Wisconsin Gov. Patrick Lucey was my first television interview when we started the news at WLUK-TV in Green Bay in 1971.
Our well-read, creative, funny, and outrageous TV-11 anchor Stanley Siegal had set up the interview for himself and was kind enough to let me interview Lucey on a different topic. I had come from investigative print journalism in Chicago and Stanley took me under wing and helped me learn tabloid TV. Like a grade school teacher, Stan made me spit out my gum before the interview and gave me other helpful tips. It was the start of a long friendship.
When Stan was fired at TV-11, his career began to skyrocket and ended up as a star in New York City with TV talks shows on WABC and WCBS. He also spread the word about the things I was doing at WLUK-TV and I began to get offers from major cities. One of those offers was from KDFW-TV in Dallas, Texas and I became the Action 4 reporter there and started making headlines as I had done in Wisconsin.
I owe a lot to Stan and other mentors at WLUK. Although I was successful in Dallas and won major reporting awards, I eventually came back to WLUK where the staff was younger but could challenge major markets in reporting, photography, and producing. It was more fun and friendly in the Green Bay TV market.
Stanley invited me on his New York talk show in the late 1970's. Waiting in the Green Room, I chatted with famous heart surgeon Michael E. Debakey and Joe Torre, manager of the New York Yankees. When it was my turn, Stanley asked me to describe his firing at TV-11 the day after he dunked himself into a bathtub full of Jello so he could tell what it would be like to be a maraschino cherry.
Stan and I were pals, and I had helped him with the stunt. When he was fired, Kaaps, his favorite restaurant in Green Bay, wouldn't take his check anymore. I invited him to my house for dinner. When my two little children had gone to bed and my wife was cleaning up in the kitchen, Stan began to cry. He told me I was fortunate to have a family. He said he was so ambitious that he would probably never have one of his own.
After very successful runs on WABC-TV and WCBS-TV in New York, Stanley continued on in cable TV and now produces his travel show called "On the go with Stanley Seigel" in Los Angeles. His lives in a hotel near Beverly Hills.
For more on the birth of WLUK-TV's outrageous newscast, listen to TV-11 historian and former sports anchor Bob Schulze:
"We knew the audience had to have some compelling reason to watch a new newscast when they already were comfortable with what they were viewing on TV-2 and 5. We wanted to make viewers uncomfortable if they failed to tune in. The answer was a newscast so 'off the wall' in its approach that it would be the topic of conversation the next day around the water cooler at work. If you hadn't watched, you didn't know what they were talking about. You were out of the loop. You weren't with it.
Being with it started with Stanley Siegel. Stanley was the son of a rich southern California banking family. He was ahead of his time, if that time ever came. Try to imagine the skits on Saturday Night Live (a late-night network comedy show that would debut later on NBC) done as semi-serious news.
We tried for comic, timely openings to the newscasts that bordered on the absurd.
In one of the most memorable, we came out of a World War II network movie to three of us [including co-anchor Ray Wheeler] on set in Nazi uniforms. "If the Germans had won the war," Stanley intoned, "this is how your news might look." My contribution that night: "Der ver two hafs to die Packer-Raider game today. Die furst haf vas very interesting. Die udder haf vas yucky."
On another Monday night, the first season for ABC's Monday Night Football and the first of those games in Green Bay, we parodied the television game show I've Got a Secret. The three of us were in silhouette as we did our best to imitate ABC's controversial and colorful sportscaster. When we got to the fourth person on the set, the lights came up. It was him.
"Good evening everyone. I am Howard Cosell, and this is TV-11 News."
Nothing was too outrageous for Stan. How about eating dog food to check out the diet of man's best friend? Or driving a Volkswagen into a lake to see if it really did float the way they showed in the television commercials? Arm wrestling George Wallace, the notorious racist governor of Alabama and a presidential candidate? Challenging Senator Bill Proxmire, a physical fitness freak, to see who could do the most push-ups? Rolling out competitive toilet tissues the length of Lambeau Field to see which really gave you more for your money? Going through the garbage of Green Bay's most famous and finding a bunch of booze bottles in the trash of a competing anchor? Stanley applying massive quantities of Nair to his hairy legs to see what women had to put up with as part of their beauty ritual? Trying to chip his way out of a block of ice to verify the strength of a Bic pen? Having a train at the Railroad Museum crash into a piece of American Tourister luggage to see how tough it was? Or submerging himself in a bathtub full of Jello so he could envision what it would be like to be a maraschino cherry?It wasn't a surprise a year-and-a-half into our run that he was gone. In November of 1972, he hooked on with a station in Nashville where he was soon notorious enough to earn a guest spot on the syndicated Hee-Haw show. His next stop was his own talk show in New York City. His very personal, live-on-the-air sessions with his shrink were enough to briefly put him ahead of Phil Donahue, the biggest name in the country at the time."
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