On July 20, 1969, the late President John F. Kennedy’s quest for Americans to land on the moon before the decade ended was complete. Apollo 11 launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but Hawaii ended up being an important final piece to the mission. This month we look back at the local news coverage of Apollo 11 from one of the broadcasters who covered it, Don Picken.
Apollo 11 was a big event at the time, with round-the-clock coverage on all of the networks. Locally, KGMB sent Bob Sevey to the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center) in Houston to film a special on the upcoming space mission.
In 1968 Picken arrived in the islands, replacing Mason Altiery at KHON as news director and anchor. A seasoned newsman, Picken had worked in radio and television in stops from the Midwest to West Coast.
"Working in Honolulu brought a rather strange combination of vanity and humility. Only four years prior I’d been a one-man news department and part-time disc jockey at a 250-watt radio station in a little Iowa town," said Picken.
Throughout his career Picken interviewed political figures from Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan to celebrities such as Jimmy Stewart, Danny Kaye, Sally Field, Jack Benny, Elvis Presley and Don Ho. But Apollo 11 stood out from all other events.
"Apollo 11 was the most interesting, challenging and gratifying event in more than 20 years as a broadcaster. The prohibitive cost of taking a satellite feed from NBC-TV on the mainland, and free access to the raw sound and pictures from NASA, led us to build our own coverage of the event," said Picken. "Charles Stubblefield, one of the most versatile broadcasters I’ve ever known, and I studied NASA-provided materials intensely to prepare. We were joined on-set by experts from (the University of Hawaii) and the Bishop (Museum) Planetarium. We didn’t know when the actual landing would occur, so we slept on cots in the studio and were wakened by the technical director in the control room in time to begin the live broadcast."
Movies on KHON would run all night long until the key moments of Apollo 11.
"When the broadcast ended sometime before dawn in Hawaii, I drove back home to Hawaii Kai and sat in my convertible, looking up at the little circle of light about a quarter of a million miles away, amazed that I’d been viewing it from just a few feet away a short time before. I still remember it with awe," said Picken.
On July 24, Apollo 11 astronauts landed their module Columbia in the Pacific Ocean south of Johnston Atoll. The astronauts were picked up and put aboard the USS Hornet where they were greeted by Nixon. Honolulu was the next stop, where the astronauts were quarantined for 21 days and greeted by an estimated 25,000 people.
"When the astronauts came back through Hawaii, a media pool selected Bob Sevey to do the live coverage from the airport. The sound failed, however, so those of us in the studio stumbled in and ad-libbed as well as we could," said Picken.
Picken would also produce and host the live events of the Apollo 12 and 13 missions. There were other memorable events during Picken’s time at KHON, from covering Hansen’s disease patients on Molokai and the closing of the Queen’s Surf Hotel, to the SS Lurline’s final voyage to Hawaii and the islands’ first 747 jumbo jet flight. Picken also appeared in the 1970 movie "Tora! Tora! Tora!" — "a one-day shoot for which I still get royalty checks every time it’s shown on TV. A decent role, a few lines of dialogue and a lot of fun," he said.
Picken has fond memories of his time in Hawaii as he fell in love with the music, culture and people. After leaving KHON in the early 1970s, he worked in public relations in Australia for most of the decade before settling in Oregon, where he now remains.
"Life is good but quiet, and I’m the luckiest man alive to have the experiences I enjoyed in the news business," said Picken.
In 1999 the moon landing was polled as the second most significant event of the 20th century, ranked behind the splitting of the atom for military purposes during World War II.
———
A.J. McWhorter, a collector of film and videotape of Hawaii’s TV history, has worked as a media producer, writer and researcher. Email him at flashback@hawaii.rr.com.
