We didn’t know if it would work or not but it gave us a longer sweep. It was before KRLA’s news at :45 and we went through the top of the hour. We could draw from anybody at the top of the hour at that point because everybody but KRLA was doing either news on the hour or at five minutes till. If people tuned us out and went to KFWB they would only be there for like five minutes. If anybody was looking for music around the top of the hour we were there. Oh yeah, we had to hide news. The previous people had made so many public service commitments. We had huge religious blocks and talk blocks and we couldn’t get rid of them. We buried them on Sunday mornings, early. The FCC was a whole different ball game back then.
Lyle Kilgore
Art Kevin: I was excited about the forthcoming change. Change was not a fearful event for me. All the new people appeared a bit “nutty” but then again, one could feel the power of it all. It was easy to want to be a part of all the excitement. I’d heard news would be de-emphasized, but in point of fact, that never came to pass. Ron Jacobs made things happen for news, for which I am eternally grateful. Working with all the new folks was a joy. The energy level was intense. The “20/20 News” format did not scare me. But I wondered what it might mean to more traditional listeners wedded to the half-hour or top-of-the-hour format. I was pleased to be trying something new and different.
The jock staff was fun to work with. They fully aappreciated what we were trying to do and never made us feel unimportant. In fact, I well remember how Robert W. or Steele or Gary Mack would question me about news stories that I had just aired. These were pros in the best sense of the word.
Roger Aldi
Roger Aldi: I was in my early twenties working the bottom of the KHJ job-ladder in the 20-man news department. One day in early 1965, a tall gentleman walked in and declared, “We are now a rock ’n’ roll radio station. News means nothing to me except the FCC makes me include it, so we’re gonna make it the best news presentation we can.” I asked someone who that was and they said, “He’s the new program consultant, Bill Drake.”
J. Paul Huddleston
Art Kevin: I’ll never forget what Roger Aldi and Andy West looked like when they returned to KHJ after covering the first night of the Watts Riots. I assigned them to ride together for safety’s sake. They had radioed in that their mobile unit had been attacked with rocks and the front windshield was gone. When they walked into the newsroom we all could see they still had shards of glass all over their hair. Some of the glass was in their ears and some tiny slivers shone from their foreheads. We spent several hours carefully removing the debris.
One day in Watts a group of teens were threatening to riot in front of their school. I dispatched Phil Barton to make his way to an LAPD command post a safe distance away from the school. Phil made a wrong turn and found himself in front of the school and in the midst of a mob that was moving toward his mobile unit. I asked him to keep his two-way radio microphone on for safety’s sake. He did. As the mob approached we heard Phil roll his window down and try and reason with the group. Next thing we know he was choking, they’d grabbed his tie! We called LAPD and they had to drive in to the building melee to save our man.
NEWSWEEK, August 30, 1965
I recall the night when police tried to quell a student anti-war protest that flooded the UC campus in Santa Barbara. I drove in with my mobile unit and found myself being advanced on by a student mob. They surrounded my car and started rocking it. As they were doing their thing I managed to convince one of the group leaders that we, KHJ, were the good guys. And that if they would stop rocking me around I’d tape their comments for all L.A. to hear and distribute and at all our other stations throughout the U. S. Thank goodness it made sense to the leader of the group. He called off his crew and proceeded to tape their grievances.
Jim Mitchell: We always tried to talk to our audience, choosing stories that would interest KHJ listeners. In those days, hard news worked for young audiences. We had the Vietnam War growing and it could have life-and-death impact for young adults. Challenges to authority were everywhere with frequent trouble on college campuses and in central city neighborhoods. We covered the first Monterey Pop Festival live from the scene. It wasn’t always possible to build a whole newscast, even a short KHJ 20/20 newscast, with that stuff, but we seldom had a problem filling. We always tried for fresh actualities, sound bites from newsmakers and reporter-on-the-scene explainers. This was straight out of the Jacobs Honolulu Playbook. Over there, five or six local wire stories a day carried the “KPOI asked” slug, meaning we gave the wire service the story after we broke it. We regularly whipped stations with twice as many people on their staff. The idea was to keep it relevant and keep it moving. Jacobs’ theory was let’s do it as well as it can be done. He had bigger things to worry about, but he listened to us and pushed for improvement.
Art Kevin: In August 1965 I remember very specifically when Jacobs went to bat to try and get me — the news department — a better playback time for a two-hour news special about the Watts Riots. We finally went with it at 4 a.m. Later, after I’d submitted the two-hour show to a prestigious news competition, I got the tape back with a note from one of the group’s officers saying we were the ones to beat, but their judges couldn’t get past the playback time which indicated to them that we had no real news commitment.
Marv Howard
Except for the Watts riots I never felt put down by other L.A. news media. They claimed we were “too raucous.” In point of fact KHJ News was too busy doing award-winning work. The Chancellor of the University of California praised us. Politicians ran trial balloons by us. I reported live when Bobby Kennedy died and when he was buried near his late brother. I was there when someone tried to murder James Meredith during the march through Mississippi. KHJ 20/20 News listeners also heard the first radio interviews of Warren Commission critics such as Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg and Mort Sahl. KHJ’s financial success also allowed coverage of major political party conventions. We were the only L.A. radio station to have a reporter at the Chicago Democratic National convention of 1968. Yours truly was tear gassed along with Dick Gregory.
The news department had the best of everything. The newest and most advanced mobile news units and the best and most expensive field gear available. After the 1965 Watts riot we were the first L.A. radio station to issue our news department jumpsuits marked with a “PRESS” logo for field safety. We also obtained California Highway Patrol hardhats to ward off bricks, bottles and tear gas canisters and to protect personnel in tight situations.
The KHJ news department won numerous national, regional and local area awards for news excellence and was often mentioned on the UPI and AP wire services. We also had station stories picked up by such publications as the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Jim Mitchell: The big thing with Jacobs is loyalty. I’ll bet he doesn’t even realize that he hired me four times, three of them after I had left jobs with him. Other people have stories like this. I left KPOI because I wanted to get back to the mainland. I had a job lined up at KMBY, where I planned to golf my way around theMonterey Peninsula and attend junior college, but Jacobs called and talked me into going to Fresno State and working at KMAK. I left KMAK to play disc jockey in San Diego. Three months later he offered me San Bernardino at the time when KMEN might have been the best — although not the best-known — station in the country. Then I left there for the beauty of San Diego again, only to have him bring me into the breathtaking success story of KHJ. Not many bosses would take back somebody who bailed out on them so often.
Come to think of it ... he did it again! About twenty years after leaving KHJ, I was vacationing in Honolulu, and he asked me to cut show promos and station IDs for his show on KGU. Sure, he screamed at us. Maybe he sometimes pushed us beyond our endurance. But nobody ever doubted that he’d do anything for people who gave him their best.
Art Kevin: Obviously it was KHJ’s 20/20 newaformat, personalities and promotion that made it all happen. Our challenge in the news department was to be as exciting as what preceded and followed us, to compliment the station’s overall goals. I think we achieved that most of the time.
KHJ News Director Art Kevin and L. A. Police Chief Thomas Reddin
The transition from the “old” to the “new” was smooth because the men involved were professionals. They were loyal and they knew they could trust what I told them. In turn, I knew that Jacobs and I were dealing from the same deck of cards.
I believed Jacobs implicitly. He was always in the news department’s corner and never gave me reason to doubt that he sincerely liked what we were doing in the newsroom. We spoke quite a bit in those days. Sometimes I changed his mind on a given subject, other times not. But the respect we had for each other was mutual.
2 B continued . . .
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