Bob Sevey anchored the KGMB News from 1966 until he retired in 1986. Before that he was with KULA and KHVH, which later became KITV. When astronauts first landed on the moon in 1969, 91 percent of viewers were tuned to his KGMB broadcast.
Many called the late TV newsman Hawaii’s Walter Cronkite. He hired and mentored a generation of on-air reporters, including Joe Moore, Leslie Wilcox, Gary Sprinkle, Linda Coble, Tim Tindall, Kirk Matthews, Bambi Weil and Tina Shelton.
About 10 years ago I had a chance to talk with him about the lighter side of his work. Did he remember any interesting events from the early days of broadcasting?
"Oh my," was his response. "You’re asking me to dredge up things that happened more than 40 years ago. The spirit is willing but the memory is suspect."
"I do recall that we had a Japanese department at KULA-TV headed by a gentleman named Harold Sakoda. They put on a weekly variety show that ran for at least an hour, maybe two. Most of the performers spoke only Japanese, but we had no Japanese-speaking director on staff."
"Our assistant general manager, Art Sprinkle (former KITV News anchor Gary Sprinkle’s father), directed the show. It was not scripted. Art had only a format sheet written in Japan-ized English."
"More often than not, what happened in the studio bore little or no relationship to what was on the format sheet," Sevey mused. "It was a director’s nightmare. Art knew only one word of Japanese, the word for ‘Stop!’ When things got out of hand, he would pop a slide onto the screen, kill all the studio mikes and shout that word into the intercom. That would bring the proceedings to a halt."
"Sprinkle would explain to Mr. Sakoda that it was quite necessary to follow the format. Mr. Sakoda would put the people in the proper places, and the show would continue. That process often took several minutes during which the TV audience was treated to a slide and audio of Japanese music. No one seemed to mind."
"Then there was the strike at KULA-TV," Sevey said. He had worked there before moving to KGMB in 1966. "It was the first ever by the IBEW against a Honolulu TV station. All the technicians and cameramen walked out. The management staff was able to keep things on a reasonably even keel during the day of routine programming on film or kinescope (before videotape was invented)."
"The 6 o’clock news, however, was another kettle of fish. There were salesmen pushing and trying to focus the cameras, promotion people were editing news film, the floor director was a copy writer, the sports guy was on the audio board and on camera was me."
"I led to the first piece of news film, and instead a commercial came up. I led to the second piece, and the fourth piece appeared. For a solid half-hour, absolutely nothing went according to the script. Everything was screwed up. It soon became funny, and I decided I had to play it that way. Somehow we finished the half-hour."
In the hours and days that followed, the station got thousands of phone calls and hundreds of pieces of mail. "Ninety-nine percent of them said they loved the newscast, thought it was the best and certainly the funniest one they’d ever seen. Most were quite disappointed when we got our act together and figured out how to do it right, in spite of the strike."
Bob Sigall, author of "The Companies We Keep" books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.
