 He saw stars--lots of them
Bob Wells likely would have admitted that he’s a very lucky man. After all, it’s not everyone who walks into a TV station and lands a volunteer job offering on-the-job training leading to a career lasting more than 40 years.
It was a career that allowed him to hobnob with some of Hollywood’s royalty along with the movers and shakers at CBS-TV.
But that’s what happened when the 21-year-old U.S. Air Force sergeant walked into Colorado Springs’ KKTV and said he would work for no pay in lieu of a chance to learn the television business and get in on the ground floor of that media’s future. Admittedly, he said, a frightened young man had to raise up a lot of courage to do what he did.
The ground floor meant moving TV lights, building sets and setting up chairs for interviews, along with a chance to learn how to direct programming, including one of the staples of early TV, the clown show for kids.
KKTV offered him a full time job when his enlistment was up a year later and from then on it was the director’s life for him as he moved from his $85 a week job to an $82.50 job at WLWD (Channel 2) in Dayton. Yes, that’s right. He took a pay cut to make the move. But what looked like a backward move, put Wells in forward motion in his new career.
At WLWD, he helped the station set up its first newscast, working with news anchor Ed Hamlin and sports anchor Omar Williams. By chance, Wells was asked to work during the summer months at WLWT, the sister station in Cincinnati, where he was a fill-in director for its stars, Paul Dixon and Ruth Lyons, and shows like Midwestern Hayride.
After accepting a job at a new station in Dayton, WKEF (Channel 22), which gave him a salary boost the move taught him valuable marketing skills when he went door-to-door to sell a UHF converter so viewers could actually watch his channel. He also was in on a promotion that brought the Indianapolis 500 to Channel 22 viewers through a delayed film broadcast. He then grabbed what was the TV brass ring in Dayton, a job with Cox Broadcasting’s WHIO-TV, the top rated channel there.
“That was the big time,” Wells said of Channel 7. After producing news there, he was one of 80 candidates for the job of promotion and market director, a job he held for 21 years that introduced him to CBS-TV’s stars on annual junkets to Los Angeles and New York to film promotions for the coming season.
One of his promotions, he remembers, got him into hot water with the University of Dayton. He had hundreds of small megaphones created with the UD basketball team’s schedule imprinted on them and handed them out at a basketball game. The hometown fans didn’t like a call by the referee and used the megaphones to show their displeasure. Then, they tossed them at the referees.
“They asked me not to hand any more out at games,” Wells said.
His office at WHIO-TV was filled with photos of Wells and those stars during promotion tours, including Carol Burnett, Anthony Hopkins, Tom and Dick Smothers, Lena Horne, George Burns, Mary Tyler Moore, Carroll O’Connor, Tom Selleck, Larry Hagman , Alan Alda and Dan Rather, among others. Many of those photos are now on display at his home in Middletown.
Admittedly, it was a heady experience for Wells and his wife, Nancy, who found the CBS stars to be pretty nice people. “They all had their own personalities,” he said. “Between takes, you’d really get acquainted. We’d talk about our families and things like that. It was their agents who were the problems.”
After retirement, Wells continued his civic activities in Middletown, something that once went with the job in marketing and promotion for WHIO-TV. He was a member of many clubs, including the Kiwanis, where he has twice been president.
His crowning civic work, however, was his two terms on Middletown City Council, where he has served as mayor as well as vice chairman/vice mayor on two occasions. “Four years is a long time,” he said of the council terms. “But I guess people liked me and re-elected me to four more.”
Wells said that his working in ridding the city of yellow signs and establishing architectural design to control housing and land were two of his proudest accomplishments.
Nowadays, he tends to his garden and volunteers at the hospital as well as at Middletown Municipal Court.
(The photo accompanying this article shows Bob Wells with fellow Middletonian Van Gordon Sauter, also a Middletown High graduate, who was president of News at CBS-TV)
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