Posts Tagged Doug Richards
Classic Atlanta TV: Don McClellan Catches Up with Officer Don
Posted by admin in comedy, episodic TV, radio on November 27, 2009
Atlanta has a rich media history, and Don McClellan has been part of it for 50 years with WSB-TV. While McClellan’s blog is clearly focused on WSB history, McClellan is also an avid runner (I remember when WSB would allow him to document a test run of the Peachtree every year, the day before the race) who loves to photograph other runners and document their stories at his blog. In fact, a co-worker who was photographed by McClellan at a race is how I found out he had started a blog.
Doug Richards’ Live Apartment Fire (Richards is another veteran Atlanta [granted not 50 years] long with WAGA, but currently at WXIA) is another great Atlanta media blog–and Richards recently directed folks to McClellan’s wealth of knowledge. So this time when I revisited McClellan’s blog (after my initial visit several months ago) I was pleasantly surprised to see he’d written a number of posts on Don Kennedy. For some of my older siblings, Kennedy was an important part of their childhood (through his alter ego, Officer Don) because of his live kids TV show on WSB-TV, The Popeye Club. (Really, one of these days I should do a post about my older sister, who had her appearance [the show was done with a live studio audience] on the Popeye Club preempted by coverage of the Six-Day War).
RIP Jim Axel
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on November 17, 2009
Long before the era of 24/7 news channels, in the 1970s, I grew up in a house that never missed the local news on the TV (or radio or newspaper for that matter. And back in the 1970s and 1980s–when you were watching Channel 5 (then a CBS affiliate) WAGA-TV–you were watching news anchor Jim Axel. The man commanded my attention and informed me as a kid, he’s part of my news junkie childhood memories.
Jim Axel died on Saturday, after a long battle with cancer. AJC’s Rodney Ho and Doug Richards (former WAGA, currently WXIA). Both articles link to WAGA’s coverage of his passing, but I linked to Ho and Richards’ pieces mostly because of the tributes that flow out of the comments sections in both posts. I was pleasantly surprised to see a comment from Axel’s former co-anchor Chuck Moore (another name I grew up respecting).
A few things are clear in reading the comments, Axel cared about his friends and his co-workers — almost as much as he loved his family. And Axel was at peace with his passing and how he had lived his life. And not everyone can pull that off. It’s not easy–and there’s a lesson to be taken away from that. Yet again, years after leaving TV news, Jim Axel one last time gave this news junkie some information that he could use.