Keith Hirshland - Cover Me Boys, Im Going in: Tales of the Tube from a Broadcast Brat

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DEDICATION

For Dad and Mom, who now frolic among the very stars for which they taught me to reach, and for Sarah, the most dazzling yet grounded person I have ever met and without whom one mans memories would still be just that.

If you spend your whole life up there on the shelf, you got no one to blame but your own damn self.
Pat Green

GETTING STARTED

I have been gainfully employed, with the exception of a few weeks here or a month or two there, for the better part of thirty-five years and am lucky enough to confess that it feels like I have never worked a day in my life. Thats simply because I have been fortunate to have had a career in television.

My broadcast career began in 1975 as a wide-eyed nineteen-year-old with delusions of grandeur, but, thanks to my dad, my life in TV goes back much further.

My father was that rare combination of dreamer and doer. He was born March 23, 1925, in Reading, Pennsylvania, and was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. He always loved sports; most kids in that part of Pennsylvania did. As was true for everyone in the mid 20s, life for the Hirshlandsmy grandfather Harry, Grandmother Helen, Aunt Julie, and (father) Leewas relatively simple. But nobody was surprised when it turned out my dad had a more adventurous one in mind.

He was not yet seventeen when historic and tragic events shocked our nation on December 7, 1941, as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack thrust our nation into World War II, but, being a resilient nation, as our military and its leaders prepared to exact our revenge, much of the country took care of business as usual (or as usual as anything can be in time of conflict). College footballs Rose Bowl game, The Granddaddy of Them All, was first played on January 1, 1902, as the Tournament East-West football game. Michigan, representing the East, beat Stanford, from the West, 490, beginning a tradition of New Years Day football games that continues today. The games were played every year from 1902 until World War I interrupted that streak. On New Years Day 1916, as a means to help fund a Pasadena parade, the game returned to stay, this time officially as the Rose Bowl. The actual Rose Bowl stadium was built in time for the 1923 version between the University of Southern California and Penn State and has been the venue for the New Years Day extravaganza ever sinceexcept for one year, 1942, and my dad was there.

As I mentioned, the game back then was an East versus West battle with a team from what was then the PCC (Pacific Coast Conference) against an opponent from somewhere east of the Mississippi. The Duke University Blue Devils, led by head coach Wallace Wade, played in the 1939 edition, coming in at 9 and 0, riding a defense that had not allowed as much as one single point during the entire season. That amazing streak continued until the final minutes of that game, when USC completed four straight passes, the last one finding the end zone, to beat Duke, 73. In 1942 Duke was again chosen to be the games representative from the East, and this time the opponent was Oregon State College (later OSU). The invitation went out on December 1, 1941. Six days later, life in America was suddenly very different.

Fearful of another West Coast attack, the United States government ordered a prohibition on large public gatherings on the West Coast for the duration of the war. A football stadium with a seating capacity of close to one hundred thousand certainly constituted the potential for a large public gathering. Lt. General John L. DeWitt recommended the game and the festivities surrounding it be cancelled and the Rose Bowl committee planned to do just that. But on December 16 Duke offered another idea. The university invited the committee, Oregon State, and the game to Durham.

My dad wasnt on that invitation list, but somehow he found himself in Duke Stadium (later named Wallace Wade Stadium after the legendary coach) for the only Rose Bowl ever played outside Pasadena. Being there was apparently not enough for Lee Hirshland. In fact, he ended up assisting Bill Stern, the play-by-play man for NBC radio that day. It was an introduction into the world of professional broadcasting that would inspire him long into the future. He eventually attended Duke for two years and then left to head west and enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. At Cal he served as the sports editor of the school newspaper, the Daily Cal , and in 1949 graduated with a degree in astrophysics. Space always fascinated himand he taught my two brothers and me to shoot for the stars.

Dad was a natural leader his entire life. By all accounts he was well liked, but more importantly he was much respected. He was a navy man and served his country in the Korean War after graduating from college. I am told that, at the time, he was the second youngest commissioned officer in the navy and eventually the youngest commanding officer of a commissioned naval ship. He was in his midtwenties and leading sailors aboard the USS Henrico , patrolling the waters off Korea during the conflict. The son of a strict naval doctor and a brilliant and gregarious military nurse, my dad learned at an early age to be self-reliant and knew the value of integrity and hard work.

Dad left the navy in 1952, eleven years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and chose Honolulu, Hawaii, to live, work, and start a family. The woman who would be his wife, business partner, and the mother of his three boys was Mary Virginia Davis Hirshland, his constant, loving companion until they died, less than a year apart, more than fifty-five years later.

My older brother, David, was born in 1953, and on December 19 two years later, I followed. I was born nearly a month premature. Mom and Dad said I couldnt wait to see the world. After doing what Ive done, being where Ive been, and seeing what Ive seen, I guess they were right.

At the time, my dad worked at Honolulu radio station KGUfirst as a salesman, calling on island retailers and automobile dealers, asking them to buy advertising on the station. In the five years he worked there he rose in the ranks to assistant manager and eventually national sales manager. But he wasnt just a behind-the-scenes guy. Dads love of sports was evident during his work at KGU, and at one point he conceived, sold advertising for, and hosted Sportslants under the pseudonym of Lee Anders. The station promoted it as a fifteen-minute sportscast from KGU with a special emphasis on predictions and discussions of Mainland football games.

That chutzpah and hard work impressed the station manager and its owner, a gentleman by the name of Donald W. Reynolds, who owned not only KGU but a number of other broadcast properties around the country. Reynolds saw promise in my father and respected his work enough to offer him the position of sales manager of KOLO TV8the station Reynolds owned in Reno, Nevada. Of course Dad accepted and, with my mom and two young boys in tow, the Hirshland family left paradise and moved to the Reno suburb of Sparks, Nevada. And this broadcast brats life would never be the same.