Unlikely Gifts with Diane M. Simard
Unlikely Gifts with Diane M. Simard
EP 6 KOLN-KGIN 10/11 STRONG in Lincoln, Nebraska
Larry King, Editor/Producer of the Unlikely Gifts Podcast, takes center stage as he and host Diane M. Simard journey back in time to central Nebraska in the early 1970s. Back then, Larry was a TV Director at KOLN-KGIN 10/11 Strong in Lincoln, Nebraska, and he reminisces about the station's broadcasters and managers.
Who remembers Gateway to Home on Sunday mornings? Mordy Mouse? Davey and Goliath? Cartoon Corral? Miss Linda and Romper Room? Larry also shares his memories of Nebraska football and the great Bob Devaney.
Personal website: https://www.dianemsimard.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DianeMSimard1965
LinkedIn (Personal): https://www.linkedin.com/in/diane-moravec-simard/
LinkedIn (Unlikely Gift Productions): https://www.linkedin.com/company/81847025/admin/
Diane's book: https://www.dianemsimard.com/book/
Larry's Sorta Fun Stories podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/larrys-sorta-fun-stories/id1612127522
Hello and welcome to episode three of the Unlikely Gifts Podcast. I'm your host, Diana M. Samart, and I'm here with Larry King.
SPEAKER_01:Good morning to you. Well, good afternoon, or wherever we are.
Diane M. Simard:As promised, today we're gonna flip the script and I will be asking the questions. Larry?
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
Diane M. Simard:Are you ready for a journey back in time?
SPEAKER_01:Well, you know, that's amazing because I'm not used to I'm not used to being the the the answer man, I guess, being interviewed. So go ahead. The the great thing is we want to explore the fact that we both were in Nebraska. And that's that's the exciting thing for me because it was some of the best years of my life.
Diane M. Simard:Well, mine as well, thank you. And and and that's where I have my humble beginnings, is in central Nebraska, of course. And uh we do, since we met fairly recently, Larry and I, we continue to explore what we have in common, which, as he mentioned, includes his time in central Nebraska in the 1970s. And that's when I was morphing from little girl to awkward teenager. So I'm on a mission to capture stories about the unlikely gifts I experienced that influenced me to become who I am today. And you can read about them in my monthly blog, Middle Age Moxie, in the blog archives on my website at DianeMSumard.com. So, Larry, please take us back to your career start. Where did you grow up and how did you become interested in television and radio?
SPEAKER_01:Oh my goodness, I grew up in the Peoria area in Illinois, uh central Illinois. And um I I always wanted to be a radio announcer, I guess. Uh when I was in high school, I wanted to be Jack Parr. And if you don't know who Jack Parr is, he was before Johnny Carson, and uh I always wanted to do the tonight show. So out of that I got into radio and television. I couldn't couldn't stand going to college, so uh I skipped school and went to the TV station and learned all about television production.
Diane M. Simard:So did you have any formal training in broadcasts?
SPEAKER_01:Not at all.
Diane M. Simard:Not at all. Wow. So self-taught. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_01:Self-taught, yeah. Uh I've taken a couple of uh courses at I went to the University of Kansas once for a seminar and and things like that, but other than that, no. It's all on-the-job training.
Diane M. Simard:I love it. I love it. Well, so how how and when did you make your way to Lincoln, Nebraska?
SPEAKER_01:1969 it was. I was in Lincoln from 69 to 71 at the TV station. And uh, so uh I'd been a TV director in Peori, Illinois. They got a call that they needed somebody in Lincoln, and I fit the bill, and uh they flew me out, and by golly, I got the job.
Diane M. Simard:So, and which uh television station was this in Lincoln at the time?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it was 1011 strong. There was only one TV station in Lincoln, Nebraska for 40 years. Uh Jim Ebel, the the station manager, did a good job of keeping other stations out.
Diane M. Simard:Ah, interesting. So obviously, some uh a very wise businessman, and he was he was very um, I'll just say tactical in his approach.
SPEAKER_01:Tactical and technical too.
Diane M. Simard:I love it. Well, so what was Lincoln like back then?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it was a nice town, nice place to grow up, nice place to raise your family. Um, I'm not sure if it was that friendly. I always heard it was, you know, kind of clickish. Uh if you didn't grow up in Nebraska, you weren't part of the the the team, but I was welcomed in after a couple of days and I got along quite well.
Diane M. Simard:Yeah, that's how I I just assumed we're always happy to just see other people growing up in Nebraska. So everybody's a friend and neighbor. And and of course you need your friend and neighbors to survive the weather and to be a farmer there. So uh I did I was doing some research and I was fascinated by this fact that um 1011 Strong, as you knew it, which is now known as 1011 Now, has been located at 40th and Vine in Lincoln since the station went on air in 1953. I just think that's amazing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and it's such a beautiful building. It started there um and it just kind of expanded, but it's it was a great production facility. I was excited about being there.
Diane M. Simard:So please explain what your job was at the 1011 station and what all you did during a typical shift.
SPEAKER_01:Well, my typical day was I was in the afternoon, I was a TV director, and so I came in in the afternoon, like at one o'clock, something like that, and I worked through to 10 o'clock through the 10 o'clock newscast. And of course, Midwest we are. We have the news was at 10 10 o'clock in the evening. So I did the 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock news. Um, and of course, I did Cartoon Corral, which is where we got involved. That was at 3:30. But uh, the afternoon shift involved creating local commercials, and so for Miller and Payne or Ben Simons or uh O'Shaefer TV. I don't know if you remember that, but fact is I was driving through Lincoln or Nebraska a couple of years ago, and I saw one of Mr. Schaefer's sons, who we grew up is still doing the commercials for Schaefer TV.
Diane M. Simard:Well, such such risk rich history. And we were discussing in a previous conversation about some of the the the news and weather um talent. And can you tell us a little bit about them?
SPEAKER_01:Well, there was a great Bob Taylor who was a weatherman. Now, my wife at the time had grown up in the state of Kansas, and she had grown up watching Bob Taylor do weather. And and he was a uh you know a very important person. Then there was, of course, Mel Maines who did the local news, and then Bob Taylor came back and did the national news. And then we had sports. But so that was the news block. It was it was kind of the 1011 strong. They always thought the most important thing to do was to do the weather first, because people of Nebraska needed to know what the weather was going to be. And then they did the local news and they did the national news, and then they did the sports, all in 30 minutes.
Diane M. Simard:Wow. I I had never heard of, and I don't recall the weather being on first. Oh, yeah. It makes sense.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Now the audience. Bob Taylor was always in the studio. I can remember seeing him in his, he was always neatly dressed, curfeered to the finest, smoking a cigarette, making the doing the weatherboard, and uh uh smoking a cigarette. Did I say that? And of course, Bob died from cancer from smoking cigarettes.
Diane M. Simard:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And of course, at the end of the weather board, which was always rolled around the studio, that could be placed any place in the studio. There was a a can for Bob's cigarette butts. So just one of those little things you might remember.
Diane M. Simard:I remember one of the unique aspects about 1011 was its lineup of Sunday morning programming. So tell us uh a little bit about that and what made it so unique.
SPEAKER_01:Well, Sunday morning a program called Gateway to Home Buying, and it was a two-hour program, a block, and it was sponsored by Gateway Realty. And in the two-hour segment, it was they showed cartoons. But in between cartoons, our friend Lita Powell Drake, aka Cat Calamity Gate, sold houses for all the the Gateway Realty offices across the state. Because Gateway Realty actually was the very first franchise real estate company in the country. And um uh so a guy named Ray Colonel Ray Gottner had had formed the company and started Lincoln, Grand Island, Hastings, Kearney, Norfolk, Beatrice, Scotts Bluff, and North Platte, I believe. That was like seven or eight. And so they had all those officers would send in video slides, they were slides at the time, and we would show the pictures of the houses for sale in the local markets. Huh. So that was the two hour, that was a a two-hour block on Sunday morning called Gateway to Home Beyond. And of course, there was also uh Davy and Goliath, which you remember.
Diane M. Simard:Uh I do. It was creepy to me because it was the claimation. And it creeped me out, but it was um I always watched before we had to go to Sunday school.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And then then there was a segment that that the local pastor, Dale Holt, who was a rever uh uh Lutheran minister, actually did, and it was a show with Morty Mouse. Morty Mouse, and he did story time and stuff like that. So uh that was a part of the show as well. So we got education, religion, and all that all in the two-hour block.
Diane M. Simard:And and selling houses. I mean, who thinks of this and puts this all together and makes it work?
SPEAKER_01:Well, the unique thing was back then there was a time you could not have uh X amount of commercial time in an hour. And so this is how uh Channel 10, 11 got around this by having all the cartoons, and they sold them you know, basically two hours, but they got a block at a time. So interesting.
Diane M. Simard:And you always I assume you always recorded that beforehand.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, always we did that on a Friday night, and uh fact fact is that's where I met Lita Powell Drake. Really? Yeah, I was in there for an interview on a Friday, and uh they were recording Friday night doing Gateway to Home Buying, and we were introduced to each other.
Diane M. Simard:Well, speaking of Lita Powell Drake, I remember that after Cartoon Corral, uh after school on weekdays, that uh the Mike Douglas talk show came on at four o'clock, and my mother watched Mike Douglas nearly every day. And you were telling me, didn't the a famous media mogul start out on the Mike Douglas show?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Roger Welch. Welch, Roger Welch is another friend who he loved us talk about, but Roger Ailes was the production manager at that time, or production assistant actually. And uh no, Roger Ailes is the guy that helped found the Fox News of today. Okay. But um, at that time, being a production assistant, his major job was driving celebrities from the airport to the studio.
Diane M. Simard:Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_01:So he got to know people, Bob Hope and whoever else was on the show, you know, they would become friends and pays off to be a production assistant because down the road he became the producer of the show, and then he also helped run presidential campaigns and uh Fox News.
Diane M. Simard:Wow, I had no idea.
SPEAKER_01:So if you're listening to this little story, it means don't don't hesitate to take a quote meally little job because it could help it could lead to something really good.
Diane M. Simard:Absolutely. No, that's that's fantastic. And of course, again, he became so famous and obviously continued those connections. It's all about who you know and how you meet them.
SPEAKER_01:It's all about networking. That's right. It's not what you know, it's who you know.
Diane M. Simard:So I remember that 1011 was also known for covering the inst entire state, which was amazing, yeah. Yeah, and and what how did that happen and what made that so unique?
SPEAKER_01:Well, that was done by Jim Ebel, who was the station manager, who was a chief engineer as well, and he created a network of of um translators, as they were called. And so not only did we have the TV station in Lincoln, Nebraska, but we had one in Grand Island, and so those two were linked together. And then off of that, these translators were into the smaller communities. And so 1011 had one of the highest rated newscasts in the country because the maximum amount of people watching one station was 1011. You couldn't watch anything else, and so by doing that, he also helped keep uh keep uh other TV stations out of the market, which was kind of good for business.
Diane M. Simard:Uh-huh. Interesting, interesting. Well, um, I know you mentioned that during those days Lincoln had cable, and you were able to watch the Denver Broncos and the Kansas City Chiefs play as well.
SPEAKER_01:And Chicago Cubs or Cubs or Bears, Chicago Bears, that was glory days of watching television because you could see a lot of things.
Diane M. Simard:Exactly, exactly. Well, at one point in time, decades ago, Denver, Colorado, where I live, was considered our country's cable capital. And the broadcast world has continued to evolve at at breakneck speed and continues to do so now with streaming. And as we mentioned before, you and I connected because you were researching Lita Powell Drake, um, who was Calamity Cape on Cartoon Corral, and she also produced the week the 1011 weekday morning show.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
Diane M. Simard:For twenty for 25 years. And as we were chatting early, I I recently watched some of her clips on YouTube, and she was an amazing interviewer. She absolutely was ruthless. What else do you know about Lita Powell Drake that you could share? She was just a fascinating woman.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I guess I couldn't share that. I I don't know. She was a fascinating woman. She, like you said, she was she was always on the go, always creative, always wanting to do things. And I'm sorry I didn't get to work with her longer. Uh, I was only at the TV station for two years, and then I moved on. But the thing she did was phenomenal. And yeah, and then those interviews that you saw uh when she was doing interviews for uh celebrities was for the morning show. So she would go off to a junket. CBS would have a junket where they would bring in all these stars and you'd go videotape them at a location, and so that's how those things happened. But uh, course they were promoting the new shows coming up for the network. And you know, so I don't know how really she got the job of sheriff sheriff um Calamity Kate, because she was the sheriff, you know.
Diane M. Simard:Uh-huh. The West's only lady sheriff.
SPEAKER_01:Right. But I know uh before that there was uh Sheriff Bill and and Irville were were the partners, and Bill had to move to Arizona because his wife had allergies or something, and so Lita, I think, saw an opportunity, grabbed another job.
Diane M. Simard:Oh my gosh. So she was absolutely everywhere at that station.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, oh yeah. Interesting.
Diane M. Simard:Well, one of the other memorable kids morning weekday morning shows that I remember was Romper Room, yeah. And it was hosted by Miss Linda. And the way I understand it, Romper Room was actually nationally syndicated and franchised, yeah, but 1011 produced its own version.
SPEAKER_01:Correct, correct. And that's about all I know. The trick was that was on at 10 a.m. in the morning, and Cliff Sorensen was the director of that show. So I didn't I didn't have to worry about the kids in the morning.
Diane M. Simard:Oh, because that was the morning shift. So and and and and who was Miss Linda married to?
SPEAKER_01:Uh Alan Beerman, who is a former Secretary of State for the state of Nebraska, and they became an executive director of Nebraska Press Association as well. Okay. Oh so it was we had a wide variety of characters working there.
Diane M. Simard:Absolutely, absolutely. So we of course can't reminisce about uh your time in Nebraska without talking about Cornhusker football.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah.
Diane M. Simard:And so did you become a fan while you were there?
SPEAKER_01:Did I become? I still am.
Diane M. Simard:Ah, thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I can't. Yes, I've got memorabilia. I get to collect the shirts and everything. So oh yeah. The first year we were there, you could still buy student tickets. Well, from student. And so we got student tickets to go to all the home games during the first year. And Bob Devaney, of course, was a coach. And uh I if y'all remember Bob Devaney, and the great deal I remember was when he was it was a cloudy day, uh rainy, cloudy, cloudy. And boy, when he walked out onto the field, the sun shone bright. And it was a beautiful day after that. Can't re can't pass that up. Boy, that was a great time.
Diane M. Simard:Wow, phenomenal. Well, there's uh for those who have or have not experienced it, there's nothing like it. It it's one of the most memorable experiences of my life is going to Nebraska football game.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And it's still on my bucket list, by the way. Oh when you get the tickets. When you get the tickets, would you let me get one, please?
Diane M. Simard:Of course. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I have to tell you, all these fun stories are truly unlikely gifts, aren't they?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
Diane M. Simard:So so where did your career go after 1011?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I left 1011. I went to Gateway Realty and created an advertising agency for Gateway Realty. And so we could continue doing Gateway to Home Buying. And after that, I started a radio station in Lincoln called KBHL, which I was in for five years. And after that, I moved to Chicago, and now here I am in Florida. Where I never thought I would be.
Diane M. Simard:Well, what an eventful trip down memory lane. Listeners, please be sure to share our podcast link with your Nebraska friends who will enjoy these memories.
SPEAKER_01:I hope somebody was listening that you I hope they're still around.
Diane M. Simard:Who remembers, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
Diane M. Simard:Well, on our next podcast, I'll be sharing a story from my December blog about someone very special to me who was inducted into the Nebraska Softball Hall of Fame at just the right time. Wow. And heads up, this one's a tearjerker.
SPEAKER_01:Ooh, I'll be looking forward to that.
Diane M. Simard:Me too. Well, we always appreciate listener feedback. So please share your thoughts in the comments or review section of wherever you listen to your podcasts. And to hear more 10-11 stories and other memories from Larry's career in TV and radio business, be sure to check out his podcast, Larry's Sort of Fun Stories. As always, I'd like to thank you, Larry, for generously sharing your production and editing capability to make this presentation possible.
SPEAKER_01:My pleasure.
Diane M. Simard:Well, what a fun trip down memory lane this has been. And before we close, please follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn. Sign up for my monthly middle-aged Moxie blog at my website, DianeMSummard.com, and tell your friends about our unlikely gifts podcast. And remember, your special memories are, in essence, your unlikely gifts. And we are delighted to share ours with you. I'm Diane M. Samard, and this is the Unlikely Gifts Podcast.
.jpg)
