2018 Inductees
Arch Andrews
Minneapolis native Arch Andrews began his broadcasting career after serving with the Marines in the Korean War.
He worked at stations in North and South Dakota, Iowa and Omaha before arriving in Denver in 1959.
Andrews worked on-air and in production for KICN, as program director, host and newsman on KTLN, and as news director for KGMC between 1959 and 1965.
His most prominent role was as Public Affairs Director for the Colorado Division of Wildlife. He coupled his broadcasting expertise with his love of Colorado’s outdoors by hosting “Wildlife Reports” which ran for 17 years on KBTV/KUSA 9News in Denver. It was the longest running program on Denver television. He also voiced “Colorado Outdoors Report” which was distributed to over 60 radio stations around Colorado.
In addition to broadcasting, he was a Screen Actors Guild member who appeared in commercials, movies and television shows and narrated almost 20 nature films.
Arch Andrews died in 2016 at the age of 87.
Tom Baer
Tom Baer came to photojournalism after serving in the Navy as an underwater photographer. He worked for WTVO and WREX in Rockford, IL before being transferred to KWGN Channel 2 in Denver in 1966. He also shot for KLZ Channel 7 in the late 60s and early 70s.
Baer was the Chief News Photographer for KBTV/KUSA Channel 9 in Denver for nearly a decade, and led the staff honored as 1977’s National Press Photographer’s Association TV News Photography Station of the Year. He started 9News’ Western Slope Bureau in Glenwood Springs.
His coverage of a plane crash near Steamboat Springs on December 4, 1978 is particularly noteworthy. Baer took his camera to the crash site overnight via snowcat and shot in chest deep snow with windchills of minus 60 degrees keeping the camera warm and dry before returning to base with rescuers to process and edit the film for the 5PM Newscast. He had the first on-site footage of the crash and rescue operations which was fed to ABC for “World News Tonight”.
Baer later was Chief Photographer for KCNC Channel 4 (he worked for all of Denver’s first four television stations) and was chief videographer for the Steamboat Springs Ski area for over a decade.
Dennis Constantine
Dennis Constantine worked in radio in his native Maryland and in Miami before coming to Denver. He spent time as a disc jockey and music director at Denver’s KTLK and hosting morning drive at KBPI in the mid 1970s.
In 1977, Constantine joined a new FM station starting up in Boulder, KBCO-FM. His original concept of “ColoRadio” was discarded as too cute before the station signed on. He played the first song on KBCO, James Taylor’s “Handy Man”, which had arrived the morning of KBCO’s first broadcast, a new song to sign on a new station.
His skill as a program director and executive over 17 years built KBCO from a low-power Boulder station to the number 1 station in the Denver market with unique mix of music and personalities attuned to the Colorado audience.
Constantine later worked as a consultant, then as Program Director and air talent at KINK in Portland and KFOG in San Francisco. He currently lives in Northern Arizona where he continues to work with a locally owned group of radio stations.
(Airchecks of the varied delivery styles of Dennis Constantine)
Don Kinney
As a writer and producer at CBS News in New York in the 1960s, Don Kinney worked with broadcasting legends Walter Cronkite, Charles Kuralt, Morton Dean, Bruce Morton, Roger Mudd and Harry Reasoner. He was part of CBS’ Space Division which covered NASA launches and checked Cronkite’s CBS Evening News scripts for pronunciation questions before going to air.
Kinney moved to Denver in 1969, as a newsman on radio and television for KLZ for five years. The day he left KLZ, he was hired and went on air at KOA, once again reporting and anchoring for KOA’s radio and television outlets.
His longest role on Denver television was as the host and producer of “The State of Colorado” for KRMA Channel 6 (later Rocky Mountain PBS). The weekly panel program featured Kinney interviewing reporters about current local news topics. The program ran for nearly 26 years and featured over 270 print journalists during its run.
He retired in July, 2002 after refusing to change the fact-based news show to an opinion program.
Dick Lewis
Few personified the spontaneous nature of early live television more than Dick Lewis. The Baylor graduate got his start in television at KOAT in Albuquerque but made his mark when KLZ-TV in Denver hired him to host and do live commercials for its late movie show.
Doing as many as 20 spots per program, almost entirely ad-libbed for a variety of clients, Lewis became one of Denver’s most popular TV personalities. Lewis’ improvised delivery proved challenging for the cameramen and directors to keep him focused and in the shot, but he was beloved by the crews who often pranked him during the live spots. Advertisers didn’t seem to mind as he was one of the most sought after pitchmen and “Tell ‘em Dick Lewis Sent Ya!” was a phrase well known to Denver TV viewers.
Lewis moved to KBTV in the 1960s where he hosted the Mickey Mouse Club and worked in the sales department. He co-founded “The Richards Agency” with Dick True and continued to appear in commercials well into his later years. Dick Lewis passed away in 2014 at the age of 87
Ward Lucas
Starting in radio in Seattle when he was just 16 years old, Ward Lucas gravitated to television journalism after college working at KIRO-TV in Seattle, where his station manager asked him to be the station’s investigative reporter, a title neither of them could truly define at the time.
A story about professional arsonists in Seattle led to a local Emmy award and a call from Carl Akers at KBTV Channel 9 in Denver. Akers and 9News gave him the freedom to pursue stories that often took weeks or months to complete but exposed criminal activities, fraud, scams and public corruption. A documentary on illegal wiretapping took over 4 years to produce and received numerous honors. His reporting took him around the United States and as far away as the Soviet Union.
Lucas anchored weekends for 9News for over 30 years and pursued a number of other personal interest and lighthearted feature stories in addition to his hard news reporting. He retired from 9News in 2009. His reports won over 70 awards and he was inducted into the Heartland Emmys Silver Circle in 2008.
A young Thomas McClelland started building crystal radio sets with and operated a spark gap transmitter during his childhood. Joining the Navy let him get more advanced training in radio engineering which he used to become Chief Engineer at WDAF in Kansas City in 1928 after leaving the service.
McClelland went to KLZ-AM in Denver in the 1930s and oversaw the station’s studio remodel and installation of a new transmitter. He kept KLZ on the air during a fire in the station’s home at Denver’s Shirley Savoy hotel. He also took a remote truck to the Colorado Roosevelt forest fire in 1938 for live reports.
Joining the Naval Reserve in 1939, McClelland went back to active duty in September 1941 and was assigned to the Battleship USS West Virginia based at Pearl Harbor Hawaii. He was killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, overcome by smoke in the West Virginia’s radio room after evacuating his enlisted staff. He was the radio industry’s first casualty of World War II.
In 1943, the Destroyer Escort USS McClelland was commissioned in his honor, a first for someone in broadcasting. General Manager Hugh Terry was among the representatives from KLZ present when the warship was launched.
Pogo Poge (Morgan Branch White)
Few radio personalities were as wild on the air, and as wildly popular with listeners as Pogo Poge was for KIMN-AM in the 1950s and 60s. The Pogo moniker came from an 82 mile trip on a Pogo stick while working for KLO in Ogden, Utah.
Poge’s penchant for wild costumes and zany stunts came with him to KIMN in 1957. He did marathon broadcasts from roller coasters, Ferris wheels, atop a flagpole and most notably, in a pit of poisonous snakes staged in the window of a Denver jewelry store. That stunt ended when one of the snakes bit him and he was given an overdose of anti-venom by a doctor.
Poge left Denver for KGMB in Honolulu where the Pogo character was seen on television for almost 15 years on the “Checkers and Pogo” children’s show. The first Checkers was BPC Hall of Famer Jim Hawthorne. He also appeared as the Attorney General in six episodes of the original “Hawaii 5-0”.
He was called Denver’s most popular DJ ever by the Denver Post’s Clark Secrest in 1984.
Away from broadcasting, Pogo was really Morgan Branch White, a quiet, faithful Mormon with a large family. He died at the age of 86 in 2010.