Play by Play

by Verne Lundquist

  I got to the station earlier than usual the day of my first show, Playhouse of Hits. It was scheduled to go on from one to four. I wanted to get some practice in. I’d worked the turntables before. All the commercials we played were on vinyl, so I was used to counting cuts and setting the levels on the potentiometers (or “pots”). Still I was going to be hosting, and I wanted to be sure that things went absolutely perfectly. All morning, while the church services played, I rehearsed. By the time one o’clock rolled around, my mouth was as dry as the Sonoran Desert and my heartbeat was presto. The theme or introduction music I chose was Percy Faith and his orchestra’s “Brazilian Sleigh Bells.” (If you don’t know who Percy Faith is, do a quick Google search for top hits for a few years in the early to mid 1960s and his name will be all over those lists.)

  I cued up the record, hand steady, and got it perfect. The sound started immediately. I let a ringing cascade of notes loose for a full ten seconds. I lowered the pot, bringing down the volume. I piped open my microphone and I said, using my best golden-throated tones, “Good afternoon and welcome to the Playhouse of Shits.”

  I felt my testicles retract and adrenaline rush through me. I recovered and kept up my patter. At the first commercial break, I knew what I had to do. Thankfully, my boss Stan McKenzie understood and he reassured me that something like that happened to everyone at one time or another—just usually not in the first ten seconds. Funny thing is, I remember those first ten seconds but very little of the remaining two hours and fifty minutes. I had a great group of friends and they didn’t give me too much grief. The next morning, I went to class and the snickers and pointing weren’t too bad—I heard “Playhouse of Shits” tossed at me and whispered in my ear the rest of the week. As tends to happen with things like this, some other campus mishap overtook mine in a week or two. I should make it clear that all the ribbing I took was of the good-natured, Lutheran variety.

  Despite that faux pas (“faux pooh”?) I loved my time at TLC. Years later, in 2009, I was invited to sit on the board of regents of what became TLU, and the school holds a special place in my heart. I was too busy to ever attend a meeting in person until early 2018, and when I did, I was welcomed with open arms as a kind of prodigal son. I graduated in the class of 1962 before packing my bags and making another prodigal son move by heading to Rock Island, Illinois, to attend the Lutheran School of Theology, part of Augustana College, the same seminary my father had graduated from.

  Unlike my father, I moved to the area of Illinois and Iowa at the start of the summer well before classes began. The Quad Cities consist of, ironically, five different municipalities. They are clustered on the east and west sides of the Mississippi in Illinois and Iowa. Rock Island is among the five. I’d worked my way through college, using monies I’d made doing a variety of jobs from the time I was thirteen—bagging groceries, operating a soda fountain, lifeguarding, laboring for a carpenter, along with my radio DJing. I decided that I needed a good summer job to help pay for my seminary tuition. I was fortunate to get a job at radio station KROS in Clinton, Iowa, about thirty-five miles north of the Quad Cities. My experience at KWED ultimately ended up serving me well.

  I was hired on for the summer to serve as an announcer at this nice little local radio station that signed on the airwaves at sunup and signed off at midnight. I took up residence on the second floor of the Clinton YMCA, just across the street from the studio. For $8.50 a week, I got a tiny room, a single cot, and a mini-refrigerator. In there I kept cans of Spam, jars of peanut butter and jelly, and Ritz crackers. From June to the end of August I kept myself fed on sandwiches and little else. Given my cramped quarters and the small table I sat at, and the even smaller chair I sat on, I felt a bit like one of the giants that Lemuel Gulliver encountered in Brobdingnag.

  I wasn’t full of myself, but my chest definitely expanded a bit. I was working full-time. I was away from home. I was no longer living in a dormitory, where most of my needs were taken care of by others. I was working in radio. Sure, I played a minor role in a minor-minor market, but I was learning about station operations and engineering and getting a few minutes of airtime as well as doing station identifications and the like. You would have thought that my stroll across the street to the F. W. Woolworth building and my climb up to the second floor of that structure was the same as me crossing Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to get to Rockefeller Center. This was the excitement I’d been looking for. I worked the four-to-midnight shift, and as I left the studio each night, the quiet, darkened streets of downtown Clinton smelled of promise.

  I knew that my time at KROS would end in August, so I kept applying for other radio jobs in and around the Quad Cities. Even though I was going to start seminary for the fall term, I still wanted, and needed, to work. With five small cities, each with its own radio stations, my chances seemed good. Just before Labor Day, the station manager at WOC in Davenport, Iowa, a man named Bob Gifford, called to invite me down for a lunch interview. Over soup and sandwiches Bob told me he wanted to hire me to work the nine-to-midnight shift as a disc jockey. Without thinking much, and not negotiating terms at all, I accepted. I don’t recall my exact wages but they weren’t much, probably no more than fifty dollars a week. That wasn’t nearly enough to put a dent in my expenses. In order to make up for any shortfall, I got a second job, working in the kitchen at the theological school. I’d get home from DJing music to make out by, grab a few hours of sleep, get up before sunup to get to the cafeteria’s kitchen, and then hustle off to my eight o’clock class in classical Greek.

  By mid-September 1962, one thing had emerged from the fog of my sleep deprivation and the steam rising from the industrial sinks: I didn’t have the calling that it took to complete theology school. The siren song of disc jockeying was an alluring one, but my decision to leave seminary was based on an honest realization that I really didn’t feel a true call to be of service in the way my father had. The discussion with my parents about my decision was, all things considered, easy. My father understood that I couldn’t lead a congregation if I had doubts about my ability or my faith. I knew that it hurt him to know the latter. He was unshakable in his beliefs and I wasn’t. He faced that with other congregants and he never took anyone’s crisis in faith as a sign of any failing on his part. He took his role seriously but knew that matters of faith and fidelity to that faith were personal choices. He could lead but he couldn’t coerce.

  For my part, I felt as if I was letting him down, but I wasn’t racked with guilt, mostly because of how he handled my revelation. I’m firmly convinced that even if my life hadn’t turned out the way it did, my father would have still supported me and my choice. He was that wonderful, and that wise, a man. I had made a commitment to attend seminary for a year and I honored that, keeping both of my jobs as well.

  As I pulled out of Rock Island in the spring of 1963, I left one other thing behind besides a potential career—my “La.”

  Let me explain.

  The evening before I went on air at WOC in Davenport, Bob Gifford and I had a brief meeting.

  “LaVerne.” He looked as if he’d just bitten into something disagreeable.

  He went on, “Take a seat.”

  I did.

  “LaVerne,” he said again, drawing my name out. A look that was half smile, half grimace spread across his face. He shook his head slowly.

  I feared the worst.

  “I just don’t see it. I don’t hear it.”

  He looked me square in the eye and said, “I can’t put you on the air.”

  My heart fell and my mind raced.

  An eternity lapsed.

  “ ‘LaVerne’ just won’t cut it. You go on tonight as Verne. You understand?”

  I nodded and left the room breathing easy for the first time in minutes.

  I’ve been Verne ever since.

  I suppose I’ve put this off long enough. As much as I wondered why I was burdened with such a mouthful of a moniker as Merton LaVerne, I felt doubly burdened
by the fact that my parents named my siblings David, Dan, Tom, and Sharon. I’ve consciously not referenced them by their names before waiting for this moment when my name was the equal of theirs. While I’m at it, I also recognized that I should (and do) count my blessings.

  Despite my name change, my mother continued to call me LaVerne for the rest of her life. Both my parents loved the name and I loved them for understanding what I’d done and for keeping true to what they felt. Best of both worlds.

  ON MY RETURN TO AUSTIN, I moved back in with the family. I didn’t feel great about that but necessity won out. Even before I left Rock Island, I’d started searching for job opportunities. I wrote to the program director at KTBC in Austin and asked for a summer job. I was hired as an FM disc jockey as a replacement for regulars out on vacation. I wasn’t earning enough to afford a place of my own. Toward the end of that summer, the veteran sports director for the TV station, Dan Love, decided to move on. I saw my opportunity and decided to toss my hat in the ring. I loved sports, and though I hadn’t covered it in any of my previous radio jobs, I thought I could manage it. With nothing to lose, I went to the office of the station’s program director, Cactus Pryor, and offered up my services. Cactus looked me over and said, “We hired you for the summer. Aren’t you going back to school?”

  Once I cleared that matter up he said he was willing to see what I could do. I was given two hours to prepare a three-minute sports segment. I would then have to perform that live in front of Cactus and the station’s president J. C. Kellam. I went after that task like my life depended on it. At the appointed time, I sat in the studio with those two men in a viewing room one floor above and delivered the best rendition of the copy I’d written to a single camera. I imagined them as they sat there stone-faced. I nodded and thanked them for the opportunity and went back to doing my regular job, which that day meant running the board for other on-air talent.

  Toward the end of my shift, I got word that Cactus wanted to speak with me. He told me that I’d done well—real well considering it was a first effort. Not quite good enough, though. They had another guy in mind and wound up hiring him to do the weekly TV broadcasts. Cactus offered me the weekend shift. I took it. Gladly. Between that and them retaining me to continue to do a five-to-nine shift as a disc jockey, I was going to earn a living wage.

  Barely.

  Come March 1964, I was hired to do the sports director job full-time. The other fellow hadn’t worked out. I was going to earn a living wage.

  Barely.

  That’s how, at the age of twenty-three, I was at the station on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. I was working the control board at KTBC-AM-FM-TV in Austin, the radio-television station owned by Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird. The station was officially in Mrs. Johnson’s name, but the vice president had a big impact there and was pretty hands-on, from what I remember.

  I had a number of roles at the station: I was the weekend sportscaster on television, and management also had me working as a disc jockey (“Catch The Verne Lundquist Show from five to nine P.M.!”). I also occasionally ran the radio board. On that particular afternoon I was running the control board for our radio news block, making sure the sound levels were adjusted accordingly and the microphones were on. I remember we were airing the agricultural report, which was on tape, when I got a phone call from my boss’s daughter, Nita Louise Kellam, who was also a high school classmate of mine. She was calling to tell me that her father had given me the night off and that they were going to let somebody take my place as the DJ that night so I could be her escort to go hear President Kennedy speak. We weren’t dating; it was simply a chance to go hear President Kennedy speak. As I was on the phone with Nita Louise talking about our plans that night, Hal Nelson, who was one of our newsmen, came barging into the control room. It was shortly after 12:30 P.M.

  “Put me on the air immediately—the president has been shot!” shouted Hal.

  I did as I was told. I was twenty-three years old.

  The rest of the day became one of the most memorable events of my life. The station was located in a five-story building in Austin at Tenth Street and Brazos Street, and within thirty minutes, we had Secret Service agents combing the building. I saw them at every elevator door on every floor, because at the time, no one knew if this was some sort of coup. In the newsroom, on the second floor of the building, we switched to CBS News. I was watching Walter Cronkite when he took his glasses off with a tear in his eye and announced, at 1:38 P.M. Central Time, that the president had been declared dead.

  We were all pressed into service that day in some way, and here I was, just a disc jockey and a weekend sports anchor. But I went back into the newsroom and said, “Is there any way I can help?” KTBC was a CBS affiliate, and CBS Television was flying in a secondary White House crew that had not been traveling with President Kennedy in Dallas. The correspondent they sent was a man named David Schoumacher, who had a photographer and an audio guy with him. I was assigned as their driver that night. The four of us got into the car and we drove to Johnson City.

  I remember we didn’t leave Austin till 7:30 P.M. or so. The drive to Johnson City was about sixty miles. What they were searching for was backup material, because who knew how long Cronkite would be on the air? We got to Johnson City around 9 P.M. and all of us were obviously in a state of shock. Schoumacher and his group had a list of contacts they wanted to find. There were people who were high school classmates of Vice President Johnson that we contacted, but the one I really remember was A. W. Moursund, who served two terms in the Texas legislature and was a member of Johnson’s inner circle. We were in his home for an hour. People were in mourning, but Schoumacher and his staff were very gracious and accommodating. We were welcomed by strangers and there would be coffee or iced tea waiting for us. It took time to set up the camera gear and sometimes it felt like an eternity. Then Schoumacher sat down across from LBJ’s people and interviewed them. I listened very carefully to how he went about asking the questions and how the conversations would evolve. The questions were intended to elicit some sense of the character of LBJ, what he had been like when he lived in Johnson City, and these were people who had grown up with him. The purpose of the trip was to flesh out who this guy was and to do so through the words of people who knew him well. Back then, we did not know our vice presidents the way we do today. Keep in mind these were primitive days of television: there were no satellites, no color television. We spent the night traveling from home to home, and David would interview anybody and everybody who could tell him anecdotes or background stories on the man who was suddenly the president of the United States.

  Here I was at the time, a twenty-three-year-old sports anchor and part-time disc jockey. To say that I did on-the-ground reporting would overstate my role. I was a chauffeur—and willing to do it. We drove back to Austin around 4 A.M. and I took the CBS newsmen back to their hotel, which was within a block of our TV station.

  It was my first foray into a broadcast with national reach.

  THE REST, AS THEY SAY, took forever.

  Not quite forever, but at times it sure felt as if I would never move up in the world of broadcasting.

  I enjoyed being around Cactus. He was a regional legend as a comic. I got a chance to go to one of the corporate gigs he did to perform at a national sales meeting. Before the main dinner, they held a cocktail reception hour. Cactus attended that in the guise of a Danish diplomat—he was a wonderful mimic and his accent could have fooled anyone. He circulated among the attendees and gathered a few facts about those people. Later, as the entertainment for the evening, he got up and spoke. Not dropping his faux persona, he told jokes and worked in facts about those he’d “interviewed” earlier. I laughed along with the rest of them. I’ve done my fair share of personal appearances since then, and I love to regale an audience, but my shtick pales in comparison to Cactus’s.

  I liked being in Austin but it was a small market. I enjoyed getting to kno
w the coaches of the various UT teams and spending time at that beautiful campus, going out into the field to shoot my own film, covering high school football in all its Texas Friday night lights glory. To this day, I’m still amazed by the size of those crowds and the quality of the stadiums. While in high school, I was invited by Lou Maysel, the sports editor at the Austin American-Statesman, to assist him at the sports desk on those Friday nights. I manned a phone and took calls from coaches or someone else affiliated with the high school football team. They’d let me know the scores and I’d write up a brief summary of the Hutto Hippos beating the Taylor Ducks 17–14 in a real barnburner decided by a last-minute field goal that squeezed just inside the right upright. That experience helped hone my writing skills and fired my imagination.

  But my main beat was the UT men’s teams. Darrell Royal was the football coach then, and I would immediately idolize the man. At first I wasn’t allowed much access to him. He did a Thursday night show for us during the season, but Cactus handled that on-air assignment. Instead I was on baseball. One of the first baseball interviews I did was with head coach Bibb Falk. Maybe Bibb should have worn a bib. He was a tobacco-chomping, expectorating machine. He looked and spoke as if he hadn’t woken up on the wrong side of the bed, but with the bed on top of him and with a large man jumping on it. I was still a young pup, and I decided to offer up an easy question to lubricate the process.

  “Coach Falk, what do you think of your team’s prospects for this year?”

  Bibb Falk didn’t bat an eye. He shifted his chaw from one cheek to another. Looking out from the dugout to some distant point beyond the outfield fence he said, “I’ll tell you one thing, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”