Max Factor and me

Anchoring the late news was -- for me -- more about show biz than journalism.

Starting in late 1971, I anchored the late news at WTVR TV for about a year. The previous anchorman had quit, and I was tapped to fill in. It took management a long time to find a permanent replacement.

I enjoyed the experience, because I was developing another skill, but I never liked the folderol that went with it. Makeup, for example. I found I looked almost normal if I wore Max Factor Tan #2 pancake. The closest place to buy it was at the old People's Drug Store at Boulevard and Broad. There was a crotchety old lady who worked at the cosmetics counter. She always gave me the evil eye when I told her what I needed. I think she probably thought I was leading a secret life in drag because I was so specific about what I wanted. I never bothered to tell her I used it for television: Imagining her fantasy about my private life was much more fun.

My hair has never been particularly tame, so the last thing I'd do before I left the newsroom to head to the studio was to comb my hair. Invariably, it needed combing again by the time I got behind the anchor desk. One of the more interesting things I learned was to comb my hair using the studio's preview monitor while the engineers were making last-minute adjustments to the cameras.

It's not at all like combing your hair in a mirror. If you stand in front of a mirror, your right hand is on your right in the reflection. But if you're looking into a TV monitor, your right hand is on your left as you look at the screen. It took a l-o-n-g time before I could make that mental adjustment while trying to do something as simple as running a comb through my hair.

I enjoyed being an anchorman not because I liked having the on-air face time. What I really liked was putting the broadcast together -- deciding what stories would run in which order and timing the newscast to the exact second so that all of the commercials ran in the right places and we finished in time for the next program to start at exactly 11:30:00 p.m. I also enjoyed it when a story broke late in the evening and we had to tear the lineup apart and, sometimes, wing it. That was journalism, not show biz.

But when a new anchorman was hired, I was glad to get back to being a reporter.

Observations on a new cat

Cassie, age 5 according to the SPCA, is a calico. She is white with orange-rust and black markings.

The new cat Chez Dale, Cassie, is an interesting companion. I adopted her from the SPCA a week ago. Her records said she was taken in by the Chesterfield animal shelter in January and then taken in for adoption by the Richmond SPCA. What made her distinct in my mind from the other cats up for adoption were her playfulness and her distinctive markings. I got a discount on the adoption fee under the Seniors for Seniors program, which matches people over 65 with cats who are 5 or older.

After a week, here are 10 random observations:

1: Cassie has an upper respiratory infection. I have never adopted an SPCA cat who didn't come with a URI. The vet gave her a shot of antibiotics in case it was bacterial and suggested we just ride it out. The URI seems to me to be improving.

2: Cats purr funny when they have a URI.

3: Cassie purrs if I so much as look at her.

4: Cassie's meow is silent except on rare occasions. She opens her mouth, seems to be meowing, but is completely silent. (Her hiss, however, is not silent, although I have only heard it once.)

5: Cassie's claws are like needles. All of my previous cats were declawed. Cassie has to learn to keep her claws tucked away when she sits in my lap and kneads my leg. She seems to get it when I say "ouch."

6: Cassie likes quiet time in a warm lap, and she will stay in my lap until I have to get up to do something.

7: Cassie begs for food when I eat. That's not cool, and I'll just have to ignore the reproachful silent meows until she gets over it. She goes through a bowl of dry cat food in about a day, and she'll chase cat treats across the room. That's fun to watch.

8: Cassie is small enough to retrieve a toy by squeezing between the radiator and the wall. Her favorites are a small cloth mouse, a furry stuffed mouse, and crumpled up sticky notes. She's smart enough to pick them up in her mouth and carry them from the rug to the bare floor, where batting them around produces more interesting results.

9: Cassie shows no interest in sleeping in bed with me. She prefers to nap in a small space under the table between the sofa and the wall in the den. This is fine with me.

10: Cassie has mastered the art of appearing and disappearing at will. She is a true stealth cat.

Agnes with a vengeance

Main Street, looking west, in the aftermath of Hurricane Agnes

Hurricane Agnes hit Richmond in June of 1972. The storm ripped up the East Coast, bringing heavy rainfall and killing 129 people. Damage was estimated at $1.7 billion. It was the most damaging hurricane ever recorded up to its time.

Portions of Richmond suffered massive flooding as the James River overflowed its banks, primarily in Shockoe Bottom and on Main Street. For days, WTVR fielded crews to cover the storm and its aftermath, devoting most of its newscasts to the story. I remember dramatic scenes of dead cattle, even small houses, floating down the James River.

One of my assignments as the waters receded took me to Main Street. I was standing ankle-deep in mud on a brilliantly sunny morning -- have you ever noticed that big storms are followed by sunny days? -- when news director Bob Trent called on our news-car's radio. "The Cronkite show wants a package on how Richmond is doing after the flooding," he said.

After I wrapped up our local story, I did a couple more standups to make a separate package for CBS. While I recorded new narration, the photographer who was working with me shot fresh film for CBS. Then we raced to the airport to put the raw film and narration on a plane for New York.

Then it was back to the studio on West Broad Street to process our local film and make packages to run on the 6 and 7 o'clock portions of "News/90."

I didn't have a lot of hope that I'd actually be on the Cronkite show that night. CBS often asked for film and packages that never got used due to the press of other news.

But at 6:30, I made sure I was in front of the TV set in the WTVR conference room. In those days, the Cronkite show started with a wide shot of Walter Cronkite at his desk while a booth announcer said, "This is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in New York, and reports tonight from Dan Rather in Washington, Bob Schieffer in Philadelphia," and so on, as the reporters' names and datelines were superimposed on the screen.

And there it was: "and Don Dale, in Richmond, Virginia."

Even better than appearing on my idol's nightly newscast was the check: CBS paid me $150 dollars. I split it with the cameraman.

Lucy

Lucy Hammer Miller

My newest great-great-niece was born at home Friday at about 12:30 p.m. She is Lucy Hammer Miller, and she weighed in at 8 pounds 12 ounces. She was a full 21 inches long and was assisted into the world by an experienced team of midwives.

Lucy is the second daughter of my brother's son's daughter Jenny. Lucy's older sister, Rowan, was my first great-great niece.

Congratulations to Jenny, her husband, Nate, and to Lucy's grandmother and great-grandmother, all of whom were on hand for her birth.

As I enter the last stage of my life, I can see ever more clearly the importance of family. And that family is linear without end. Welcome to the family, Lucy!

Covering SCOTUS

The Supreme Court of the United States

With coverage of the 1970 Virginia General Assembly session under my belt, I looked forward to reporting on more Virginia politics. But in those days, unlike today, there were great lulls in political news between elections and between General Assembly sessions.

To keep me busy, the station added local, state and federal courts to my beat. I quickly found it to be another arena I enjoyed covering.

Over the next few years, I covered two local cases that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court -- one I covered from the beginning of the end and another I covered from the beginning to the end. Plus, I covered the nomination of an intelligent, thoughtful and extremely able local attorney to a seat on the nation's highest court.

It was Richmond's annexation of 23 square miles -- and 47,000 residents -- of Chesterfield County that provided my first taste of justice at its highest levels. Richmond had grown over the centuries by annexing portions of the neighboring counties. In 1965, the city went after a chunk of Chesterfield. The annexation took effect January 1, 1970, just as I rejoined the WTVR staff.

A group of black Richmonders promptly filed suit claiming a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, saying their voting power had been deliberately diluted by the city. Richmond's white leaders, the plaintiffs said, had conspired in drawing the annexation map to deliberately add white voters. The facts seemed to be on their side. Before the annexation, the city's population was 52 percent black. After the annexation took effect, the city's black population was 42 percent.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Previously, Richmond City Council's nine members were elected at-large. The city capitulated and effectively nullified the drop in the black population percentage by agreeing to a ward system. The wards were drawn so that four would contain a majority black population, four would contain a majority white population, and one would be racially even. The Supreme Court Justices ruled that the new system guaranteed that black voters would be represented fairly.

The second time I filed reports from the Supreme Court was at the end of what became known as the Richmond School Consolidation case. It, too, was about a merger. The city's school system sued in Federal Court to force a consolidation of its mostly black schools with the mostly white schools in Henrico and Chesterfield. The city's top educators held that children learn better in a racially mixed classroom. U.S. District Court Judge Robert R. Merhige ordered consolidation. The counties appealed, and the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond overturned the decision. The city School Board appealed to the Supreme Court, and once again I covered arguments there. The Supreme Court, in June 1972, upheld the appeals court ruling, and the prospect of school consolidation was dead.

Filing reports from the Supreme Court was not easy in the early 1970s. WTVR had no microwave or satellite technology. There was also no videotape -- just film. So a cameraman and I would drive to D.C. We'd film a standup open and close in Washington and then race to get the film on a 1 p.m. bus for Richmond. After legal arguments before the court ended, I'd write a story to go in the middle of the two standups and phone it back to the studio, where my audio would be combined with my standups and file film for the evening news. Then I'd film another standup open and close in front of the court, and we'd drive back to Richmond with that film. At the studio, I'd write the middle of the story and record it for use at 11 p.m.

It was an awkward system, and it made for very long days. But none of the other Richmond stations were sending reporters to D.C., so we had the only coverage from Washington.

My only other brush with the Supreme Court came when President Nixon nominated a Richmonder, Lewis F. Powell Jr., to a seat on the court. When the nomination was approved by the U.S. Senate in late 1971, Powell held an afternoon news conference at his downtown office. The local newspapers, the AP and the national TV networks were all on hand.

Powell had been watching my reports from the Supreme Court and my coverage of Virginia politics, and he greeted me by name when he walked into the room. The national reporters' jaws dropped, including Bernie Shaw's. (Shaw was then working for CBS but would later join CNN and become famous for his live coverage from Baghdad as the city was bombed during the Gulf War.)

After the news conference, I raced back to the station to write it up for WTVR's evening news. Shaw did the same for the Cronkite broadcast on CBS, filing his report from our studio. We both watched our stories unfold in the WTVR conference room. As the Cronkite broadcast ended, Shaw said, "I guess I should file something for CBS radio."

"Don't worry," I said. "I fed them a story about 90 minutes ago."

Shaw was pissed. "You know you just screwed me out of a $75 fee!" he said.

"Yeah," I said. "That's what it's about: being first."

I used the check from CBS radio to buy a dining room table for my tiny apartment.

Things my cat taught me

Pusskuss (1970-1989)

I can't imagine living in a house where mine is the only heartbeat.

In 1970, I adopted a cat from the Richmond SPCA. I've always loved animals. My first job, while I was still in high school, was working as a kennel boy at Ambassador Animal Hospital on Broad Street. That job hardly seemed like work to me.

As a kid, I had dogs, but no cats. My father didn't like cats, and no matter how many stray kittens I dragged home, I wasn't allowed to keep them. My father would always find somebody else who was willing to adopt them. (At least that's what he told me.)

The first dog I remember was Mr. Bo, a Cocker Spaniel that was named for the cartoon character who advertised National Bohemian beer. Mr. Bo once ate a box of my sister's Crayolas and left technicolor deposits all over the back yard.

My second dog was an Airedale mix whose birth I attended. I was working at the animal hospital on a weekend when his mother went into labor. I played doggie midwife until the on-call vet arrived. The mother's owners gave me one of the puppies. We were studying "Le Morte d'Arthur" in high school English class, so I named him Modred, after a character from the King Arthur legend. Modred was Arthur's illegitimate son by his half-sister Morgause, and given my Modred's mixed background it seemed an appropriate choice at the time.

In 1970 I lived in an apartment: no dogs allowed. Thus, if I wanted a four-legged pet, it was a cat or nothing.

I didn't go to the SPCA with the idea of adopting a kitten. I went to interview Margaret Williams, who was then the shelter's director. But while I was there ...

I brought Pusskuss -- whose name came from my nephew's inability to pronounce "pussycat" when he was a toddler -- back to the newsroom with me, but there was no safe place to keep him there. I filled the bottom of a 16mm film canister with water and stashed it and the kitten in my Volkswagen until I could go home. When I left the station, Pusskuss was fast asleep in the driver's seat.

Pusskuss and I bonded instantly. He always slept face-to-face with me, with my arm curled around him as his front paws rhythmically kneaded bread against my chest. He was my first cat, and he lived with me for 19 years. Part Siamese -- as are many black cats -- he had a yowl that commanded attention. He also purred loudly when he was happy -- very loudly -- and often drooled when he was completely content.

He trusted me implicitly. At Christmastime one year when he was a few years old, I awoke one night to find him standing on my chest, squeaking out a meow that was unlike his usual full-volume yowl. I turned on the lights. As he squeaked again, I could see a bit of a metallic icicle from the Christmas tree at the back of his throat. He had eaten it, and it was choking him. I quickly grabbed a hemostat left over from my medic days, and Pusskuss calmly allowed me to stick it way back into his throat and pull out 10 inches of icicle. If you know cats, you know that's trust.

So why am I writing about a cat? The answer is simple, especially if you read the subtitle of my blog: Pusskuss taught me so much.

I learned responsibility. I learned understanding. I learned about unconditional love. I learned that pets are not simply playthings: they are sentient beings that often demand patience and always deserve the best you can give them.

Pusskuss also taught my father about the joy of having a cat. In 1971, I made my first trip back to Europe. I left Pusskuss with my parents, knowing that my mother would be a responsible guardian. I expected that my father, the man who had never let me have a cat when I was little, would simply ignore him.

When I got back two weeks later, my parents picked me up at the Richmond airport at about 9 p.m. My first question was, "How's Pusskuss?" My mom told me he had settled in just fine, although he had prowled the house intently for the first few days, she said, "looking for you."

My father was quiet for a few minutes. Then he said, "Pusskuss is probably asleep now. Why don't you wait until tomorrow to take him home."

"He's a cat!" I told him. "Cats sleep all the time. He won't mind being woken up."

Then it dawned on me. My father wanted one more night with Pusskuss.

"Okay," I said. "I'll pick him up in the morning."

When I went to my parents' house the next day to fetch Pusskuss, my father had gone to work. My mother told me that it had seemed to her as though Pusskuss had been on a mission during his stay. He seemed determined to convert my father into a cat lover. "He spent most of his time in your father's lap. He slept with your father. It was the strangest thing," she said.

Pusskuss's mission was accomplished. He had conquered my father.

Within a month, my parents had adopted a cat of their own.

Ch-Ch-Changes

Bob Trent was the best news director I ever worked for.

Bruce Miller, WTVR's news director, didn't stay long after I joined the news staff. He'd been news director since the early 1960s. When he first started, the TV news department consisted of him and a photographer. By the time he left for the field of public broadcasting in 1970, the staff had grown to about 20.

For a time, Larry Cooper served as interim news director. But then management made an excellent decision: They hired Bob Trent, a radio news and sports reporter who had been working at WRNL.

Bob turned out to be the best news director I ever worked for. He was an organized administrator. He had cultivated a variety of excellent sources during his years in Richmond. He was determined that our newscasts would beat the competition six ways from Sunday. And he hated -- absolutely loathed -- being behind on a story, any story. He wanted WTVR to be first and fast, and he prized accuracy.

He made a flurry of good decisions when he arrived. He hired a couple of good anchormen, among them a young man from Ohio named Ken Srpan. (Ken's last name was pronounced SIR-pan. The newsroom started an informal "vowel movement" to add a letter to his last name, which I don't think Ken found particularly amusing.) He also brought on board one of the best reporters I ever worked with, Bonnie DeVries. Bonnie was so good she kept us all on our toes. She was also a striking Nordic blonde, which she used to her advantage in the male-dominated world of politics and government. Her intelligence and her ability to home in on the real story behind the razzle and the dazzle made those she covered both trust and fear her.

Bob instilled in all of us a renewed sense of the importance of the news we broadcast and a renewed dedication to being first in the ratings. ("News/90" was first in the ratings when he joined us and was No. 1 by a greater margin when he left.)

I remember one significant point he made in an early staff meeting: "People vote and make decisions about their lives based on what we report." Those words stuck with me for the rest of my career in the news business.

Bob also had a temper. I remember him putting his fist through the newsroom wall when we lost an important story in the film processor. He didn't abandon the story because we lost the film, though. He had the reporter join the anchorman live on the set to tell the story -- something that was far from routine in those days. But Bob believed the story mattered more than any visuals.

Bob taught us well, but the respect for accuracy he instilled in us came back to haunt him a few years later. Bob left WTVR after two years. In 1976 he surfaced publicly again -- this time as a campaign staffer for Democrat Elmo Zumwalt, who was running against incumbent U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr. A career Navy man, Zumwalt was the youngest officer ever to serve as Chief of Naval Operations. After he retired with 32 years in uniform, he launched his campaign against Byrd, who was by then an Independent.

By 1976 I had moved up to news director at WTVR. Bob called me one afternoon with a tip on a story that the Byrd campaign definitely would not have wanted to see broadcast. I forget what the story was, although I do remember that it was nothing scandalous. It was newsworthy, however, so I took notes and assigned a reporter to write it up for the "News/90" anchorman to read.

During our conversation on the phone, I told Bob that I'd have to include the fact that the tip had come from the Zumwalt campaign. He asked me not to do that. But I didn't think I had a choice. What he had taught us about accuracy was important.

I believe Bob knew that I was right in attributing the story to him instead of to an un-named source.

Zumwalt lost his campaign against Byrd. It certainly wasn't because of that one story that Bob had tipped us to. However, the incident did damage our relationship. And I regret that even today.

I did it for the money

The weather set was at the opposite end of WTVR's Studio 1 from the news set. There were two spacious studios, but weather had to be broadcast from the same studio as the news because the station had only two color cameras.

Nothing ever brought me the public recognition that being the "News/90" weatherman did -- not being a reporter or even an anchorman. Nothing.

And I fell into the job because it paid a talent fee, an extra $25 each week. (In today's dollars, that would amount to about $140.)

Dick Collins, who had been the WTVR weatherman for many years, left the station in the summer of 1970. Management posted a notice that any staff member who wanted the job could apply. I'd been out of the Air Force for six months, and I was still struggling to set up an apartment, buy clothes and create a life. I needed the extra money.

I took solace in the fact that being the weatherman wouldn't interfere with my job as a reporter, since, in those days, it took only about 30 minutes to set up the weather boards and become familiar with the weather bureau's forecast, which we got from the AP wire. The forecast was allotted about two minutes in the 6 p.m. news block and the same again at 7 p.m.

In those days, the weather was not seen as the audience draw that it has become today. I didn't know anything about meteorology, but that wasn't a prerequisite.

I auditioned and got the job.

Each evening at about 5:30, after the stories I had covered that day were edited and packaged, I'd gather the forecast information from the teletype machine and head for the studio. It took me about 20 minutes to set up the weather boards.

The maps were painted with a metallic pigment, and I had a box of magnetized numbers, along with little magnetized circles labeled "H" and "L" to represent high- and low-pressure areas, and -- honest to god -- shoestrings that had magnetized triangles and semicircles glued to them to represent various fronts. For the forecast itself, I had magnetized clouds, suns, raindrops and snowflakes to work with.

That was it: Just me and some magnets and maps.

(Six months later, CBS began providing us with daily videotaped satellite images showing the cloud cover. This was seen as a gigantic leap forward in TV weather technology.)

I had a lot of fun with the weather broadcasts, mainly because I didn't take them very seriously. To be clear, the journalist in me wanted to make the forecast accurate, but my sense of humor quickly surfaced. I began to develop a playful approach. For example, whatever city had the day's highest or lowest temperature became "one of my favorite places," even if I'd never heard of it before. Cut Bank, Montana, popped up a lot with the coldest temperature. Who the heck in Richmond, myself included, had ever been anywhere near Cut Bank? But the bit worked.

When the forecast was for temperatures below freezing, I'd suggest that people be sure to bring their brass monkeys indoors for reasons that I left unspoken -- but the audience got the reference. One Friday evening, one of the engineers was leaving as I was sticking my shoestrings and magnets to the weather boards. He told me he was playing golf the next day and asked about the forecast. "It's going to be windy but warm," I told him. When I began my on-air forecast that night, I told the audience that it would be a fine, warm day for playing golf, "but be careful, because the wind might blow your balls away." To be perfectly honest, I didn't get the double meaning of what I'd said, but the cameramen did. There were hoots of laughter that I didn't understand until after the broadcast had ended and somebody told me what I'd said.

The cameramen got into the act, too. One night, one of them began to strip off his clothes behind the camera in an effort to break me up. It didn't work. I beat David Niven's famous line at the Oscars by four years. "Marty," I said to him, "put your clothes back on. Nobody is interested in your shortcomings." Everybody in the studio howled in laughter. I have no idea what the TV audience thought. They hadn't seen what was going on off-camera.

Within a few weeks of my debut as the WTVR weatherman, I began to realize the power of the position. People would stop me wherever I went to talk about whatever outrageous thing I had said the night before. They were paying attention, and they apparently liked the irreverence.

Frankly, it got to be a pain in the butt. As a reporter, I might have covered a really serious, important story the night before. But all anybody wanted to talk about was what I had said on the weather. The situation provided hard evidence that viewers were seeking entertainment more than information. Today, nobody even bothers to pretend otherwise.

I kept that weather gig for about two years. Despite the fact that I couldn't go to the grocery store without being recognized, it was an enjoyable part of my TV career. Even today, on the rare occasions when I am recognized in public, I'm usually asked, "Didn't you used to be the WTVR weatherman?"

Sometimes they'll even ask, "Didn't you used to be Don Dale?"

Well, yes, I was. And, oddly enough, I still am.

Culture shock

John Filo shot this Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, 14, kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller after he was killed by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University.

The culture of the United States had changed dramatically between 1966, when I left for Germany, and 1970, my first full year back in Richmond. Some of the changes were shocking, even though I had read about them -- and even reported on them for American Forces Television.

The country was divided between those who approved of the war in Vietnam and those who didn't, those who were young and those who were old, those who had voted for Nixon and those who voted for Humphrey, those who had long hair and those with crewcuts. People my age wore peace symbols on their jeans and on their denim jackets -- not all, but many of them. Others called the symbol "the footprint of the American chicken."

I had just been discharged from active duty in the Air Force, and it was not easy to break free of the military mindset. What would my new alliances be? Where did I fit in? What, exactly, did I think?

As a reporter, I couldn't betray my feelings on the air. But as a person, I struggled to come to grips with -- to drill down to the core of -- who I now was. Nearly half of the year would elapse before I knew the answer.

The events of 1970 helped to shape me, as, I believe, they did for every other American. We might have been divided into two distinct camps, but what happened that year shook us all.

Here's just a bit of what happened that year. A jury found the Chicago Seven defendants not guilty of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. A bomb being constructed in New York's Greenwich Village by members of the radical-left Weather Underground group exploded prematurely, killing three of its members. The Army charged 14 officers with suppressing information related to the My Lai massacre. U.S. forces invaded Cambodia. In Washington, D.C., 100,000 people demonstrated against the war.

But the event that shattered my faith in the military and destroyed any lingering respect I might have had for the Nixon Administration occurred on May 4. Four students at Kent State University in Ohio were killed and nine were wounded by Ohio State National Guardsmen, at a campus protest against the U.S. incursion into Cambodia.

The images on television that night were horrifying. I had spent the day on the state government beat, but that night's coverage of the Kent State shootings eclipsed the rest of the news. I remember standing in the WTVR TV master control room watching the report on the Cronkite news with tears running down my cheeks. I was also as angry as I think I have ever been. How could our own military kill unarmed students on a college campus? How could this be happening in my own country? If this was acceptable, what values did we actually embrace?

By the time I went home that night, I finally knew precisely where I stood. I wanted the war to be over. I wanted the president out of office. I wanted sanity to replace chaos.

These things did happen, but not for several years.

So what did I do? Not as much as I could have. I was at the next anti-war march on Washington, but it was as a reporter. I voted for McGovern in 1972, but I was on the losing side. I developed a circle of friends who shared my opinions, but we didn't participate in public protests or build bombs or riot. We simply, quietly, seethed with anger.

I have to admit, too, that I was frightened by what was happening in 1970 -- and by much of what had happened since 1966. I knew we would endure, but would anything ever be the same again? The future was a scary place.

The impact of what we loosely call the Sixties (which actually started in about 1965 and lasted until about 1975) changed us all, in some cases for the better and in others for the worse. My fears might seem ludicrous today, in 2010. But that's in retrospect. Today we know how it unfolded. When you're living through it, the outcome is not so clear.

Richmond has long been acclaimed as a hotbed of social rest. (Go back and read that sentence again.) But that wasn't always the case back in the Sixties. One illustrative incident comes to mind.

As antiwar sentiment among those on the left reached its peak, a flyer for a protest rally appeared in the Channel 6 newsroom. The headline proclaimed that an antiwar group would "Kill a Puppy for Peace" at a rally in Monroe Park. Below the headline was an image of a coffin and an appealing picture of a puppy. Naturally, it caught our attention, and I was assigned to cover the story.

No puppy was killed. It turned out to be a run-of-the-mill protest, worth about 30 seconds on the evening news. I don't remember even seeing a puppy.

After all, this was Richmond.

And I have to say that some of the news from 1970 wasn't seen at the time as quite so serious. The Beatles broke up. Ford introduced the Pinto. And on Dec. 23, the North Tower of the World Trade Center topped out at 1,368 feet, making it the tallest building in the world.