Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.
Bobbie Wygant
Local television icon Bobbie Wygant, who was a fixture on the Fort Worth's NBC5 for decades as an entertainment correspondent, died Sunday at 97, the station announced.
Wygant worked for KXAS for over 70 years, beginning her career at the Fort Worth-based station in 1948 — years before television would become the dominant broadcast medium. When Wygant was hired, the station, opened by Amon Carter and known then as WBAP, was still two weeks from going on the air.
“They poured me in with the foundation," she was found of saying of her association with station.
Though originally from Lafayette, Indiana, where she also studied broadcasting at Purdue University, Wygant and her husband, Phil, would move to Texas following her graduation.
Wygant would make history in 1960, when she produced and hosted the talk show "Dateline," becoming the first woman in the southwestern U.S. to host a general interest talk show on television.
"Before that women had to do the housekeeping things and the cooking and so forth." Wygant said. "The staff was 'moi!' I produced it. I did my own research.”
As a host of "Dateline" and later as an entertainment reporter for the station, Wygant would become and well known for her celebrity interviews, which included conversations with The Beatles, Madonna, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Bradley Cooper, and Bette Davis and earned praise from the likes of Stanley Kramer and Dustin Hoffman.
Wygant’s regular half-hour daily talk show aired at 12:30 p.m. On Nov. 22, 1963, she had been given a heads-up that the station would cut to a news feed if John F. Kennedy's motorcade got to Market Center in Dallas early. She was already on the air when the first report broke on United Press International’s primary national news circuit at 12:34 p.m. The wire service simply reported that three shots were fired at the motorcade.
She had two guests that day — big band leader Ray McKinley who was from the area and was going to play for a dance at the Casino ballroom on Lake Worth, and Lambuth Tomlinson, publisher of All-Church Press Inc. Tomlinson, she says, “was a lovely man and a man of faith.”
In those days, television floor directors communicated with the on-camera people through hand signals. Her director that day was Ed Milner. “All of a sudden, he put both hands up. I didn’t know what it was. It was not any standard communication signal to the talent,” Wygant said years later to Paul Harral, then editor of Fort Worth Magazine.
Then a slide came up on the monitor. “It said, ‘News Bulletin.’ When that came up, I just stopped. Ray finished, and I didn’t continue the interview,” Wygant said. “And then I heard a voice that said, ‘From the motorcade of the John F. Kennedy parade in Dallas. We have a report that there has been what could be gunshots in the vicinity of the president.’ ”
When it ended, Milner told her to pick up where she had left off and go on. “My initial thought was some idiot is out there with firecrackers,” she said. “I couldn’t comprehend that there would be anybody out there with a gun, firing a gun.”
The segment would be interrupted six or seven times with news bulletins. “I continued on with Mr. Tomlinson, and being a man of faith, he could relate a spiritual comfort after we knew that the president had been hit and was fighting for his life,” Wygant said.
“The last thing that we had before we went off at 1 o’clock — the last bulletin we had — was that the president had been given last rites,” she said. “Actually, when we signed off, the president was dead. It just wasn’t confirmed.”
She drew uniform praise for her professionalism that day but modestly attributed it to her experience in broadcasting and to her training. But she also grew in confidence. “I’ve thought many times, if I could get through that day, I can handle anything. Throw it at me. I can handle it. I can’t conceive that I would have ever have a bigger challenge than that on live TV,” she said.
She had a built-in annual reminder, she always said. “My birthday’s on Nov. 22. I was born in 1926, and that was my 37th birthday.”
Wygant received a number of accolades for her on-screen work, including being inducted into the Gold Circle of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and a Gracie Award, which honors the achievement and programming gof and by women.
Following her technical retirement from the station, Wygant continued to pop up on programming as a freelance entertainment reporter and published her memoir, Talking to the Stars: Bobbie Wygant’s Seventy Years in Television, in 2018.