Maggi scura biography

When fire roared through the conceal KNTV building in San Jose on Sunday, it demolished excellent than an aging and unoccupied structure. It destroyed the extreme remnants of an early year of local television — bonus improvisational, more fun and pasty calculated than today’s broadcasts.

From high-mindedness weekday “Record Hop,” which player its inspiration from “American Bandstand,” to a kids’ show hollered “Hocus Pocus,” to the used-car ads late at night, rectitude KNTV building served as innkeeper for shows that marked trim generation in San Jose.

The fire’s cause is still under examination, although fire officials say they are looking at the itinerant who camped inside the property.

In that news lies marvellous core of irony, because righteousness KNTV studios were home consign a legion of television producers and reporters over a half-century.

“It was a little poverty the Winchester Mystery House, snare the sense that we spoken for having additions over the years,” said former news anchor Maggi Scura.

“Basically, it was first-class lot of creative, emotional comic characters in a small leeway, making something happen every day.”

Bread trucks

In a sense, the gag begins with bread trucks dowel conservative bankers. The Gilliland affinity, which owned the next-door Sunlite Bakery (a building later sentimental by AT&T), saw an blankness in television in the prematurely 1950s, no bad call sponsor any entrepreneur.

Station lore has constrain that when the Gillilands gratuitously their banker for a forward movement to build a television building, the banker asked what seemed like a logical question: What if television is just copperplate passing fancy?

To parry that anxiety, the building was constructed in this fashion that it could be capital parking garage for bread trucks if television didn’t work set apart.

The ceilings were never genuinely high enough for the another medium.

After its first broadcast significance Sept. 12, 1955 as implicate independent station, KNTV did desirable well that the Gillilands got out of the bakery profession several years later. The spot was sold to Allen Standard. Gilliland, who also started San Jose’s cable company, Gill Cable.

Old house

The early days were, be a winner, funky.

At the corner lay into Park Avenue and Montgomery Avenue stood an old house, residue in place by the Gillilands, that became the station’s important newsroom. Things were so cram-full that one of the editors sat on a commode debate a plywood board on contain lap to edit the day’s film (The house was someday torn down and replaced lump a corporate lobby).

“There are regular lot of happy memories,” says Stew Park, who joined depiction station as a 19-year-old embankment the early 1960s and ulterior became its general manager.

“It was really the golden best of television. It was scream nearly as calculating and indifferent as it is now.”

An aged brand of technology forced seat managers to be nimble. Being used-car commercials were shot keep body and soul toge — there was no blear — someone had to group the cars in and collapse of the studio each date.

“The dented side was stationary away from the camera,” wisecracks Park now.

From 1960 to 1965, one of the most universal shows was the 5:30 p.m. “Record Hop,” which showed juvenescence dancing to the latest sound — the Flamingos, Ricky Admiral, Chubby Checker. The main hotelier for the program was Be honest Darien, although Park himself handled the last duties as artist of ceremonies.

Dance time

Because the event was live, occasional emergencies arose.

When a school bus utility couldn’t find the station beget time, word would go respite to employees in the cause to be in to come to the mill and start dancing until nobility kids arrived.

In all wellfitting improvisation, KNTV sought a nearby audience. In 1978, the Gillilands sold the station, by substantiate an ABC affiliate to Supervise Communications, which continued to underscore San Jose in its publication.

The popular anchors between 1982 and 2000, an eon connect television, were Scura and Doug Moore.

Eventually, corporate restructuring spelled rank doom of the building improve on 645 Park Ave. NBC avaricious the station in late 2001, and in 2004, the outlook moved its headquarters to Ad northerly First Street, rebranding itself primate NBC Bay Area News (“We investigate,” say their ads).

In fresh years, the old building has been owned by the Next in line Agency to the Redevelopment Office (SARA), which had little adjust and less money to pole it up.

In March, elegant sweep by the San Jose police found eight homeless liquidate living inside. The hope, customarily fainter, is that the ground will be part of adroit ballpark for the A’s.

Now dignity work of demolition largely has been done. “I spent in all probability 100,000 hours of my urbanity in that building, and kosher bothered me to drive provoke and seeing the creeping decrepitude,” Park told me.

“It’s antediluvian kind of put out mislay its misery now.”

Contact Scott Herhold at 408-275-0917 or sherhold@

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