a quake that allowed me to win a series of awards, including an Emmy. But there was no money for Trader Vic’s or Jack’s, and the only views we got from Telegraph Hill were when we drove up there to visit Coit Tower.

Our son Bradley was born while we were in San Francisco, and afterward, we briefly returned to Fresno – yes, Fresno — to teach journalism at, yes, Fresno State. Once again, I thought that would provide a more stable life than broadcasting, but once again, I got that nagging “old feeling” back – the one that prodded me to return to the excitement that TV news provided. So I took an executive producing job at WSB-TV in Atlanta. Nice town. Great station. But not good enough to keep us from returning to San Francisco for another job at KPIX a couple of years later. Yeah, second time around at Channel 5. And this time, the earthquake we endured was a big one – the Loma Prieta. You can read more about what happened that memorable day elsewhere on this blog site. Suffice it to say, it was dramatic and life-changing.

Our Amy was born when we were in San Francisco that second time – and afterward, we took off again, this time to Southern California and to KNBC-TV. Yes, years after we left Al Buch in Phoenix when he turned down a job at KNBC – I lucked out again and reached my goal – working for the National Broadcasting Company. The network. NBC. So naturally, one more (and one last) time, we hit the road a couple of years later, and it was that old familiar route – yes, back to San Francisco and, yes, back to KPIX-TV. Go figure. And after a few more years in the Bay Area, it was time to leave that exhausting “fast track” of broadcasting and go back to simpler times in easier-to-live places. Yep. Fresno.
*****
Let me tell you a story. When I was born at the old Saint Agnes Hospital in Fresno, I became one of 90,000 residents in the city. The house I lived in had been built in the early 1920’s. My parents bought it with cash right after World War II. It had all of 900 square feet – two bedrooms, a bathroom and a floor furnace in the living room. We never had much money, but we never went hungry. Dad worked as a mechanic at Crockett Bros., downtown at Broadway and Stanislaus, and Mom was a “stay-at-home” who kept the family together and raised the kids. I had a brother who was 10 years older, and we were never close.

That neighborhood around our home was a great place to grow up. There were lots of other kids my age in that area, and we played baseball or wiffle ball every summer night after dinner. We wouldn’t stop until it got too dark to see the ball. We played football on autumn weekend afternoons after we had raked all the leaves that had fallen from the gigantic sycamore and maple trees that lined our streets – and after we’d put those leaves in enormous piles in the gutter and lit them on fire. No one told us back then that burning leaves polluted the air – and the truth is, those burning leaves smelled incredibly good.

Fresno was so small and so safe then that after junior high school on Fridays, I could take the No. 4 bus from my neighborhood to downtown – walk to Woolworth’s to pick up the latest KYNO Top 30 or Top 40 lists – and take the bus back home – without anyone worrying about me. The bus rides cost 5 or 10 cents, as I recall. The route for No. 4 ran a block north of our house, and the “bus stop” was a place on the grassy strip in front of a wonderful ranch-style house on the corner of Arthur and Yale. Today, that house looks exactly like it did then.

Downtown was an exciting place when I was growing up. Fulton Street had great stores – Montgomery Wards, Roos/Atkins, Penney’s, Gottschalks, Newberry’s, Grant’s, Harry Coffee’s – some wonderful tall buildings, all built in the go-go days following World War I – and several incredibly ornate movie houses like Warner’s, Hardy’s, Wilson and Crest. At Christmas, Fulton was decorated with colorful bells that were hung over the street, and store windows glittered with glorious Christmas scenes. It was magical.

I loved growing up in the Fresno of my youth. Yes, I dreamed those big dreams of moving away – and, through some pure luck, I was able to see most of those fantasies come true. Of course, living those dreams meant moving away for nearly two decades, and when we returned for the last time, Fresno had grown dramatically, and so had its problems. All those years of increasing traffic had helped pollute the air — so there was no more raking the leaves and burning them in the gutter – and no more burning wood in fireplaces on some winter nights. And crime had gone up. But though Fresno had expanded oh-so-much, it was still recognizable as the Fresno I knew as a kid.

And it still is, all these years later. That’s what makes leaving so tough – and leaving is, indeed, what we will do this Friday – one more time, one last time – when Sharon and I drive out of Fresno and head west, to the Central Coast. Our trek will take place almost exactly 45 years to the day when I first moved out of Fresno – and almost 44 years to the day we first met.

No, it does not seem remotely possible that so much time has passed so fast – and that so much has happened with us. It’s been a grand and glorious and incredible ride – full of twists and turns, ups and downs, and highs and lows. Oh, the stories we could tell – and we will, in the future – but not here, not in Fresno. This is the last line of the final story I’ll ever get to write from my hometown.