January 23, 2008

Hillcrest Manor,
I Knew Ye When

Memories.  The devastating Sunday morning fire on Hillcrest Manor that took KREX-TV off the air caused a surge of recollections from decades past. 

It was KREX-AM-FM-TV that brought the Maynard’s to this valley forty years ago.  Jan and I wanted to leave the banks of the Mississippi and head west.  A friend suggested checking out the vacant sales managers spot with a Colorado Springs TV station.  It turned out he had the correct state but was about 250 miles off on the city.  But, west we headed, to work for, at the time, Grand Junction’s sole TV station. 

In 1968 KREX-TV was the flagship of a small Western Slope network.  The other stations were KREY-TV in Montrose and KREZ-TV in Durango.  The three outlets branded themselves the XYZ Television network.  My original career goal was to work for ABC, instead I wound up at the other end of the alphabet.  It was the luckiest of breaks. 

The Hillcrest Manor studio of ‘68 surely qualified for the Historic Places register.  And the last time I stopped by the station, not a lot had changed over the passing years.  Originally built for radio, when TV joined the family, the building, like Topsy, “just growed”. It was the oddest of structures. Walking through the front door on your left was the expansive office of Rex Howell, the station’s founder and Colorado broadcasting icon.  Straight ahead lay a gigantic room, originally the radio studio, large enough for live big band broadcasts, but once radio went to records, it became an area that basically functioned as a huge waste of space.  To the right of the entrance, steps led downstairs, past the bathrooms, and into a bullpen housing, at various times, copywriters, photographers and sales people but no matter how the faces and desks changed, it was always the location of the coffee pot.  This room was a personal favorite since it combined fresh coffee with desks to lean on, plus an always-present group of employees dishing the latest gossip.  It was the perfect environment to waste time on the company nickel.  

Through the door on the left of that bullpen, one walked directly into the TV control room, a darkened bunker filled with TV monitors.  But unlike most TV control rooms that look out on the news set, in the KREX control room, one could only see a sliver of the studio revealed by standing and staring through a side door. 

A door in the TV studio led to the newsroom.  When I came on board it was the accounting office and later that year changed to house the news folks.  The room’s original function was as a bomb shelter stocked with food, water, and rumor had it, weapons.  This was a time shortly after the height of the “Cold War”.  Mr. Howell lived just across Hillcrest Manor from the station and was a conservative like no other in our valley.  (On his office wall were pictures of J. Edgar Hoover and Spiro Agnew).  And in the sixties, no individual was better prepared to live through a nuclear attack on Grand Junction with his just across the street bomb shelter.