Nancy and I returned last week from a trip to Africa. We’ll be writing a lot about that in future entries but we saw and did so much that it is taking some time to sort things out and go through all the pictures we took (thank Heaven for digital cameras). Today, we want to do some reminiscing about some old friends who are together this week for the first time in, probably, forty years.
It will be 44 years ago this December that three young men began to work together on what became The Missourinet.
Jeff Smith, Chuck Morris, and me.
We never had our picture taken together. Until this week.
The story of The Missourinet goes back several years before 1974, however, and it begins on the top floor of a rickety old building now long-gone at 410 East Capitol Avenue. It was the home of a radio station that no longer operates in Jefferson City and the building was so old and unstable that anyone who slammed the front door down on the first floor (which I think was originally the basement of a century-old—and more—house was likely to cause the needle to jump on a record in a second-floor studio.
The production studio of the station was in the living room of the old house. The fireplace was still there and occasionally a bird would fall down the fireplace and go batting around the room frantically trying to get out. Once, a bird got through the ventilation system and into the adjoining news booth, a cubicle about four by five feet or so, where it rested in the comfortable near-darkness until I walked in and turned on the light for the first newscast of the morning. The bird really went nuts and I stepped back and held the door open until it could go nuts in another part of the building while I went on with the newscast.
Later, when the station added an FM station, a small studio was built inside the living room/production room. A bird got into the FM studio one day and in its excitement delivered a deposit onto a record that was being played. I don’t think the announcer ever explained why the broadcast was briefly interrupted; I don’t think there was a way he could have explained it.
Well, anyway, a year or so after I became news director, a young fellow came to work as my assistant. His name was Clyde Lear, a really sharp fresh graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, the first Plan B master’s degree student.
Plan B was something new at the school. It was for people who didn’t want to go on for a doctorate and found the strong research part of the original master’s program not real useful to someone who wanted to get out and report. So Plan B was created and it involved writing a paper rather than a thesis.
Clyde’s paper was about the creation of a state radio network. We sometimes talked about the idea when things got slow in the newsroom.
Just down the hall, in another decrepit room, was the office for the farm director and the program director. This was all on the third, top, floor of the old building, a room where (I swear), you could raise the windows and the sash would go up but the glass would stay in place.
The farm director was Derry Brownfield and he had a dream, too, for a statewide agriculture network. Before too long, Clyde and Derry started talking.
Clyde was a terrific reporter. Didn’t know beans about sports, which the news staff sometimes had to do. He sold Bibles and other religious books during the summer vacations from college and he sold a ton of them. Frankly, Bible-selling was more lucrative than radio journalism, and Clyde decided after a time that he and his growing family just couldn’t make it on $95 a week (I think I was making 125). So he left to sell pavement sealer for a local lumber dealer, Buel Baclesse—whose wife ran a fabric shop next to the lumberyard on Dunklin Street. He and Derry kept in touch.
They finally decided to do the network thing. Agriculture first and then news. They talked to some folks and got some other folks to co-sign bank notes to get started. The first studio was in the now-former fabric shop. Clyde did all the wiring, all the commercial-selling, all the affiliate sign-ups, and Derry did the news and the markets. They started, I think with about nine stations.
They had planned to take their idea to the radio station manager and ask to use something called the sub-carrier frequency on the FM station’s antenna to distribute the programs. The frequency was not something people got on the regular radios but was sometimes used to distribute elevator music to department stores or offices through special receivers. You have to be kind of along in years to remember hearing that music while you shopped or, uh, rode the elevator. But the manager got wind of their network idea before they could meet with him and he summoned Clyde one night to a meeting under a street light near both of their homes and in the ensuing heated discussion announce he was going to fire Derry Brownfield.
Which he did.
Which was the best thing that could have happened to The Missouri Network, Inc., as the company began. It meant that the network would be completely independent of the programming demands of any particular radio station and would have to arrange hard-wire connections with affiliates. That worked until technology made it possible for us to eliminate the expensive telephone line hookups with stations and became the first radio network anywhere in American that was 100% satellite-delivered.
The concept worked really well and about a year or so after the network began on January 2, 1973, Clyde and Derry decided the cash flow was good enough to pay their salaries, make payments on the loans, and start the news network.
So Clyde called me. We met. He offered me a job.
And I put him off because I had been the capitol correspondent for KMOX in St. Louis (an impressive title that amounted to little more than doing a sixty-second wrapup piece about what had happened in Jefferson City during the week. It was broadcast on a Saturday morning show in St. Louis. KMOX’s general manager and broadcasting god Bob Hyland had told me a few months earlier that the station was impressed by my work and wanted to “bring me in” as soon as there was an opening. I later learned I was not the first person he said that to and by the time Clyde called me I was about to give up on the dream of working for CBS in St. Louis. Finally it was clear that wasn’t going to happen so I told Clyde I’d work for him.
I was going to stay with the station through the November elections but the manager, upon learning I was going to be the fourth person from the station to work for the network, told me that I should consider October 31 my last day.
So on November 1, 1974, I started helping Clyde make his dream of a news network come true. We would debut on January 2, 1975. Two other reporters would be the first staff members. Jeff Smith, who had worked with me at the radio station before he went to more lucrative pastures, was the first choice. And shortly after that we got an application and an audition tape from a young man in Albuquerque named Charles Morris. They were extraordinary reporters and even more extraordinary people.
I think the addition of the three of us raised the total company employment to eight.
We started working together on December 1, 1974. One of our first jobs was to move the furniture in to the first studios, a two-room efficiency apartment on the top floor of a former funeral home at 216 E. McCarty. KWOS was on the bottom floor (I think the employee kitchen was in the former embalming room). Our offices were in the apartment that was used by families of the recently-departed who needed a place to stay for a few days.
Gray metal desks, heavy and ungainly, were among the first things we moved in. We had to hoist those suckers up a narrow stairway, make a little jog to the left and then another one to the right and fit the desks through a standard-sized (narrow) door opening. That was the easy part.
The desk for the studio was a former wood, u-shaped circulation desk from the old city library that we wrestled with for an entire day and finally took apart, even breaking glue joints, to get it inside the office. The whole day! We were exhausted when we called it a day. But it made for an impressive operations center for the network.
And on January 2, 1975 we went on the air with a congratulatory greeting from Governor Bond and some stories about Missourians (and Americans) being allowed to own gold coins for the first time in about four decades. Somewhere we have recordings of the first newscasts.
Not long afterwards, the Missouri Network, Inc., changed its name. The farm network had signed up its first affiliates outside the state so it needed a name that didn’t have “Missouri” in it. That’s when it became the Brownfield Network. And later, Missouri Network, Inc., became inadequate. We had a staff meeting at the corporate headquarters across the street at 217 (now a law office) and somebody suggested the company get a name that recognized the founders. And that’s how Learfield was born.
By then, Charles Morris was gone. I think by then he was working for United Press International and later was an owner of an Oklahoma radio station. Jeff Smith had become a part of the company sales force and became General Manager of the Missourinet. He later became the President and COO of the Minnesota News Network (which Learfield later bought) and moved on to become a communications director for Northwest Airlines before it disappeared into Delta in 2008. He can still fly free, although on standby, with Delta and now is the Communications Director for Volunteers of America of Minnesota and Wisconsin, one of the country’s largest health and human services organizations.
Charles, who often came into the newsroom toting the latest book on positive thinking by the televangelist and motivational speaker Rev. Robert Schuller, later went to seminary and is the president of California-based Haven Ministries, Inc., a radio ministry that began in 1934.
Both were invited to the Missouri Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame induction in June of the guy who brought them to the Missourinet so we could together provide Missourians with political and government news they never before had a chance to hear. Neither Jeff nor Chuck could make it. But schedules seemed to match up for the visit this week.
We started something good. We made Clyde’s dream come true. And now the four of us—Clyde, Jeff, Chuck, and me—are together again. We’ve been telling stories, recalling people we dealt with all those years ago, remembering how we provided a product that Clyde and our friend Jim Lipsey—another colleague at that Jefferson City radio station—could convince stations to take (we started with 36 affiliates, most of which were farm network affiliated stations that had learned the company could be trusted).
And we’re finally getting our picture taken together.
We were blessed by the opportunity we had to start something good. We were blessed by working for Clyde. We were blessed because we were able to work with each other.
We visited today’s Learfield building where Jeff and Chuck were amazed by the empire the company has grown to from the days when we were employees 6-7-8, setting out to change the way Missourians got news about their state government and politics. Only one person working in the building has been around long enough to remember us. Afterwards we went back downtown to the Missouri Bar Annex, the former ex-funeral home where we visited our original newsroom and studio. They are now divided into two offices.
News and Ag broadcasting are just a small part of Learfield Communications today, a billion-dollar-plus enterprise that Clyde and I sometimes visit although more and more people wonder who we are. A lot of people work for Learfield now. There are offices throughout the nation. But once there were eight of us in two buildings. And we were three of them. We were The Missourinet.
(That Chuck on the far left, Jeff, me, and Clyde having a good time in today’s Missourinet newsroom.)
We still look enough like we did all those years ago that we didn’t have any trouble recognizing each other. It was a special time back in the mid and late 1970s when we started the Missourinet. It was a REALLY special time, those 21 hours we had together more than four decades later.