BSO: Kitty Flashback

I recently came across this essay from January 2014 about the passing of local broadcast pioneer Kitty Broman. It's been out of print, so I decided to give it a permanent home here:

Former local media mogul and TV talk show host Kitty Broman has died at the age of 97.

In many respects Broman was a pioneer in television broadcasting, at least in the sense that she was often the first woman to hold certain positions in the broadcasting business, which in its early days was overwhelmingly dominated by men. My sainted grandmother was a fan of her program “At Home With Kitty.”

But even granting her that status, the substance of her work was often very light. As I explained once in the context of the first time I saw The Dan Yorke Show:

I had never seen local programming like that. The only thing remotely comparable was a local interview show that ran for a hundred years on Channel 22 called “At Home with Kitty”. It was hosted by Kitty Broman, a likeable enough gal but frankly her only known qualification for hosting the show was the fact that she was part owner of the station.

The soundstage was set up to look like a living room, with a couch and cups and saucers set up on a coffee table. She even wore an apron. The illusion they strove for was as if the guests had stopped in for a cup of tea with Kitty. It was an unintentionally hilarious program, which showed the lamest puff pieces about local politicians. It almost seemed to be a rule that no controversial topics were allowed. I think many people used to watch the show just to make fun of it.

What impressed me about Yorke was that he didn’t seem to be interested in a topic unless it was controversial. He didn’t try to avoid confrontation or debate, instead he embraced and encouraged it. He wasn’t afraid to put a guest on the spot and he did not try to make them feel that they were attending a tea party. I recognized that in a journalistic sense Yorke’s show was breaking new ground….

Kitty Broman and her husband Bill Putnam presided over the Valley TV scene at a time when disastrous decisions were made in public policy and corruption in public offices was rampant. Instead of working to expose those follies and villains, they played an insider’s game that ranged from cynically self-serving to mindlessly cheerleading on behalf of the region’s power players. In this Kitty was very much like her male counterparts in the local journalism of her era. Their legacy and hers is forever tarnished by the stories they didn’t tell.

Included with the prior essay was these pics taken of Stan's Drive In, a former fruit and vegetable, stand as seen from the bus in 2014. The building, and the beautiful tree beside it, were destroyed last Fall after having been abandoned for about a decade.