Bill Hanley tells me he was 29 years old, just five years into what would grow to be a 30-year career with Twin Cities Public Television, when the station’s higher powers asked that he fix their “Friday night problem.” It was 1984, and ratings-driven broadcast news was all the rage, but not necessarily on public television.
“What I came to learn was the ‘Friday night problem’ was a fairly typical public affairs show — panel discussions, four guys around a table with narrow ties, talking in academic terms about public policy,” said Hanley, in a recent phone call from his downtown St. Paul condominium, situated walking distance from the station he retired from in 2015. “Most public affairs shows didn’t try to do news. And this market was a really terrific market for news.”
Frederick Melo
So Hanley sat in St. Paul’s historic Como Park with a legal pad and dreamt up “Almanac,” which would be part meditation on public policy, part variety show. It would have to be a lot less formal, he decided, than scripted television news or auditorium-style interview panels.
“Almanac” would combine current events discussion with culture, maybe even music, and a monologue-style essay from a Twin Cities opinion leader. No news anchors — just “hosts.” And guests that resembled a broader cross section of Minnesota. There might even be room for a splash of humor and Midwest quirkiness.
And, to the horror of some of his bosses, Hanley declared the show would not be pre-taped. Instead, it would air live for a full hour, channeling some of the energy, vibe and spontaneity of a late-night talk show, but broadcast at 7 p.m.
“We fought about that for months,” Hanley recalled. “It delayed the start of the show.”
After months of back-and-forth debate, the first episode of TPT “Almanac” aired live on Dec. 7, 1984, running 56 to 57 minutes.
Now fast forward to this Friday — almost 40 years to the day — when “Almanac” will host a special retrospective live broadcast, marking the 40th anniversary of Minnesota’s longest-running public affairs television show.
Longtime hosts Cathy Wurzer and Eric Eskola will introduce guests, as they do every Friday night, as well as weather with Paul Douglas, state Capitol news with Mary Lahammer and conversational debate with various partisans and academic experts on sofas.
The guest segments
Full disclosure: I’m partial to “Almanac” for a number of reasons. When I moved to Minnesota in 2005, the late Pioneer Press political journalist Jim Ragsdale — one of the friendlier industry veterans around the newsroom — was a regular essayist on the show.
These days, that role falls as often as not to former Pioneer Press theater critic Dominic Papatola, humorists Kevin Kling and Tane Danger, and radio personality Sheletta Brundidge. Musician Jearlyn Steele frequently performs with her siblings in The Steeles. Larry Fitzgerald, Sr., a journalist for the Minnesota Spokesman Recorder whose son and namesake spent 17 seasons with the Arizona Cardinals, offers his take on sports.
Every now and again, an email pops into my inbox inviting me onto the Friday night hot seat so Wurzer and Eskola can pepper me with questions about rent control, downtown St. Paul or the next St. Paul mayoral election (which is less than 12 months away, might I add).
It’s never not fun, never not an honor, and never not nerve-wracking.
In 2008, a much thinner, younger, fresh-faced version of myself — complete with a mouth full of adult braces — sat in that hot seat to explain the guilty verdict in the trial of Olga Franco, a Guatemalan national who been living illegally outside Marshall, Minn., when she drove through a stop sign and caused a chain-reaction car crash that killed four children on a school bus.
I’d traveled as far Guatemala to chase that story, and then to Marshall to watch her jury trial unfold. “Almanac” felt like the dot on the exclamation point at the end of a substantial reporting journey.
Hanley, who was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, joined TPT at the age of 24. Five years later, he was moving television staff around like Tetris, hiring on former star intern Brendan Henehan to help him behind the scenes, even though Henehan had little in the way of formal training in broadcast journalism. Hanley still congratulates himself on that decision.
“There was a lot of staff shifting around,” said Kari Kennedy on Wednesday, remembering suddenly landing opposite Henehan, who would become her “partner in crime” producing “Almanac” together for the next 30 years.
Henehan retired last year after 40 years with TPT. There have been other changes, though not all that many. Kennedy, now the show’s supervising producer, said they’ve added field reporter Kaomi Lee to cover northern Minnesota, and they use studio space to show off chefs actively cooking, musical acts, animal guests and more.
The news hosts
The crew from Twin Cities PBS (TPT)’s “Almanac” in 1984, from left: TPT executive vice-president Bill Hanley, hosts Jan Smaby and Joe Summers and Almanac producer Brendan Henehan.(Courtesy of Twin Cities PBS)
Sitting in Como Park with his legal pad that fateful day 40 years ago, Hanley wrote down a non-traditional choice for news host — Joe Summers, a sitting Ramsey County judge whom he considered colorful, “widely respected and well regarded.” Summers suggested yet another non-newsie: Jan Smaby, Hennepin County’s welfare director, be added to the mix as co-host. “She was tall and very bright, and people just adored her,” Hanley remembered.
Summers, prophetically, would tell colleagues that he would die at the age of 48 of a heart attack. Instead, his fatal cardiac arrest came at the age of 47.
“That night on WCCO, the top story was Joe Summers’ passing, and almost always in his bio, the fact that he was the host of ‘Almanac’ was presented before the fact that he was a sitting Ramsey County judge,” Hanley said.
After a series of fill-in hosts, Eskola — a sports commentator who had worked the state Capitol beat for years for WCCO Radio — auditioned, interviewing famed epidemiologist Michael Osterholm for his mock studio appearance. It was the height of the nation’s AIDS epidemic.
Eskola took the host seat in November 1986 opposite Smaby, who eventually decided to run for lieutenant governor, ending her newsroom career. Eskola and Wurzer were dating at the time, and Hanley at first objected to a couple hosting together, but he relented after seeing her audition.
“She clearly was the best,” he recalled.
The two married, then later divorced, with no fanfare in front of the camera.
“When they got married, we didn’t make a big deal of it,” Hanley said. “We didn’t try to hide it. It was done in a reasonably classy way. (Their divorce), it was seamless for us. … You could never detect, one week to the next, a change in their personal relationship.”
Still, they had their quirks. Eskola, for one, liked to wear scarves, which falls outside traditional news anchor attire.
“I said, ‘Does he usually wear a scarf? Then let him,’” Hanley said.
A more crowded field
Minnesota gubernatorial candidates, from left, Norm Coleman, Jesse Ventura and Skip Humphrey participate in a 1998 debate on Twin Cities PBS (TPT)’s “Almanac.” (Courtesy of Twin Cities PBS)
Eskola only half jokes when he says he’s “grown old in front of a TV audience.” Still, there’s a special feeling to being there as history changes. He recalled a former professional wrestler named Jesse “The Body” Ventura getting elected governor in 1999.
“You had to have your head on a swivel,” Eskola said. “He could make news from his office to his Lincoln Navigator — a big, humongous SUV. He called it ‘The ‘Gator.’ He could be on his cell phone with a college radio program in Providence, R.I., and say something that would make news.”
These days, those sorts of headlines are more likely to hit social media long before they hit appointment news television.
“Now there’s so much competition for current events, and news and analysis, we’ve had to carve out a niche for high information voters, and people interested in current events,” Eskola said. “I hope we’ve earned our reputation for being right down the middle and being fair and square to all involved, but it’s a dramatically different news media landscape from the 1980s. There was certainly no competition in our time slot for a current events show.”
Viewers in the early days left feedback on 10 station answering machines, and Hanley insisted that they all be in his office. A caller once left a cryptic message to look on page 16 of the prior day’s USA Today newspaper. An intern scoured the city until they found it — a small chart on women running for office across the nation listed, under Minnesota, the name Ann Carlson running for state auditor.
“In point of fact, they meant Arne Carlson, who eventually became the governor,” Hanley recalled. “Brendan was about to leave for the day, and I said, ‘Call Arne, see if there’s any chance he’s willing to come on the show as a woman.’ He was dressed as a man, but he was willing to play along. We wanted to poke fun at USA Today.”
“I was praying for this stand-alone line that was encapsulating what we were trying to do. Joe and Jan asked him, ‘Well Ann, do you have a hard time raising money?’ and he said, ‘Well, frankly, I have trouble raising money no matter what sex I am.’ It became part of our promotional lore.”
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Carlson, perhaps ironically, could be one of the show’s biggest critics.
“‘You’ve substituted real news for this fluff,’” Hanley recalled the governor once saying. Expected or not from political hawks, “it was a little tough getting that kind of criticism.”
The guest lists would grow to include the likes of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone and other household names in Minnesota, sometimes well before they had won office. Still, Hanley recalled a boss who had relocated from New York City grumbling that the show’s informality would never fly in the Big Apple. To Hanley, the Minnesota authenticity was exactly the point.
At a time when viewership for appointment-television news is declining nationally, Kennedy sees the show’s longevity as testament to Minnesota’s political temperament. There’s fewer and fewer places where curious, conscientious minds can hold conversation with others from across the political spectrum “without just throwing bombs,” she said. “You can’t find that in a lot of places anymore. It doesn’t exist. I think the nature of being a Minnesota show helps.”
Episode #4113 of Almanac airs Friday, Dec 6 at 7 p.m. on TPT 2. More at tpt.org.
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