Start Up TV Station

From My Times, My Town by Walt Bodine
Kansas City Star Books, 2003

On the days surrounding my Sunday nights at WHB, I was piecing together a living. Luckily, in October 1969 a new television outlet went on the air, the first locally owned station in the area since The Star sold WDAF more than a decade before. Bill Wormington, the general manager and one of a score of local investors, hired me as a news director for the new venture -- KCIT, Channel 50. My news staff consisted of Mary Loy Brown, who covered days, John Hayes, the evening newscaster, and Steve bell on nights. I filled in on all those shifts.

The station had no network affiliation, but it had a strategy. As a UHF channel, one of the ultrahigh-frequency bands numbered from the teens through the 80’s, KCIT was on a different portion of the TV dial from what most viewers were accustomed to. For a while, we gave away UHF antennas. Our primary pitch, however, was our independence. At that time the three commercial network affiliates in town -- WDAF, KCMO and KMBC -- had had it their way for years. Given the chance to carry a lucrative on-time show, they’d bump an episode of a regular network show despite objections from the show’s loyal viewers. KCIT jumped at the chance to carry those shows. One problem was explaining this succinctly in our promotions. We hired an ad agency, but it didn’t coming up with a good answer. In a meeting to discuss the problem, I blurted out, “How about billboards that say, ‘See What You’ve Been Missing’” We carried that theme into radio commercials and some print ads. It seemed to work.

Our newscast was scheduled every half hour. Each lasted a minute and a half, and they opened with, “Now, a TV 50 fastcast.” That was a tongue-twister. One of our fill-in announcers, who was not above having a couple of beers waiting his turn, sometimes crashed badly just trying to say the phrase.

KCIT’s physical plant was at 2100 Stark in the unincorporated Blue Summit area between Kansas City and Independence. It consisted of a Quonset hut containing the control room. Connected to that building was a large trailer with offices for the news and other departments. There wasn’t the feeling of permanence you got strolling the halls of Channels 4, 5 or 9. In stormy weather, the hail beating down on our Quonset hut was guaranteed to drown out the newscaster’s voice and leave the audience wondering whether the station was under machine-gun attack.

There were problems aplenty. Nothing shatters your confidence quite like discovering that the cameraman and all the people in the studio are laughing at you while you’re on camera. You can’t hear the laughter, but you can see it. “What happened?” you think,“What have I done wrong?” Once we were using a rear-screen projector color-coded to yellow. I stood in front of a yellow background wearing a yellow shirt and tie. No one had told me that you shouldn’t wear clothing the same color as the back ground.

My line was, “Remember: Tonight, ‘Stagecoach West’ will be the evening feature film beginning at 8 o’clock.” They shot me against a scene from the movie showing the stagecoach coming down a hill. I was supposed to disappear when it came to me, but upon reaching my yellow shirt the little stagecoach with its team of horses went rolling across my chest, disappearing perhaps in my inside pocket, only to emerge from my left shoulder a second later.
Looking at the tape, the producer said, “That’s all right, let’s use it.” It made for a little conversation around town -- which that station dearly needed.

Before long, KCIT ran into financial difficulties. You knew things were tough when, on payday, employees jumped into their cars to take their paychecks to the rural Missouri bank where the station had its account. In mid-1971 KCIT went under.
The day the station died, the program director, Bill Ladesh, an old hand in the business, had to do the necessary things. As curious executives at other stations around town watched on their own sets, he read on the air a message from the Federal Communications Commission and played the national anthem. Ladesh added his own special touch -- the famous Warner Brothers cartoon finale, “That’s all, folks!”

For those of us who worked there, the closing created an eerie feeling. We were used to the routines of broadcasting and now none of that mattered. Screens all over the station went dark. Here and there, a knot of people stood and talked. Others loaded their lunch boxes and headed for the parking lot. Some of them looked back, and some didn’t.