IN THE SPOTLIGHT: DICK FORD: A Half Century of News

St. Louis Commerce Magazine, Jun 01, 2004 by Imbs, Christine

What does a serious television news anchor do when asked to break into song during a live interview? If you're Dick Ford and the request is made by the legendary actor Zero Mostel, you sing.

"I told him I didn't sing, but he said, 'You do with me,"' Ford remembers with a laugh. "What else could I do?"

Singing with Mostel may have been 'a bit out of his comfort zone, but when it comes to covering the news, Ford is right at home. After all, he's been at it for the past 50 years. You could say television news and Dick Ford grew up together.

"I got my first television job while still in high school," he says. "They didn't have a news department at the time, so I joined the stage hand union and worked all the programs. It was a great learning experience."

Ford says stations in those days only gave token attention to the news. The entire department was run by five or six people, and they aired two 10-minute newscasts each day. As for cutting-edge visuals, they were lucky to have snapshots, or black and white film without sound. "My first job, we took photos with a Polaroid camera and showed them during the news," Ford says. "People got excited because they could actually see a picture of something."

Today Ford says just producing the local news takes a staff of several hundred, and it airs about seven and a half hours daily. Ford admits that lines between news and sensationalism are sometimes crossed, but as a person who remembers world events coming to him from a voice on the radio, television news still amazes him.

"Listening to the radio with my father, I thought how great that we can listen to this guy give us this information," he says. "Now, we actually see what they are talking about. It's exciting."

Ford can look back at a career filled with some incredible achievements. He's covered national political campaigns and conventions, flown on a training mission in an F-4 Phantom jet, traveled to Saudi Arabia to report on Desert Storm, and reported live from Rome during the canonization of Sister Philippine Duchesne.

And oh yes, he made it to the White House.

"It's impressive that a president takes time to speak with you-even if his answers are canned," Ford chuckles. "But the luckiest thing I did was to interview all three generations of Eisenhowers. David Eisenhower, the president's grandson, told me he had never met anyone who had actually done that before."

Although technology has improved how we receive the news, Ford doesn't believe it means we get more of it than before. "I think in the old days audiences got just as much information; it just became more laborious to listen to it," he says. "Today, it's a more picture-oriented business. Often times, if a story doesn't have a picture, it doesn't get on."

After 34 years anchoring a news desk in St. Louis, this well-respected and popular broadcast journalist plans to retire soon. The station is actively seeking a replacement. When that occurs, he plans to remain in St. Louis. "I look at what I have here and what St. Louis has to offer, and I'm very happy," he says.