About eight years ago I joined the Rotary Club of Honolulu, the largest and oldest in the state. I met many interesting people in the club, and one of them is Linda Coble.
Coble is friendly, funny and smart. She’s been a pioneer — the first woman in many arenas — but never by design.
"I’ve never set a goal in my life," she says. "I think I am more a believer in fate and that if you consistently apply yourself and work hard, you can rise above life’s unpredictability."
Coble was the first woman to earn a broadcast journalism scholarship to the University of Oregon from the Oregon Association of Broadcasters. She landed a job in the newsroom at KHVH-TV (now KITV) and was Hawaii’s first female reporter. Two years later she was promoted to Hawaii’s first female anchor.
She also was among the first female members of the Rotary Club of Honolulu, its first female president and Hawaii Rotary’s first district governor.
There are 49 Rotary clubs in Hawaii. Meetings used to rotate among members’ businesses, hence the name.
Getting started wasn’t easy, Coble says. "I knocked on doors at TV stations throughout Oregon when I was close to graduating from the University of Oregon. The personnel director at KOIN Channel 6 told me to return after I had more experience … and a sex-change operation. I was crushed. A dozen years later, when KOIN hired me as the affiliate’s first female anchor, I found that same personnel director and in my deepest voice said, ‘I’m baaack.’"
Coble’s first job in Hawaii was at KHVH, Channel 4, as a newsroom secretary in 1969.
"I started at KHVH in July 1969, the same day they landed a man on the moon. I answered phones, took suits to the cleaners, swept the floor and earned $1.50 an hour. But I watched over the shoulder of everybody and learned what they were doing."
There was a car bombing at Holiday Mart one day, and Coble was the only one in the newsroom. "They looked around and all the reporters were gone, so they sent me," Coble continues. "They knew I had the skills. I had studied and shadowed reporters.
"Within months of being hired as a secretary, I became a reporter, and two years later, in 1971, they made me an anchor at KHVH.
"They decided to call us the ‘foxiest team in town.’ They made a glass coffee-table set and suggested I cross my legs a couple of times during the newscast.
"I didn’t comprehend that it might be unusual for this blond haole from Oregon to be telling locals the news of the day. I couldn’t pronounce Kalakaua. If something was happening in Ewa, I turned and asked on air, where was that?"
One of Coble’s biggest scoops involved the late Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
"Barry Goldwater was a buddy of my dad’s in the Air Force. One evening Don Rockwell gave me the assignment to interview Goldwater on his way home from Cambodia. His plane stopped to refuel here, and Rockwell thought I could catch a shot of the plane refueling.
"My cameraman and I showed up at Hickam Air Force Base, and we could see the plane across the tarmac. I asked a man in a uniform to tell Goldwater that Linda Coble was here to see him. My cameraman and the guy in uniform looked at me like I was an idiot. But he walked across the tarmac and spoke to the senator.
"I could see him look in my direction and wave." Coble ran across the tarmac. Goldwater greeted her — "Linda, how the hell is Bob?" — "my dad. We had a great conversation about his trip and the war in Vietnam."
"We should have nuked them," Goldwater said, referring to the North Vietnamese. The suggestion that the U.S. seriously consider using nuclear weapons in South East Asia made huge headlines across the country, Coble recounts. "You heard it first on KITV. It was early in my career, one of my first reports, and it was a huge scoop."
Next week I’ll talk to Coble about moving to KGMB and working with Cec Heftel, Bob Sevey and Joe Moore.
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Bob Sigall looks through his collection of Hawaii photos to tell stories of Hawaii people, places and organizations each Friday. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.
