Journalism and the Independent lost Rich O’Brian on August 8th. Here at the Independent I had the great honor of interviewing Rich about his journalism career back in 2020 for our Christmas magazine entitled Meet John Doe. That interview changed my perspective on the significant contributions Rich provided in television as well as print. This week’s “Long Time Gone” is in honor of Rich as he takes us back to the golden years of the American experience through his many years of journalism.
Rich O’Brian taught me to always be intrigued with people. That everyone is important in one way or another. He’s like that eternal box of candy Forrest Gump told us about, “You never know what you’re going to get.” And, in Rich’s case, more true words were never spoken. I met Rich a few months back. On that day, an elderly gentleman with a pleasant smile and an open, friendly personality wearing the Alabama Crimson Tide on his cap and sweatshirt, walked into my office intrigued with how we did the newspaper and wanting to buy a subscription. He and his wife Dianne had just moved to Eads. Some weeks later, he submitted an article and said, “Use it if you need a filler, if it works for your readers.” I was somewhat intrigued. This gentleman seemed to understand a little bit about newspapers.
Actually, Rich O’Brian knows a lot about not only newspapers but also about radio and TV news. He’s been in the media industry since 1975 when one day his natural curiosity and love of people’s stories was relevant in his decision to start a newspaper up in Montana entitled The SkyLine and Big Sky newspaper. Next came his accidental assent into becoming a well-known television news anchor across the Western United States. Finally, he settled into radio production until 2005 when he decided to pursue projects in Christian ministry.
A thousand different stories can be told of O’Brian’s experiences as the news anchor at KOLN-TV, Channel 10/11, CBS in Lincoln or as a talk show host at radio station KJTY-FM, Joy 88 in Topeka. In fact, Rich spent 3 years as a newspaper publisher, 23 years as a television news anchor, and 14 years in radio. Those more than 30 years were stuffed full of deadlines, storylines, bylines and interviews in which Rich, in his inquisitive and authentic way, learned a lot about a lot of people. And he loved every second of it.
That eternal curiosity and belief that all people are essentially important and have something interesting to say may have been the reason Rich has met and influenced so many prominent people during his long life. As a journalist, having worked in television, radio and newspaper, his love of people resulted in him becoming the Forrest Gump of journalism as O’Brian rubbed shoulders with famous sports heroes, politicians, journalists, authors, and even activists who played pivotal roles in shaping the nation.
But Rich’s brush with historical figures didn’t begin when he started his career. It actually started long before that, as he was curious and open to people even as a young child. From the 1940s through the early 2000s, O’Brian walked the streets of the Deep South and traveled his way through the Heartland meeting and greeting people from all walks of life who would eventually become famous in their own right.
His Forrest Gump tendencies first emerged in the Deep South in Birmingham, Alabama. Rich’s natural inclination to study people and induce them into conversation began as a child as he watched how individuals were treated during the segregation era when the “equal but separate” belief system had been in place resulting in practices that were short on common sense and long on unfair treatment. Even as a kid, Rich leaned towards equality and had a naïve interest in all people, no matter their color.
He and his father used to love to go watch the Birmingham Barons, a minor league baseball team, play at historic Rickwood Field, the oldest ballpark still in use today. There was another team that also played at Rickwood Field, on the off days, separate from the all-white Barons team. The Birmingham Black Barons, of the American Negro League, played home games at Rickwood on alternate Sundays and at other times when the white Barons were not playing at home. Local preachers often dismissed their congregation before noon when the Black Barons were in town, telling their parishioners that they would meet them at the game. Indeed, the success of the teams became a point of community pride.
Rich was walking the streets of Birmingham and attending baseball games prior to 1948 at a time considered to be the last year of the Negro Leagues. After Jackie Robinson was drafted to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and shattered the race barrier, many other fine black players followed. Willie Mays was one of those players who had a tremendous career in the major leagues. Before that, Willie Mays played for the Black Barons. It was during those years that Rich O’Brian stood shoulder to shoulder with the famous Mays while on the streets of Fairfield, Alabama.
O’Brian tells the story, “I assume he had come down from Fairfield Highlands where most of the negro population lived. He had his uniform on and his jersey said ‘Mays’ on the back and he had his cleats hanging over his shoulder. I assume he was waiting for a streetcar to take him to Rickwood. That’s how we got around Birmingham in those days. I was just standing at a store window gazing at the display, and he came up and did the same. He wasn’t very big.”
In the early 1960s Rich was still in Birmingham and had seen the devastation of the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed 4 young black girls. The church bombing was the third in Birmingham in 11 days after a federal order came down to integrate Alabama’s school system. When thousands of Black protesters assembled at the crime scene, Governor George Wallace, whose central goal was to preserve segregation, sent hundreds of police and state troopers to the area to break up the crowd.
In later years, Rich would interview Wallace in Washington, D.C. Rich described Wallace as, “Arrogant and self-righteous.”
During the years Rich was an eyewitness to the end of segregation in Birmingham, a little girl in Topeka named Linda Brown started a legacy of activism in 1951 as a third grader. At the time, the school district maintained four elementary schools for black children, compared with the 18 available for white children. Her father, Oliver Brown, attempted to enroll her in Sumner Elementary School, which was a few blocks away from their home and all-white at the time.
At the request of the NAACP, Brown’s father and 12 other families similarly tried to enroll their children in all-white schools, expecting to be unsuccessful. They were, and that gave the NAACP the leverage to file a lawsuit, led by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Because Brown was the first name alphabetically on the plaintiff’s list, the case was dubbed Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregated schools violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Long after her successful court case, responsible for dismantling “separate but equal,” Brown continued to be a voice for school desegregation in Topeka.
Later in life and while working in TV and radio, Rich worked directly with Linda Brown and her sister Cheryl Brown Henderson as they served on a board in Topeka, founded by Brown, called the Board of Education for Educational Excellence. Rich greatly enjoyed the work this foundation did as it was based on welcoming education for all people. Rich admires Linda Brown to this day saying, “What a sweet lady she became.”
O’Brian also took a seat in history one day in 1982 when he happened to sit beside a young personable man on a plane headed to Washington, D.C. Rich was on the flight because, as a news anchor at KOLN-TV, Channel 10/11, CBS affiliate out of Lincoln, NE, he was assigned to go to Washington to tape a series of promos for the national CBS anchors such as Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, and Mike Wallace. Rich felt the young man was someone he should know being in the news business.
“I turned to the young man and said, ‘Say I feel like I should know you, but I can’t place how?’ The young man turned to me and told me he was the former Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. I asked him if he was going to run again.”
In 1982 while talking to Rich O’Brian, Clinton was an attorney at a private law firm in Little Rock, although at the time he most definitely was running for Governor of Arkansas for the second time. He had served as Governor for one term from 1978 to 1980. After meeting Rich, Clinton won re-election in November 1982. Clinton would go on to serve a total of five terms as the Governor of Arkansas. Of course, history also tells us that Clinton become the President of the United States serving two terms from 1992 to 2000.
When O’Brian and Clinton got off the plane in Washington, DC in 1982 Clinton went on toward his eventual arrival at the White House, O’Brian went to the CBS Network in Washington where he met many memorable people through shooting the promos and at various social events throughout the week.
Rich described the trip by saying, “I was sent there to be a part of a promotional idea CBS had to raise ratings. Dan Rather was not a popular figure at the time and CBS thought this promo would help to boost his image a bit. I found Rather to be a really good reporter and he could sure break a story—but he wasn’t a great anchor. He was a nice man and I felt he became the scape goat for CBS. I also met the lovely, gracious CBS co-anchor Diane Sawyer. She was quite nice and friendly. And finally, on that trip I worked on a promo with Mike Wallace. I found him to be somewhat pompous. I later met his son, Chris, who is the same.”
There have been a number of other people Rich met in his years in television. They include former Kansas Senator Bob Dole, President Lyndon Johnson, former Kansas Senator Nancy Kassebaum, former United States Attorney General John Ashcroft, and a long list of national Christian leaders.
He’s also worked with Tom Brokaw when he was the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News which he held for 22 years. He is the only person to have hosted all three major NBC News programs: The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and, briefly, Meet the Press. Rich found Brokaw to be, “Taller than I thought he was and really nice. I liked him.”
Another person Rich found very charming was Charles Kuralt. This was when Rich worked at KCWY-TV in Casper, a new television station he helped to get established. Kuralt was most widely known for his long career with CBS, first for his “On the Road” segments on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and later as the first anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning, a position he held for fifteen years. “Kuralt would pop in and chat with us in Casper. He was a great guy,” remembers O’Brian.
Throughout his career, but particularly during his years in radio, O’Brian admits that he loved doing the one-on-one interviews the best. “I’ve been told that I’m pretty good,” he smiles, “I should be, I’ve done enough of them.”
Rich has interviewed the most interesting people through his work in newspaper, television and radio. They include Governor Ronald Reagan (he later attended a press luncheon at the White House after Reagan became President), Montana Governor Thomas Judge (who he actually ran laps with at the YMCA track in Helena), former Governor of Kansas Kathleen Sebilius, baseball great and former manager of the Kansas City Monarchs of the old Negro League Buck O’Neill, former pitcher and later baseball coach at Liberty University Al Worthington, former Kansas Governors John Carlin and Sam Brownback (when they were both candidates for Congress), host of Candid Camera television show Allen Funt, American tenor singer of the Lawrence Welk Show Joe Feeny, Harlem Globetrotters’ Meadowlark Lemon, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Nebraska Governor Bob Kerry, and journalist Geraldo Rivera.
Brittanica lists Rivera as “American investigative journalist, talk show host, conservative political commentator, and television personality best known for his sensationalistic reporting and his tendency to include himself in stories.”
Rich agrees with Brittanica’s description based on personal experience, “Geraldo Rivera was not a genuine person. I interviewed him at KOLN-TV Channel 10/11, CBS in Lincoln in the mid-1980s. He was only interested in pursuing his career and would do anything it took to do so. Didn’t he later do some crazy stunt involving Al Capone’s Vault? When I interviewed him, he was pretty much the way he is today on FOX.”
Even today, despite pursuing other interests, Rich still has ideas of perhaps starting a podcast focused on southeastern Colorado and its people. Rich describes his idea, “I’d talk to people from all areas of life about agriculture, education, religion, and business. I think there are a lot of people around here that have important and interesting things to say.”
He may be onto something with his podcast idea. This new type of media, the way people get their news these days, has changed so drastically. People no longer look to the mainstream media to get the truth, to find the stories. They go online looking for their favorite pundit or news provider who leans politically in their favored direction. Rich thinks it’s because cable news ruined journalism.
“When we were producing news in the 1970s and 1980s people thought that if you were a television news anchor you were honest. They believed the person who came into their living rooms every evening at 5pm giving them a thorough, and unbiased, summary of the day’s happenings. We never gave our opinions through chit chat when we were live. We were above that. We left it for the people to decide what the news meant based on the facts we presented. But when cable news came in, they didn’t have the same rules as the networks. They started talk TV, explicit content shows and commentary at night. By the time I was about ready to retire, the way news was distributed and received, especially on cable stations like CNN, MSNBC, FOX and others, definitely had a political lean and if you paid attention, a bias toward certain people or ideas.”
It has been a true pleasure to Meet Rich O’Brian, the Forrest Gump of journalism whose general wonder of the world and the people in it, makes him a genuine, average guy who has rubbed shoulders with legendary people such as Willie Mays and Ronald Reagan, lived and reported history as it occurred, and listened with great interest as they, both the famous and the not-so-famous, answered questions only a person like Rich O’Brian would ask.
