St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 103

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 7H FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 1994 Humphries bleep what people think. He's pro-NRA, and jokingly calls women broads. "In TV these days, there are the 'everyone' types, usually morning show people like Katie Couric. The princes and princesses, Diane Sawyer is an example.

And the seers, with Ted Koppel the best example of a mystic. "Herb fits no definable category." The man who fits no definable category finished his TV career a week ago in the 5200 block of Emerson Avenue in Walnut Park. Fittingly, it was a police story. "Nightside" Herb finished up in the daylight. His last stand-up was the story of the firebombing of the house owned by Calvin and Denise Bailey, neighborhood activists fighting drugs and prostitution in the Walnut Park area.

Before his arrival, Sixth District Sgt. Wayne Gray was talking about Humphries to bomb and arson detectives Richie Williams and Robert Huggans. Williams wasn't sure if he knew Humphries. Gray said something about always seeing him at disasters, murders and plane crashes. "Oh, you mean the guy with the cowboy hat?" said Williams.

Moments later, the guy with the cowboy hat stood there, his microphone aimed in the general direction of the police officers. "What's going on here?" "I don't doubt that," said Steve Hammel, KMOV's news director. "I remember when I moved here last September, I had a housing inspector up in my attic. He looked down and said, 'Hey, I hear you work with Herb Humphries. We love Herb "One of Herb's great gifts is that he has a natural resonance with a lot of people in the audience, and with the people he reported on and interviewed," said John Frazee, a former Channel 4 producer who is now vice president of news services for CBS in New York.

"And he invented doing real nighttime reporting rather than rehashing earlier newscasts. He was one of the first two or three nightside reporters in the country." "I learned so much from him," said Channel 4's Robin Smith, who's worked with Humphries for 16 years. "We were the first station anywhere to go to electronic news gathering" using microwave dishes for live reports from the scene. "Herb taught me the art form, being accurate with very few seconds to prepare. He was on the cutting edge, truly a pioneer in electronic journalism." "In a business where integrity and honor are in short supply, Herb had the most integrity of anyone I've ever met," said Jeff Rainford, a former KMOV reporter and now press secretary for Marsha Murphy's campaign for the Senate.

"Herb is the last of the characters," said Ellen Harris, an assignment editor at KMOV. "He doesn't give a rats' has been a friend." (In fairness to Mink, he didn't exactly call Humphries a dinosaur. What the former Post-Dispatch television critic, now with the New York Daily News, said was something in response to a remark by KMOV station manager Allan Cohen, talking in 1981 about a show they were planning called "Herb Humphries After Hours." (The show would have Humphries scouring the nights looking for offbeat stories. Cohen told Mink that he wanted to be careful to protect Humphries' image as a newsman. Said Mink, "That's kind of like an animal protection group seeking to protect the long-extinct All Humphries remembers is the word dinosaur.

"All of us, sooner or later, are going to be dinosaurs. But the brand of journalism they're doing now on TV is not the kind I learned." He bristled when he recalled an assignment editor telling him to cover a murder. 'You cover the he said, 'and we'll send someone out to cover the rest of What the hell's the rest of it?" Humphries' first 20 years were spent in radio, mostly as a news executive. The 20 years on TV in St. Louis that followed were almost entirely as a street reporter.

Humphries was news director for six months after arriving at Channel 4. Talk of this makes him uncomfortable. "Oh, you don't have to mention that." It seems he didn't agree with the station manager about how to run a news operation, so that was that. "I didn't like the job anyway." Thus was born "Nightside" Herb or, as he sometimes calls himself, "the Rev. Herbie Del." "He used to give people Gideon Bibles and sign the leaf page 'from the Rev.

Herbie Del said Wiman. Herb Humphries once had one of the highest ratings" of any non-anchor in St. Louis television, a score" being ad agency talk for audience recognition. From page one former Channel 4 anchor Patrick Emory was grousing about something and Humphries turned on him and said "You know, Pat, your career would be over with if somebody took a knife to your face." Emory is another person who owes his career, in part, to Humphries the news executive. Emory's first big job was working for Humphries, then news director of KFWB in Los Angeles, the first all-news station on the West Coast.

At the time, Humphries was 190 pounds, three-piece suits, tassel loafers and razor-cut hair, "a real New York look," said Emory. It was only after he came here from Los Angeles in 1974 that he transformed himself into the Herb Humphries of cowboy hats and boots, buckskin coats and good ol' boy delivery. (Since his days here, Emory has roamed the land from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to Ted Turner's CNN. There, he ran afoul of a "pipsqueak" vice president, said Humphries. Emory is now anchoring a news show in Sacramento, Calif.) Such is life in the TV biz, said "Nightside" Herb, himself relegated to part-time status for the past two years' "Years ago, Eric Mink called me a dinosaur, and I wanted to kick his bleep.

Maybe today I am a dinosaur. Trash TV, we used to condemn it. Now we condone it. "We used to laugh at those shows, 'Current but no more. 'Does your cat have the Bubonic plague stay tuned at look, I don't want to come off sounding all negative.

I've loved my years in St. Louis. This has been a great 20 years. Every viewer, with the exception of Mink, Humphries: A 'Newsman's Newsman' a Humphries won national awards for his coverage of Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968, and the shootout between Los Angeles police and the Symbionese Liberation Army in May 1974. When he was the honcho at KFWB in LA, a tip from a fringe figure in the infamous Charles Manson Tate-LaBianca murder cases led to the station being the first on the air with news of thejarrests of the Manson family.

Humphries does not enjoy interviewing celebrities. "I don't think celebrities are news." But when Elvis Presley got out of the Army in the late 1950s, his agent, Col. Tom Parker, arranged a publicity whistle-stop tour, meeting fans and talking with local media along the way. Humphries was working at a radio station in Midland, Texas. He was picked to board the Elvis train.

"I didn't have any idea of how in the hell to interview Elvis. But there I am waiting to talk with Elvis, who's on the platform speaking with fans. There's this big commotion. One of the aides said, 'There's a kid out here who looks like he's 10, and he demands to interview "I looked over at Parker and said, 'Colonel, that's my story. Let the kid interview him, and I'll do a story on the His name was Guy Brown, 12 years old, the sixth-grade correspondent for the Stantan, Texas, grade school newspaper.

"It was a pretty good interview. And my story made the national wires." Because of Humphries' unusual approach to the Elvis story, Guy Brown got a full scholarship to Northwestern University. It was offered by a Chicago newspaper executive who saw an account of Humphries' interview on the wire. John McGuire HERB Humphries' TV personality was often defined by his madcap "Nightside" features. Dressed as a pumpkin on Halloween night and doing a stand-up in a crowded street in front of the old Herbie's bar on Euclid Avenue.

Addressing his commentary to a horse. Or interviewing Miss Nude-something-or-other wearing a tie, cowboy hat and little else. But, as Paul Harvey is fond of saying and now the rest of the story. "He's really a newsman's newsman," said Al Wiman, a KMOV colleague and friend. Before landing here 20 years ago, Humphries worked from coast to coast.

Starting in Greenville, S.C.; then Midland and Austin in Texas; Los Angeles; San Diego; Miami what an awful New York and St. Louis. "I've covered just about everything the '71 earthquake in LA; brush fires; tornadoes and hurricanes; a real tragic story, the mystery of a headless girl; and the flood of '93. Humphries' radio days brought him a number of scoops. As news director of WINS in New York, Humphries used his numerous contacts with the Austin police he's always been cozy with cops to cover by telephone the unfolding story of the University of Texas tower massacre.

Charles Whitman, a deranged ex-Marine, carried a small arsenal to the top of a tower on campus and began shooting people in the streets below. "The chief of detectives, ol' K.R., kept saying, 'Wait a minute, Herb, here he comes around on my K.R. was standing over the body when he pulled out the wallet and gave me Whitman's name right over the air." purchase No other sale item will apply daft) fipffl sat, mm SAT. SUN. HAZELWOOD Hartley Rd.

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