Brubaker Book Takes A Look Back To His Days In Television

EDMONDS - Times were different in the 1960s when Bill Brubaker broke into the Seattle broadcasting market.

It was a busy time, yet somehow relaxed. Fun seemed more important than now. Few in the media took themselves all that seriously.

Born and raised in Spokane, Brubaker came to Seattle as a radio newsman in 1962. During his 25 years in the broadcast industry with KOMO, Brubaker spent 17 years as a television anchorman, mostly in the key evening slot.

After Brubaker left television and was appointed to the Snohomish County Council in 1987, he often talked of the need to get his creative juices flowing. A few years ago, he wrote a patriotic speech that won a Freedom Foundation Award. It is a talk he has been called on to give more than 30 times.

That speech triggered something. His wife, Marlene, recalled that Brubaker had jotted down some anecdotal notes during his final months on television and urged him to take a look at them.

Those vignettes, repeatedly refined during the past year, are the core of Brubaker's recently published look behind the scenes of local television. " . . . Never as it Seems," published by Peanut Butter Publishing of Seattle, came out just before Christmas. It sells for $11.95.

For those who've been around for a couple of decades, the anecdotes provide a mostly humorous trip down memory lane. For more recent arrivals to the Puget Sound area, it should serve as a quick peek at what once was.

Distribution is really just beginning for the soft-cover book, intentionally printed in fairly large type for aging eyes. Brubaker, 54, of Edmonds, just signed a contract with Pacific Pipeline, a major distributor. The first printing was 5,000 books. Brubaker, with an investment in the production, will break even after 3,000 are sold.

People from the broadcasting industry are now calling Brubaker to tell how much they like the book and reminding him of a score more stories.

Several stories are about animals in television shows and their unpredictability. Then there's the fast-talking Ray Ramsey, for many years the last word on the weather at KOMO, even though Brubaker makes it clear Ramsey did a lot of hedging.

It was an age when the industry wasn't beyond live pranks. As an anchorman under extremely hot lights, Brubaker required two glasses of water, one that he gulped just before going on the air, the second to be sipped during the broadcast. Once, gin was substituted by floor directors and it took a lot of commercials before a woozy Brubaker could handle the broadcast. From then on, Brubaker sipped from both glasses to be on the safe side.

In his introduction, Brubaker notes the book is not about technology or journalistic rules but about "wonderful people, skilled and energetic people who weren't afraid to make mistakes along the way or share a wart or two with the audience."

To write this book, Brubaker greeted his word processer each morning about 5 and worked an hour or two before going on to his county duties. He'd rewrite the work he did the day before, and write some new anecdotes.

He already is writing another book that should be completed this year, about the four-year project of exploring the Cobb Seamount, an underwater mountain along the coast that in some places is only 130 feet below the surface.

To do his reporting work, Brubaker was trained in what then was a new and dangerous procedure: open-ocean diving. Although he didn't actually make any dives, he kept up with what was happening on the project.

There probably is at least a third book somewhere out there. Brubaker keeps hearing about the high-school-football team his father played on in Spokane and is finding out it was so good it was undefeated and might have played and beaten a college team.