In Grade School, Did Your St. Louis Teachers Air Rex Davis's News on KSLH?

[Pink Freud]

I just got my daily update from the Missouri Historical Society with a trip down memory lane: Rex Davis, the familiar news voice on KMOX Radio for decades, hosting his morning KSLH radio news show for St. Louis Public Schools. https://mohistory.org/blog/kslh

In the seventh grade at Mark Twain School in north St. Louis, my 80 year old teacher, Mary Murphy, was a serious history and news buff. She wheeled in the school's massive radio each morning so we could listen to Davis's 15-minute update of local and national news. Miss Murphy was adamant we listen to this, so much so that she'd have pop quizzes each day about the content we had just heard. It was only years later that I realized how valuable and important this was to all of us.

This is probably, along with my mother's insistence that I read everything, why I also became, like ancient Miss Murphy, a news and history buff. Of course, Miss Murphy had a built-in advantage; she had lived through most U. S. history, or so it seemed.

Boy....could today's grade schools use those morning radio news updates! The utter ignorance of so many young people, who have millions of (ahem) information sources, is startling.

BTW, it's a good thing Rex Davis adopted that name for radio. His birth name just wouldn't roll off the tongue: Frank Zwygart.

[Pink Freud]

Boomers have pretty much a common language all our own, since we came up during a time when there were only 3 national TV networks, and almost every public school nationwide followed the same format with similar textbooks and teachings. There was no internet. We had only two independent TV stations in St. Louis; KPLR-Channel 11 (home of Captain Eleven and the Three Stooges, plus Wrestling at the Chase); and KETC, Channel 9, the (later) PBS station for educational programming.

The most popular news and entertainment magazines were TV Guide; Newsweek; Time; Life; Look; Saturday Evening Post; Photoplay; and Sports Illustrated. One of the staff photographers for Look was an aspiring Hollywood director named Stanley Kubrick, who invented his own lenses.

We got our nightly national news from either Douglas Edwards, Walter Cronkite, John Cameron Swayze, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Howard K. Smith, or later 26 year old Canadian Peter Jennings. In St. Louis, we got our local TV news from John Roedel; Chris Condon; Spencer Allen; Jim Kincaid; Max Roby; and Glenn Wilson; our weather from Howard DeMere; Pat Fontaine; Dianne White, and Mary Frann (yes, from "Newhart"). Local TV sports from Ed Macauley; Ron Jacober --- who can forget his interview with Harry Caray, holding a Schlitz the day after his firing? --- Sonny Randle; Bob Buck; Bob Wilson; Les Carmichael; et al.

During one unforgettable week just after the Blues lost in the 1968-69 Stanley Cup Finals, KTVI subbed in Bob Plager, Doug Harvey, and a few other Blues players, before they fled St. Louis to go home to Canada for the summer, to read the 10pm St. Louis sports, all five nights. Poor Harvey, the NHL legend, was nearly illiterate, and you should have heard him try to pronounce "Julian Javier".

With only 3 TV networks to carry scripted programming, we only had three choices for TV viewing every evening, in an era when every new show was given at least 13 weeks to find an audience, so we all discussed the same shows the next day at school or around the water cooler.

[abuxb]

It seems that KMOX was always on in our house as I was growing up. I remember that Rex Davis always closed with, "Today's news shapes tomorrow." As a five or six year old, I thought he said, "Today's news shakes tomorrow," which of course made no sense to me.

[Pink Freud]

My first day in Journalism 101 our instructor, the ageless reporter Robert Randolph, held up that day's local paper and said "I hold in my hands the first draft of history".... and I was hooked for life.

When I completed Broadcast Center (then) in Clayton, my Electronic Journalism Instructor was Larry Conners, who then offered me an (unpaid) internship at KMOV. Had I been 10 years younger and living with my parents I would have leapt at it, but I had bills to pay.

So glad I was able to later work in local news and sports in print, radio, and TV. I saw what they go through before airing --- or pulling --- a news story. Several times a day we'd get calls asking, " Why aren't you covering (some lurid, sensational local gossip)?", and we'd have to tell the caller we looked into it, talked to several people, and it was all just that....gossip.

Of course, my paper didn't have a Jerry Berger.