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vii Foreword Bill Kurtis The month of March is when much of the world celebrates the first signs of spring. But not Chicago. I had to scrape away frost on the window of my Holiday Inn room to catch the rose glow of sunrise creeping over Lake Shore Drive. I hadn’t felt below-freezing temperatures in three years, and my blood was thinner now. That’s what living in California does—or so it feels. But here I was, staring out at ice floes and pondering what the living hell I had done to deserve this. It was 1973, and I was thirty-three years old. My three-year stint as a correspondent for CBS News, Los Angeles bureau, was my perfect job. It was a coming-of-age in my career. You become a fireman to fight fires. As a policeman you’d rather risk your life than direct traffic for thirty years. As a reporter, you want stories, big stories. From LA, we covered eleven western states, including Hawaii and Alaska, and I’d spent more than two hundred days a year away from home. Earthquakes in Los Angeles and Managua, antiwar riots in San Francisco and Berkeley, chasing Howard Hughes to Las Vegas and Vancouver were just a few reportorial adventures sprinkled among more earthly assignments like covering the Charles Manson murder trial for ten months, Angela Davis for six, Daniel Ellsberg. Well, suffice it to say I loved it. But CBS corporate had something else in mind. A CBS News boy-genius of Special Events, Bob Wussler, had been named the general manager of WBBM-TV in Chicago, a CBS-owned and -operated station. Wussler was in charge when Walter Cronkite teared up as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. In Chicago, he faced a task almost as hard as getting to the moon. WBBM-TV had been in third place for years. An exodus of anchors like Fahey Flynn and John Drury had wound up at competing stations taking viewers with them. Flynn teamed with Joel Daly at WLS-TV (ABC) to prove there is no age barrier when Chicago loves you. WMAQ-TV (NBC) was still enjoying a dynasty of Floyd Kalber, teamed with commentator Len O’Connor. Wussler and his news director, former newspaperman Van Gordon Sauter, sized up the situation and laid out a plan. First, they needed a new anchor team in a new setting, different from the other stations in the market. Since I had worked at WBBM-TV viii F O R E W O R D from 1966 to 1970, I had something of a running start. I’d play the straight role. I should say straight to the extreme: I was white and male with the look of a midwestern kid from a small town in Kansas. (I’m from Independence, Kansas—one hundred miles from anywhere.) To borrow a more contemporary television description, I was Friday Night Lights. Filling a coanchor-commentator role would be a quirky Jewish kid I’d heard of but never really met, Walter Jacobson. He’d been a batboy for the Cubs, legman for legendary Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley, wire-service reporter and backup, and heir apparent to commentator Len O’Connor at WMAQ-TV. That first cold morning when I reported for work in studio 1, broadcast history seemed to hang from the walls. The first presidential television debate between Kennedy and Nixon had taken place there in 1960. But we were not to broadcast from the cavernous memorial. I was ushered instead to an equally large studio that had been turned into a working newsroom. It looked like one of Wussler’s election specials at CBS News. Nice. News from a working newsroom . I was thinking “breakthrough.” And he brought more of his secret sauce from the network. We would introduce the first local use of the Minicam, a mobile electronic videotape apparatus that was lightweight enough to be taken anywhere at any time in a hurry, and it sent back to the newsroom pictures and sound that we put on the air as we received them. Our broadcasts were urgent, immediate, uncensored, and unedited. Dazzling. But there was one small change of plans awaiting me. Knowing that I had committed past the point of no return (to my old career path), the wizards behind this historic venture, Wussler and Sauter, casually suggested, “Wow, you guys look so great at the anchor desk (in the middle...

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