Remembering Jack Morris and Betty Boyd

We've lost two Tulsa TV pioneers in the last little while. Newsman Jack Morris died in early December at the age of 88. Betty Boyd, host of local daytime shows and later a state legislator, passed away Thursday at age 86.

Whenever someone says, "It's 10 o'clock!" I mentally supply the rest: "Jack Morris news time!" I remember Morris at KTEW (NBC) in the 1970s, but his first television job was as news anchor at KTUL.

Here's an 15-minute profile and interview with Morris, from 1991, the year he was inducted into the Oklahoma Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame (Jerry Webber, who worked with Morris at KTEW, is the narrator). Morris talks about the course of his career, including his nightly commentaries from a conservative perspective, traveling to Israel right after the Six-Day War for a documentary on the mideast crisis for KTUL, and what it was like to have to deal with news footage on film. In 1978, he won a Freedom Foundation of Valley Forge gold medal for his commentaries. (For Hal O'Halloran fans, there's a brief glimpse of a promotional photo of the KTUL news team -- Morris, O'Halloran, and weatherman Don Woods - at 4:45.)

KTUL has a tribute to Betty Boyd, which includes a promotional video from 1965; it appears to be aimed at selling Boyd's daily noontime show to potential advertisers. In the video you'll see a brief Cy Tuma newscast, an ad for Wilson's MOR canned ham and BIF canned beef (the shot of MOR with sliced olives belongs in James Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food), an old-school weather cast, a Maxwell House commercial, and a bass player and a pianist who played the theme and incidental music throughout the show -- live.

MORE from Tulsa TV Memories: Jack Morris is featured on one of the "Newsmen" pages, and Betty Boyd has a page all to herself.

Here's Jack Frank's video tribute to Betty Boyd from a few years ago.

She mentions Hal O'Halloran and Cy Tuma at about 2:20. And at about 1:10 in, Lawrence Welk flirts with Betty.

UPDATE 2024/11/20: Updated the embed code for the Jack Morris video. The Betty Boyd tribute is no longer on YouTube, but Jack Frank of Tulsa Films has posted her entire interview with Lawrence Welk.