Before he went into radio, Bob Brown never realized how long 30 seconds can be. As far as he was concerned, it was just a half-a-minute.

But he found out, in short order, it can be an eternity if you have nothing to say. By now, as a WOC-TV announcer, he's become quite adept at filling those seemingly eternal silences.

Bob enjoyed the limelight even in high school days in Sterling, Illinois. "It was a commercial band in that we got paid," he reflects, "but non-commercial if you judge on what it sounded like."

Dartmouth, Amherst and Williams were his choices of colleges but their semesters didn't begin until September. Instead, he entered Vermont Junior College in January to study law, after leaving the Army. But law school "sounded like an awful lot of work for the interest I had in it," he says. He finished in liberal arts -- a background he feels is essential for any announcer.

Bob "fell in love with the business," as he puts it, when he filled in as part-time announcer on a Vermont station. "This is it!" he decided and promptly devoted three months to taking special courses in radio at Columbia University under the set-up with NBC.

Much to his chagrin, Bob found it difficult to get a job in New York and "pounding the pavement" held little appeal for him. It was then that he entered the Leland Powers School in Boston for professional television, theater and radio training.

Strangely enough, Bob is one person you can't convince that television is better than radio. "It's just a novelty," he says, "and when it wears off, people will return to their radios." Concerts and regular disk jockey shows are, he avows, as good on the radio as they are on TV. Bob doesn't own a TV set because, as he laments, "I'm really quite poor." However, perhaps as a stimulus to a national "return to radio" movement, the radio is going constantly at his home. Bob's wife, Bev, also works evenings at WOC-TV as a script girl. The couple admit that 5 to 11 p.m. hours upset the normal routine but they're used to it by now. Iowa, however, is one place Bob isn't too interested in getting used to. He feels Iowa is too damp and too flat and he misses the pine trees and mountains of Vermont -- the adopted state he calls "home." Bob is quite a skiing enthusiast and for this reason alone, he may well miss the snow-capped Vermont hills. TV Forecast 01/03/53

Above picture of Bob Brown courtesy of Jon Book.

Below - Special thanks to Gwen for this WOC September 1957 brochure.

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