News of the passing of Ken Brown arrived the same day as news of a major change at Baltimore’s oldest television station — a newscast without the usual well-dressed men and women introducing reports from the anchor desk.
Ken worked in local television for 46 years.
I’m not sure what he would have said about the anchorless news show at WMAR-TV. But it likely would have included the phrase “bean counters” or some sardonic comment about tech billionaires changing American life, and not for the better.
The strange anchorless shows at WMAR-TV, with recorded news reports appearing without live setups or tags, represent an attempt at media survival as habits of news consumers — viewers and readers — shift away from traditional sources.
A couple decades ago, after I had a five-year run as host of a weekend show for WMAR, I thought the station should consider moving to an all-sports format, offering coverage of local high school, college and even club teams. With its live telecast of the Turkey Bowl, the annual Thanksgiving Day game between Calvert Hall and Loyola Blakefield, the station already had a reputation for celebrating local sports. More of such programming might have been a way for WMAR to distinguish itself in the market, pick up new viewers and advertisers, and survive.
Ken Brown, with whom I worked for more than a decade at WBAL-TV, would have provided a union man’s reality check on that idea: Switching to all-sports programming would require a financial commitment that WMAR’s owner, E.W. Scripps, would never make.
Besides, I can hear Ken say, the people who own and operate local TV stations have no imagination.
Who was this seemingly hard-bitten guy, Ken Brown?
Not someone the vast majority of viewers of WBAL-TV knew. But they saw his high-quality work, day after day, for decades.
Ken was a videographer, one of the dozens who work behind the cameras and in the editing booths at Baltimore’s local stations and rarely receive recognition for their deadline work.
I first met Ken in 1980, when WBAL hired me to produce either a weekly feature or commentary for its Friday evening newscast.
This was back before the internet changed everything, when Baltimore had three daily newspapers and three TV operations thriving in a competitive news environment. Just about every newscast had a “local feature,” a story about an interesting person, place or thing. It was most often a human interest story.
Ken was a master at his craft. He taught me how to turn an idea into a three-minute feature for WBAL-TV’s Action News.
He was a tough guy with a big heart, and he liked shooting and producing stories that, above all, sparked emotional responses in people, or a good laugh.
We told stories of Baltimore’s growing homeless population. We profiled Maryland veterans of each of the country’s 20th Century wars — the oldest Black veteran of World War I, the Baltimore men who took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the forgotten soldiers of the Korean War, the young men who went to Vietnam, and those who never returned.
We profiled a kooky Fells Point antiques dealer, a woman who sold lawn ornaments on Pulaski Highway, a master of barbecue in Glen Burnie, a blind man who rebuilt automobile transmissions, a shoeshine boy in Pigtown, a city social worker who tried to help a much older woman with too many cats in a Hampden rowhouse, and the queen of Baltimore’s painted screens.
Ken and I were the last to videotape and report on Kelso, the champion thoroughbred race horse, on his last legs at Woodstock Farm in Chesapeake City.
We also produced, with varying degrees of artistic success, features about miniature golf, British royalty, Jones Falls traffic, presidential campaigns, a Chesapeake Bay monster and a Frederick County ghost hunter.
Ken Brown started at WBAL in 1968, before videotape replaced film in news operations. Robert Tutman, one of the first Black men hired as a cameraman, recalls Ken being the only person on TV Hill who offered to teach him to operate a camera and edit film. Remarkably, Ken had been hired just a few days before Tutman. “And yet,” Tutman says, “he was the one who helped me the most.”
Ken probably worked, at one point or another, with every reporter employed at Channel 11 from May 1968 through December 2014. But he had a special relationship with the late Ray Bennett, a features reporter for 12 years in the 1970s and 1980s. Ray’s stories aired under the banner of “Ray’s Way” and, with Ken’s camera work and skillful editing, helped WBAL tell a fuller story about Baltimore and its people.
“Electrons in the ionosphere,” Ken said, his derisive take on what happened to all the stories he helped produce for WBAL back in the day. It was intense work with a camera and microphone, followed by editing, followed by the telecast of a story, and then — poof — the story became particles passing through Earth’s atmosphere.
He was right about the ephemeral nature of TV work, the need to produce content every day, and then see it disappear into the cosmos. But, along the journey, there are moments that people remember, that had great meaning for them. I hope Ken realized that.
The late great Murray Kempton, the Baltimorean who became a New York columnist, once made a dark observation about news photographers.
At a congressional hearing in May 1954, attorney Joseph Welch exposed Joe McCarthy, the communist-hunting senator, as a bully and a man with “no sense of decency.” Welch’s take-down of McCarthy sparked applause in the hearing room.
“You can only measure what that applause meant,” Kempton wrote, “when you knew that two press photographers were clapping, and I have never believed before that a press photographer cared whether any subject lived or died.”
If you didn’t know him, you might have seen Ken Brown as one of those hard-edged, care-not guys with a camera. But he had a big soft spot inside — the sweet spot that generated some of the touching stories he produced back when features were a valued part of local television’s daily fare.
Ken didn’t want a memorial service, according to his son, Ken Brown Jr., and I was not surprised to hear that. Ken was a private guy, not given to boast, more comfortable behind a camera than as the center of attention. The story was always supposed to be about someone else, never him — until now, and better late than never.
Dan Rodricks, former Baltimore Sun columnist, writes weekly for Baltimore Fishbowl.
