My mistake. I thought the poster was talking about the first 5pm news/feature show. By any name, KPRC was first with a news and features show at 5. KTRK was indeed first with a show named "Live at 5".
As for that property on South Post Oak, the Hobby family got a very good price for it when they decided to build the new station at 8181 SW Freeway in 1972. It helped to build that place.
I was working for KPRC radio then, in the old building and later in the new. I can tell you that KPRC TV/Radio had really outgrown the S Post Oak facility. We were shoe-horned into every nook and cranny of that place like you wouldn't believe.
TV and Radio news were in the same room -- about 20 feet by 20 feet. They weren't separate departments then. TV news took up most of the room. Ray Miller's desk was in one corner, and radio news -- all of it -- was in the opposite corner. We had one desk and one typewriter, and we used an old phone booth as the radio news production room.
Miller expected all his people to be able to work on both sides of the room. The TV anchor -- Larry Rasco -- was still doing afternoon newscasts on radio when I came there in 1969. TV reporters filed stories for the radio side, and radio reporters were often called on to cover a breaking story for TV, which meant we all had to know how to shoot and edit film. You'll be interested to know that our current senior U-S Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison never did quite master the art of turning her long TV stories into usable radio reports. We always had to edit her reports down to the 30 or 35 seconds we could use.
Those were the good old days. The unionized NBC correspondents who were coming through all the time could never get over how multi-skilled the KPRC people were. I'll never forget George Lewis's reaction. "You radio guys really cover TV stories? You edit your own film? My god the union would have apoplexy if we ever tried that."
About a year before the move to the new building, Ray Miller finally drew a line between the two news departments and hired John Davenport to be KPRC's first Radio News Director. The new building had separate areas for TV and radio, and that made the separation complete. Even so, the TV reporters continued filing stories for radio for some years after that. That practice faded away gradually, and I think it finally ended when Miller retired.
My favorite Ray Miller story is about his hatred of seeing other TV stations' microphone logos in his reporters' camera shots. He especially hated those big Eyewitness News logos, which looked like a small space satellite attached to the end of the mic.
Miller told his reporters and photographers he didn't want to see them anymore, and they were "encouraged" to literally rip the KTRK logos off the offending mic if they had to.
For several years the TV newsroom had a collection of about a dozen Eyewitness News mic logos hanging on the wall like trophy scalps. Absolutely true. There was a running joke that Miller paid a bounty of 25 dollars for each one a reporter could bring back, 50 dollars if it had the other reporter's blood on it, and 100 dollars if the other reporter's bloody hand was still attached.
