There are a lot of people in the broadcast, and business news, worlds for whom I have great respect. But I hold my greatest and deepest respect for my friend Ken Prewitt. We go back 36 years to WERE in Cleveland. A rather dreary facility on an alley off a dreary block on Chester Avenue in Cleveland: across from the Greyhound, next door to the Trailways and catty-corner to a Gulf station. We also had a sister FM station downstairs. So when Ken would give directions to the place, he'd say "It's the only corner in town with five stations....two bus, two radio, and one gas."
On a staff of about 25 full-timers and part-timers there only were three of us who were really interested in the markets. Ken, his co-anchor Bob Price (a Vietnam-era Marine who became an excellent business reporter on KCBS in San Francisco), and me. And I think for each of us, it was not just another beat to be followed, but an extension of our own value systems....the belief in free markets and the rule of law. And I suspect that extended into a code of personal behavior. Ken, in particular, was the real gentleman of the newsroom. For years, my late mother would recall the time that she came to the radio stationŠ.and the only man who stood up was Ken Prewitt. She'd tell me that every time she'd see him on the CBS Morning News.
I wish somehow there existed a video of how Ken and I, during the Mutual news break at the bottom of the hour, would open the Wall Street Journal together. I can picture 5:30 AM in particular, when we were looking at the listed options page. I can hear Ken saying something like, "to make any money on this, I think the stock has to close above this strike price by the time the contract expires." We didn't know, but we were figuring it out. He figured it out faster than I did, because I had to ask him, "What's a strike price?"
And that goes also for the time when the station management finally realized how overextended it was. On a Wednesday in the middle of winter, it fired most of the staff. Which meant that on Thursday Ken Prewitt's midday all-news shift became a talk show. He didn't miss a step, and he and his suddenly former co-anchor turned co-host, Catherine Johns, put together a model for what a non-ideological, news-oriented talk show could be like. And she went on to great success doing that at WLS in Chicago.
And then the Wall Street Journal started a radio network. Wasn't more than a few months before they decided to call in a pro from out of town, Ken Prewitt. The Journal did not have a major affiliate in the New York. It was on a lowly-rated classical station owned by GAF. But it didn't take more than two or three months before someone at Money magazine heard him and hired him for WCBS. I remember the phone call into the newsroom in Cleveland, where now I was doing the business reports. "You want to work in New York." "Yeah." "I'm resigning in ten minutes, you call in twenty." I did, and now, three decades later I owe my career to him.
