It was 5:55 a.m. Fifty years ago today, I turned on the microphone, pushed a button on the cart machine to play the theme, and said to people throughout Missouri, “This is news on the Missourinet….” for the first time.
We’re going to tell you the story of how it all started and some of the things that it turned into. This will be a long entry. But half a century is a long time and no, it does not seem like only yesterday.
This entry runs to about 15-16 printed pages, so you will be forgiven if you decide it’s not worth finishing if you start. But the company isn’t doing anything to celebrate this anniversary, so I’ve decided to put some things on the record. Voluminous things and I apologize for being voluminous. But The Missourinet and the people who made it deserve a historical accounting.
All we did was revolutionize the way Missourians learned about their state government, their candidates, their office-holders as well as the daily flow of events throughout the state. We lived by the second hand and by the events, some scheduled and some random, and a few were tragedies that put us to tests and challenged our capabilities to respond. But respond we did.
The Missourinet was a dream of my former assistant news director at KLIK in Jefferson City, a station that has since become just one more format in a building full of formats in Columbia, one of the hundreds of stations owned by one of the larger radio station groups in the country. Clyde Lear was the first Plan B graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, a program that let people do a special project instead of writing a thesis. I probably would have a master’s degree today if that option had been available in my time at the Journalism School. But as time went by, I found that doing radio was more interesting than writing a big paper about some arcane issue in the business. Clyde’s project was how to do a statewide radio news network.
A report Clyde did for KOMU-TV while he was a student shows some of the roots of the company that he, Derry, and others founded. The creation of a broadcast center on the first floor of the Capitol was a significant development, as you will see.
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Clyde, who earned enough money in the summers selling religious books to finance much of his college education, recalled on his own blog many years later:
My first “run” at starting a radio network failed. It happened in the fall of 1968 between my final book summer and starting at KLIK. My idea was a simple one. I’d charge each station an average of $10.00 per week for feeding them personalized stories from Missouri’s capital city. Bigger stations would pay more; smaller markets less. All I needed was 20 of the some 70 markets to earn $200 per week; pretty good pay in those days. So, I started selling; driving east on I-70 toward St. Louis. KWRE, Warrenton signed on; then St. Louis’ powerhouse rocker, KXOK; then Farmington; then another along I-55 and then Cape Girardeau. At Sikeston in the southeast corner of the state I hit a snag. The owner was a board member of the Missouri Broadcaster’s Association and he reported that he thought the MBA was going to start its own news network. He suggested I chat with the President of the MBA over in Joplin — on the other side of southern Missouri. I remember clearly driving all night for an early morning meeting with this guy who confirmed that most certainly the MBA was getting into the radio network business and there wasn’t a chance I’d succeed. So, I drove home. Five hours. A failure. And dejected. The next day I applied for and got my $85/week job at KLIK. The rest of the story is that the MBA never moved on its scheme. But I’d had a taste; learned tons; and four years later was much wiser.
Just down the hall from us in that century-plus old building at 410 East Capitol Avenue in Jefferson City, was the office of farm Director Derry Brownfield, who had dreams of doing some kind of agricultural marketing program throughout the state.
When I met Derry, I thought he had the perfect name for a farm broadcaster.
Clyde was a terrific reporter and as a Jefferson City native, he had a background in the city I did not have. We made a great team. Both of us were committed journalists, aggressive, creative—and newlyweds. Clyde left us after a couple of years (to sell driveway sealer for a local lumber dealer—-which might help you understand how paltry his salary was) but he stayed in touch with Derry and with me.
He and Derry got some financial backing to put a farm network on the air on January 2, 1973. They called it Missouri Network, Inc. Derry did the broadcasting. Clyde was the engineer, manager, salesman and whatever else needed be done. They started with just six affilaites, but before too long they had a lot of stations and when they started picking up affiliates outside Missouri, they had to change the name.
And that’s where the Brownfield Network began. Today it is known as Brownfield Ag News and bills itself as “the largest, and most listened-to ag radio network in the country with more than 600 affiliate radio stations across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and the Delta region.”
“The Delta Region” originally was The Delta Net, a specialty network for Missouri’s bootheel and farming areas around it where the crops are a little different—cotton for example—that went on the air a year after Derry’s first broadcast.
By early 1974, Clyde and Derry’s project was strong enough for them to move toward creation of a news network. The Missourinet, they decided to call it. Clyde asked me to be his news director. I put him off because the CBS Regional Vice President and KMOX General Manager Robert Hyland had told me that the station in St. Louis wanted to “bring you in” when there was a news department vacancy. I believed it and so did then-news director Bob Hardy but as the months went by and Hardy moved more to the programming side, and a new news director took over, it became apparent I had been misled.
So I agreed to work for Clyde. 
(An early ad from Missouri Life, which the company owned until it cost too much to keep. It flourishes today under another generation or two of owners.)
The only thing close to a statewide radio network that existed before that was something that was haybaled together once every four years for a gubernatorial inauguration. The Missouri Broadcasters Association arranged all the necessary phone lines for stations throughout Missouri to pick up the KLIK broadcasts of the parade and the ceremonies at the Capitol.
But a full-time network focusing on state government and politics that also picked up stories from affiliates throughout Missouri—a state version of the national networks—was revolutionary in Missouri broadcasting.
Clyde and Derry had built so much confidence in the industry that The Missourinet started with something like 36 affiliates.
I was the seventh employee of the company, the sixth on the staff at the time because one of the early ones had stayed only briefly and was gone when I arrived. I thought it would be great, at least for a while, to work from 8-5 getting things set up and hiring two other reporters.
Not so fast, Bob—Derry had gone to Rome to cover the World Food Conference. So my first day started before 6 a.m. and I had to drive to Brownfield’s farm off of Route 179 just past Marion where a studio had been set up in a house originally intended to be a residence. My first broadcasts were farm news. Thankfully our other farm broadcaster, Don Osborne, did the markets. I knew how to do news but I didn’t know a pork belly from a tenderloin, so that worked out well.
When Derry got back, I went to work on the state network side. The first thing we had to do was think of a new name for a history show I had done on KLIK called “Missouri in Retrospect.” The station still had the original scripts but I had copies retyped by the station secretary and it was always our plan to do a network version of the show. We kicked around several ideas before slightly paraphrasing the title of Bernard DeVoto’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Across The Wide Missouri. I suggested substituting “our” for “the,” and the rest is, well, history.
It took a lawsuit to allow us to run the program. The manager of KLIK maintained I had done the program as part of my employment there and thus the station owned all the rights to it—although the program began as a voluntary effort on my part to commemorate Missouri’s sesquicentennial in 197I and I had kept doing it voluntarily until I left with the station never telling me I had to keep doing it. So we had a little lawsuit that let us run the show on the network while the station had someone else reading my scripts. We finally got it settled without a hearing.
One day, when Clyde was working at KLIK, he looked across the table that separated our desks and said, “You should put this in a book.” Eventually, there were three.
One day we went to St. Louis to meet a fellow with a synthesizer to create the opening and closing themes for our newscasts. We settled on a jazzed-up version of the first five notes of The Missouri Waltz, the state song. In 1976 I heard someone comment that it’s a lousy state song, languid and reeking of the old South and having nothing to do with Missouri except being a song about a song that someone learned while sitting on their mammy’s knee, “way down in Missouri where I heard this melodeeeeeee.” I immediately agreed but not until relatively recently have I heard something immeasurably better—The Missouri Anthem sung by Neal E. Boyd, the young man who won the America’s Got Talent contest. Neal died in 2018 at the age of 42. There’s a video of him made when he was running for a legislative seat—he ran twice and lost both times—in which he sings the anthem: Neal E. Boyd and Brandon K. Guttenfelder – MISSOURI ANTHEM
After that we had to find a studio, furnish it, hire the other two reporters, and let the world know about us.
The original Carnegie library in Jefferson City was about to move into its new building and had furniture to sell. The U-shaped circulation desk struck me as the ideal studio piece. We also bought a big two-sided library shelf. A few days before we went on the air the three members of the news staff exhausted themselves trying to get that big U-shaped desk up a flight of stairs, around a corner to the left and then through a door on the right. It took all day and we finally took the thing apart enough to get it in.
We didn’t have regular soundproofing materials for the studio so we put carpet on the floor and on all the walls; the orange and red shag design looked okay in the 70s but by the time we left 216 East McCarty Street to move into an attic of an old house across the street, that carpet looked sooooooo 70s.
(The original cast in what is now a Missouri Bar office that once was our newsroom—-with a piece of the “soundproofing.”)
Down on the first floor of what had once been a funeral home was affiliate KWOS. The station break room had a drain in the floor. It was next to the hand-operated elevator that brought caskets from the display room, down the hall from the Missourinet office, to be used by those who had been prepared in the later KWOS break room.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that we got a group picture taken of the three of us who were the Missourinet that first day.
The first reporter we hired for the Missourinet was Jeff Smith, who had worked with us at KLIK for a while before going to Illinois to find more profitable employment. And we also hired a young reporter from KRKE in Albuquerque named Charles Morris. Jeff much later retired as a VP with Northwest Airlines and Chuck went on to a long career in religious broadcasting, recently retiring as the voice of Haven Ministries. Our get-together a few years ago was the first time we’d been back together in the better part of four decades. That’s Charles on the left, Jeff, me, and Clyde on the right. Frankly, I think we look pretty good, fifty years along.
I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us that this thing might not make it. I like to say we materialized Clyde’s dream.
We went on the air on January 2, 1975. We had spent the week before that doing interviews and gathering actualities for our first newscasts. We spent a day “dead-rolling” our programs—newscasts at :55 with repeats at five minutes past the hour (the 7 a.m. newscast was stretched an additional five minutes in those days when stations did longer newscasts, in case anybody wanted to stick with us for the extra time) and again on the half-hour—-except during the noon our when the third feed went out at 12:29 because the farm network had a show that was fed from the Centertown office at 12:35. Our second newscast on the first day featured Governor Bond welcoming us to the Missouri airwaves and saying a nice thing or two about us.
We were everywhere. We sent people with the Missouri delegations to the national conventions. When a tornado hit Neosho not long after we went on the air, we sent Chuck to Neosho to give us live reports. We were in the House and the Senate every day and often would be at the Capitol for night committee hearings when the common folks got to tell their stories about potential legislation and we were recording, recording, recording so listeners could hear the voices of those shaping their public policy.
At the time, the Capitol Press Corps was made up of guys who’d been around for years with two wire services, two newspapers from St. Louis and two more from Kansas City with other newspaper reporters from Cape Girardeau, Springfield, Joplin and St. Joseph. There was some
“who are these guys” questions and there was some skepticism that we would last. We were a completely new animal and sometimes—because we hadn’t been around very long—we asked some impertinent questions.
People throughout the state heard their legislators arguing about bills. They heard the governor’s voice talking about issues. They heard the state epidemiologist talking about the Swine Flu, the Revenue Director updating the number of income tax returns being filed (with the assistance of United Press International Bureau Chief Steve Forsythe, we embarrassed one Director of Revenue by having the department mail somebody’s tax return to a stranger). And our affiliates provided stories from all corners of the state.
Some members of the House didn’t like it when they heard that their voices in debate were being broadcast on the radio but we quickly overcame that. Once, the chairman of a Senate Committee—William Baxter Waters—demanded that I remove a microphone from a witness table at a hearing. He and I worked that out right afterward and we never had another problem with recording hearings.
There were few hearing rooms at the Capitol when we set up operations, which meant a lot of committees met at night because there was no place to hold hearings in the daytime. The House sometimes had hearings in the Capitol restaurant in the basement because it could hold a pretty good number of people. It worked out well—until the refrigerators and freezers motors kicked in and unless you were face to face with the committee, you couldn’t hear anything.
Sometimes we had hearings in the legislative library, a wide-open room with the witness table facing the windows and the audience sitting behind them It’s a beautiful place (more beautiful now that it’s been restored to its original colors) but the acoustics were horrible. Those of us sitting behind the witness struggled to hear what was being said. I had headphones plugged into my SONY 110B cassette recorder, so I was better off.
House Appropriations Committee meetings were in the House Lounge with the large committee seated at a c-shaped section made up of several tables to the left of the entrance. The witness sat at a table across from the entrance and others, including me, sat behind them, to the right. When things got boring, which was most of the time, I would find myself looking at part of the Benton mural and a few minutes later I would realize I was looking at another segment. Several years later when I wrote a book about the mural, I discovered Benton designed the painting to draw the viewer’s eyes through it.
There also were hearings in the Highway Department hearing room a block away, in the rotunda, and at least once, in the House chamber.
One hearing in the Senate Lounge—on the Equal Rights Amendment—was packed and undoubtedly was far beyond fire safety standards. The Senate committee was around a couple of tables on a platform on the left side from the entrance and I spent the hearing account halfway under the committee table, right in front of the table that witnesses who struggled through the crowd would stand at to testify.
We were doing primary election returns in 1976 when Congressmen Jim Symington and Jerry Litton and former Governor Warren Hearnes were competing for the Democratic nomination to succeed the retiring Stuart Symington, Jim’s dad. It appeared Litton, a cattle farmer from Chillicothe, had pulled off an upset when we got a telephone call. There had been a plane crash at the Chillicothe airport. We immediately suspected the worst because we knew Litton was staying at home until the numbers came in and then planned to fly to Kansas City for a victory party. We worked the phones and wound up talking to the driver of the ambulance that had gone to the scene. He confirmed there were no survivors. Litton and his family all died along the pilot and the pilot’s son.
A few days later we arranged to broadcast the Litton funeral.
Twenty-four years later, Nancy and I were at her sister’s house in Albuquerque, decompressing after a week in the back country of Colorado mapping ancient pueblos and rock art sites, when the KOB-TV newscaster announced that the plane carrying Missouri Senate candidate Mel Carnahan was missing. We switched over to CNN and it was reporting the plane had crashed. I called the newsroom and everybody was there—including Clyde. I told Brent Martin, my managing editor, to find Lt. Governor Roger Wilson and stick with him because he was going to be sworn in as governor that night if worst came to worst. Brent gave Clyde a recorder and sent him to the Capitol. Roger didn’t want to say much but Clyde, the old fire horse of a journalist got a brief interview from him anyway.
Nancy and I got a little sleep and then drove 996 miles from Albuquerque to Jefferson City the next day. Brent told me later that when he went on the air at 5:55 that morning for our first newscast, he had to stop and remind himself that thousands of Missourians would be hearing for the first time that their governor was dead.
Our Chief Engineer, Charlie Peters, spent the next day getting phone lines installed the capitol for the big funeral that was expected. By then the word was out that President Clinton and Vice President Gore would be attending the funeral, along with a large number of those I referred to as “the stars of C-SPAN.” Workers at the Capitol had worked hard to get aluminum stands set up for photographers and TV cameras and facilities for radio and other media. One of the Carnahan aides complained that the Secret Service had gotten involved and, “It was secret and not very much service.” We had a little set-to with them when they said we couldn’t broadcast from our planned location. I think the Carnahan folks intervened because the media stayed put.
The funeral was on a beautiful day three weeks before the election and it was outdoors on the south lawn. Clinton, Gore, and members of the U. S. Senate and the House of Representatives walked right past our broadcast position. The AP took a picture of the procession and I’m standing right at the fence, broadcasting what I was seeing.
Two events. Two plane crashes. I believe they changed the course of Missouri politics. People have asked me what were the biggest stories the Missourinet covered. The flood of 1993 was a huge and long=running story. But the most important stories of the first half-centuries of The Missourinet were the most important ones we covered.
It was a difficult event to broadcast because I had allowed myself to get closer to the Carnahans than I did to anyone else I ever covered. Jean kept me up to date on the book she was writing about First Ladies and I gave a couple of speeches at special events there. The governor’s coffin was in the mansion’s main hallway and I, as the radio pool reporter, was in the library to the left of the hallway as you enter the front door. Jean came down to welcome the governor’s office staff and when she came in, she saw me in the library and came over and hugged me and said, “We’re so glad we got to know your son.”
Our son, Rob, was a flight instructor at the time (now a Southwest Airlines Captain) and one evening during the campaign, when Governor Carnahan showed up to fly a light plane to Hermann—he hadn’t had his pilot’s license very long, I don’t think—where was going to meet Jean and their Highway Patrol security officer and go on to a fundraiser in St. Louis. Somebody had to fly the plane back to Columbia. But when they got to Hermann on that hot summer night, the plane’s engine wouldn’t refire. The Governor invited Rob to go into town with them and have dinner together. And Jean remembered that when she saw me in the library on a day that she had the heaviest of hearts.
There have been other funerals at the capitol, only a few, and none had a greater influence on What Missouri—and maybe the nation—would become.
Carnahan had gone to St. Louis three weeks before the election for a fund-raiser and then was headed to southeast Missouri for another one when the plane went down. Many years later, I met the man who hosted the fundraiser in St. Louis and he told me that Carnahan announced during the meeting that he had, for the first time, pulled ahead of John Ashcroft in the race for Senate.
The crash was a huge problem for Ashcroft. He did the honorable thing by pulling all of campaign commercials and not campaigning for the last three weeks. It was too late to put somebody else’s name on the ballot and on election night, I was anchoring our coverage when, along about midnight the last big slug of votes came in just before we went on with that hour’s report. I remember thinking, “My God, he’s done it.”
We covered a lot of important stories in the first 50 years of The Missourinet. Those were probably the most consequential stories.
Telephone lines were the lifelines of our operation when we started. But as the Brownfield Network expanded into other states, we had to look at an alternate distribution system because the phone bills were getting financially difficult. Satellite technology was just catching on and Clyde and the other company officials decided we had to distribute our services by the bird. Our first satellite dish was set up behind the office at 216. The Missourinet and Brownfield Net became the first broadcast networks, including the national ones, to be distributed entirely by satellite.
A bigger uplink dish was installed at the farm office. In 1989, as we consolidated the farm and news divisions in the one building at 505 Hobbs Road, the company hired a big-lift helicopter company to airlift the big dish from the farm to the new office site. I think there still is a video on Youtube that shows what happened—-that shortly after the helicopter lifted the dish off and headed toward town, one of he retaining bolts snapped and the added eight was more than the others could hold so the whole thing fell a few hundred feet into a farm field with a disastrous “crunch” and our dish became material for recycling. Fortunately, the incident happened early so the dish didn’t fall on top of road, a home, or even a shopping mall. We used a portable uplink until we got all of the insurance stuff settled and built a whole new one at 505.
One day we got job application filled out in pencil from a kid working our affiliate in Lexington. When we were far enough along to hire a sports director, we brought him in. His name was (and still is) John Rooney. Each morning, after I had finished the major newscast and John had finished his 7:20 sports report, he and I would make a fast trip to the Yum-Yum Tree up on High Street to pick up a version of a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit and a diet cola drink called TAB. We’d be back in plenty of time to do the 7:55 newscast.
John later teamed with another up and coming young sports broadcaster for some of our early Missouri Tiger basketball broadcasts. Both John and Bob Costas went on to long careers in major sports broadcasting. John, of course, has been in the St. Louis Cardinals broadcasting booth for a long time.
After a few years at 216, we moved across the street into a house at 217 E. McCarty. The news department was in the attic. Our studios were one floor down. It was dark up there so Clyde installed a skylight, which was fine until summer arrived and that old attic, as attics do, got hot, really hot. There were times when I’d send some members of the news staff to the kitchen to cool off. We finally got up on a ladder and scotch-taped some wire-service fanfold paper to the ceiling to deflect some of the sun’s rays and heat.
We moved to 505 Hobbs Road, the present headquarters of the two networks, in 1988-89. That place became the nerve center of a major broadcasting corporation that was moving to become one of the nation’s dominant entities in collegiate sports radio and is today THE largest.
As time went by and as technology changed, my House reporter—Travis Ford—convinced the Speaker to let us run live floor debate on our web page. I did the same with Senate leader Jim Mathewson. A few years later, we convinced the Missouri Supreme Court, which only recently had agreed to let people record and film its hearings, let us stream arguments before it. I’m not sure if we were on the internet for the trial of impeached Secretary of State Judith Moriarty, but I do know we recorded the whole thing. The recordings are in the oral history archives of the State Historical Society in Columbia.
When the state re-instituted the death penalty with legal drug injections as the means, we knew we had to cover executions because we believed the state should not inflict its most severe penalty without statewide news media present, and by then UPI had faded away, leaving us and the Associated Press as the only statewide media organizations. The Missourinet’s Dan McPherson covered the first one—which was done in the gas chamber at the old penitentiary (they couldn’t use gas because the seal around the door to the chamber had rotted away and witnesses as well as the honored guest would all be executed so a lethal cocktail of three drigs ws used for George “Tiny” Mercer, who was about as bad as they come. Dan was one of the pool reporters that covered the event and reported to the large number of other media folks what had happened—and there was a large crowd for the first execution in more than a decade. Dan is one of three of our former reporters who had to learn new way of writing and thinking when they went to law school. He’s been an assistant attorney general for a long time.
In 2009, I covered the execution of Dennis Skillicorn, one of 22 executions I covered, first in Potosi and then in the newer prison at Bonne Terre. Executions were done at midnight then (now they’re scheduled for 6 p.m.) and reporters then, and now, cannot use cell phones during the event itself—or other recording or photographic devices. I kept notes of the times various events occurred that night and afterwards, in my motel room, I sent out a series of tweets doing a chronological recounting of events. I think I might have been the first reporter in the world to tweet an execution.
And it goes on through the pronouncement of death, interviews (if there were any) of survivors of his victims and eventually with me leaving the prison.
It got a lot of reaction. Some thought it was gruesome. Some thought it was a revelation. Some were critical, including some anti-death penalty people in Europe—as I recall. I only did this once, not because of any bad reaction but because when executions were finished and I was back in my motel room, I had to write my stories and feed them back to Jefferson City for the morning newscasts. By then it would be about 4 a.m., and my only thought was getting to bed.
After the 1986 elections, we compared the two wire services reporting of the numbers and found a lot of inconsistencies. I met with Secretary of State Roy Blunt to see how we could develop a centralized, reliable election reporting system, and the Missouri Elections Consortium was born, giving the media that paid the consortium fees that were used to pay Blunt’s staff who had to run the feeds. Secretary of State Bekki Cook took the consortium system and made it available to the public at large.
We believed in pushing the envelope. One year, we had an intern whose expertise on the internet was so much a benefit that we almost started doing video feeds of the legislature. We were wired for let people watch the state senate’s last day but backed away at the request of the President Pro Tem who worried the senators would misbehave on the last day if they knew they were being televised. By the time the next session began we had lost our intern and some internal company management changes ended our experimentations.
One election, we went on the internet live at 7 p. m. and stayed live until we wrapped up our coverage after midnight. During the feed we paused to do reports on the network. We had a small audience of people watching us do radio in the August Primary that included reports from reporters or stringers at various campaign headquarters. Our audience tripled for November. The next time, we tried to use Google Groups so we could have videos. Our success was spotty but we were looking forward to taking the next step but it never happened.
Clyde let me have a summer off one year to work with the Missouri Cable Television Association to establish a Missourinet cable channel that would be kind of a hybrid between ESPN, CNN, and PBS. We put together a terrific programming package that we could deliver to the cable operators throughout the state for a price per customer per month that was about as much as a large bag of M&Ms with peanuts. When I pitched it to the local operators, they looked at me as if I was a telephone post.
Today the House, Senate, and the Supreme Court do their own streaming. House floor sessions are televised and so are some hearings. Inaugurations are televised, streamed, and broadcast.
One reason we were able do the things we did, or try the things we tried, was that the owner of the company was a journalist at heart. As we have seen radio change in these last fifty years, and too often not for the good of the communities in which they operate, we realize how important Clyde was to the things we were free to do. I think Missourians are better off because we didn’t just do newscasts but because we were motivated to push that envelope.
Because Clyde was a journalist at heart, he let me do a lot of things—especially getting involved with the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the equivalent in our business to the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association. The company paid for my travels to meetings in Washington and convention cities. I was the first person elected to lead the organization twice and my active participation in it led me to lecture programs on college campuses and even conducting seminars on creating free newsrooms in Romania and Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Clyde never voiced any concerns about the costs of those activities. And I always had great news staffs that kept up our levels of reporting while I was gone.
I walked out the door for the last time as news director on December 1, 2014. As they say in sports, “I left it all on the field.”
The Missourinet is still where I left it but not the same as I left it. It has changed as the radio industry has changed. But it still fills its role as the statewide news organization that keeps an eye on our government and our politics.
Clyde retired before I did and I see fewer faces that I recognize whenever I visit to record some new episodes of Across Our Wide Missouri (I have a new batch on a shelf next to me) or drop in for some other reason.
A lot of people worked for The Missourinet in those years and good people work for it now. It’s different but the industry is different.
Fifty years ago today we went on the air. We started something good. We had faith in each other that we could do it.
We started with Royal manual typewriters (our first newsletters were called “Notes from a Battered Royal—which all these years later has morphed into “Notes from a Quiet Street.”), cart machines in the studio, one reel-to-reel tape recorder that we used for telephone interviews (everything else was one-to-one in person interviews) and one UPI wire machine.
And we had no idea what the network or the company would be fifty years later.
It’s only a tiny part of a billion-dollar corporation with headquarters in Plano, Texas now, but it keeps churning out meaningful products and profits. Learfield Communications helped inaugurate the big-money collegiate sports marketing deal to the country when we bid six million dollars to broadcast Missouri Tiger basketball and football games for five years. Today, Learfield says, “From tailgates to t-shirts, courtside seats to NIL activations, on game day and every day, Learfield is your connection to college sports and live events. We engage 150M+ loyal and passionate fans across the US with unrivaled leadership across sponsorship, ticketing, licensing, and more. Our playbook is powered by media, technology, and data, unlocking value for university partners and venues while connecting brands to fans.”
The 50th anniversary of the Missourinet will pass quietly today. The corporation decided there would be no celebration. But that’s okay because The Missourinet will do what it did on January 2, 1975—cover the news for the people of Missouri, with good people who will do it responsibly and do it well.
Four of the founders of various parts of what became Learfield Communications (a combination of Lear and Brownfield) are in the Missouri Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame—Clyde, Derry, Rooney, and me. It’s quite an honor but more important, it’s a validation that Clyde had a dream and we make it come true far beyond what any of us could conceive.
So there’s some of the story of The Missourinet, just for a historical record. It began fifty years ago today, on this date, January 2, 1975.
It seems like it was only—
Fifty years ago.
