Anne Keefe, Grand Dame

Anne Keefe was the wisest person I’ve ever known.

I believe that it would be her advice that one shouldn’t shed a tear upon hearing that an old friend passed away at the age of 90, after having done all she ever wanted to do and more, in a life filled with good health, loving family, and mostly happy days. Don’t be ridiculous, Anne would say, just celebrate that wonderful life.

“What more could you ask for?”

I can hear her asking that question, because that’s how Anne Keefe delivered most of her wisdom: by asking questions. She did that on the air for half a century as a broadcaster. She did it over a drink. She did it wherever she was, right up to the end.

So when the news came last night that Anne had passed away in her home in Rochester, New York, it occurred to me that she would have us raise a glass to her wonderful life, enjoy a few stories, and move on. She was, after all, most self-effacing. I’m following half of her hypothetical advice (having shed a few tears), so let’s celebrate her.

“Didn’t we have a lot of great times?”

Anne sure did. Her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren were the center of her universe. She loved the arts and culture and reading and doing crossword puzzles. She was an elegant lady, but as feisty and down to earth as they come. In a 2007 interview with our Jeannette Cooperman, she offered a favorite refrain:

“I’ve been healthy, which is kind of sad for my doctor, because I smoke, I drink martinis, I eat bonbons, and I don’t walk—except to get more ice or outside to smoke a cigarette.”

And, oh, there was that legendary career as a renowned, groundbreaking broadcaster. She was a St. Louis Media Hall of Famer, beloved and famous in the city that she served so ably for decades.

Here’s where I get to do my Anne Keefe impersonation. Because if we’re going to get on the topic of her “legendary career as a renowned, groundbreaking broadcaster…famous in the city she served so ably for decades,” I get to ask a question:

“Which one?”

You see, Anne Keefe had two full-fledged legendary careers: one in St. Louis, with which so many in our town are most familiar; and another, equally impressive, in her hometown of Rochester, New York.

She started there in 1945 as basically the first woman in television news. She had a series of modest jobs: soap-opera work, radio, TV, commercials, and what have you. She gained fame as the chatty host of the local Dialing for Dollars franchise. And while raising six children as a single mother, she rose to the top—and I mean the top—as a broadcasting star.

The Wikipedia page for her station WROC-TV singled her out among just three popular broadcasters as having “contributed to the station’s success in the 1960s and 1970s.” It noted that Anne split time between both the TV and radio operations. And it cited her mid-’70s departure (and that of the others) as contributing to the dominant station falling into a slump that would last for decades.

Rochester’s loss was St. Louis’ gain in 1976, when en route to an interview with a Kansas City TV station, KMOX general manager Bob Hyland managed to intercept her with a famous 6 a.m. job offer that only came to fruition after he accepted her bombastic dare that “you can’t afford me.”

I said Anne was self-effacing when it came to her incredible accomplishments. I never said she lacked self-confidence. She was well aware of how good she was, especially in her ability to kick butt and take names in the brutally misogynistic world of broadcast.

Anne Keefe was one tough character.

She was also a talented one, with a wonderful radio voice and a demeanor that was smart, refined, and sophisticated yet utterly accessible to a down-home audience, be it in Rochester or St. Louis.

For nearly two decades, she reigned as the grand dame of KMOX, one of the most important women in the news business anywhere in the U.S. She was an essential part of the golden years of KMOX, helping it enjoy an unparalleled run of success, featuring other greats such as Jack Carney, Jack Buck, and Bob Hardy, who are all gone now as well.

Anne had a substantively powerful voice, liberal but independent and beholden to no one’s orthodoxy. She was remarkably well read and always prepared and versed in her subject matter. Like those other greats, Keefe was a world-class interviewer, but with a style of her own. She could probe, challenge, and show empathy simultaneously. She was magical.

Just like in Rochester, Anne was a vital part of the station’s success and was beloved by her audience. Just like in Rochester, her station spiraled downward after the star personalities moved on.

Of course, there was another mini-career in St. Louis, a run of about a decade dating back to 1988 as a panelist on Donnybrook, our free-for-all news roundtable show on the PBS Nine Network. She sat alongside me and always made me feel like her peer, but let’s be clear: We weren’t peers. Only one of us was a broadcast giant. Most assuredly, it wasn’t me.

Indeed, I distinctly remember that the first real credibility that came to our show in the early years was achieved by our late provocateur Martin Duggan’s successful recruitment of Anne as a panelist.  It was no small feat, because Hyland wasn’t crazy about the idea, but Duggan somehow prevailed.

Duggan was the heart and soul of Donnybrook in those early years. With no disrespect to my fellow “founders,” Anne was our only star. And speaking for myself, she was our mentor. It was working alongside her that I learned the power of the question—at least the kind of question that only Anne could deliver.

Now, understand that Anne took part in our boisterous discussions and certainly had no shortage of opinions. She made her points with roughly one-tenth the verbiage that I needed, but she treated me with much kindness and respect.

Donnybrook colleague Bill McClellan always likes to tell how his wife, Mary, would warn him not to argue with Anne, and he mostly complied. I didn’t have a wife in those days, so on the rare occasions when I was at odds with Anne, I didn’t have the good sense to back off. I’d rattle on with much assurance about whatever was on my mind and wait for her to respond in kind. Then, she’d hit me in the eyes with one of those questions. They were always concise, direct, and on point. It was how she rolled.

“Are you saying that…?”

Whatever blank she filled in, it referenced what I was coming off as saying, as opposed to what I meant to say. I probably didn’t lose every single argument that I had with her over the years, but most of the time, if Anne challenged me with one of her questions, it was time (as Martin would say) “to move on to something else.”

But if I had to pick the one place in which she taught me the most, it was in recognizing—and rejecting—the demise of civility in the public square and in the news media. Anne had a front-row seat to this real-life theater of the absurd, having seen the coarseness grow over a period of several decades. Here’s one way she described it in that 2007 interview with St. Louis Magazine:

“I did celebrity interviews for 30 years, and people would call in to ask questions. Sometime in the mid-’80s, things started to reverse: People would call to insult the author. I said to myself, ‘I can’t sit here and have this person attacked.’ So I would interview the person, say thank you, and hang up, and then open up the lines. We got into a phase where we enjoyed humiliating people. That’s when I began to think I didn’t want to do this anymore.”

(If you’d like a glimpse of why I think Anne Keefe was so wise, check out the rest of that interview.)

Anne walked away from public life in 1998, when she still was at the top of her game and fame. She didn’t have to. But ever the observant one, she looked around and didn’t want to be part of what she was seeing. Frankly, she was too good for it.

In 2013, I had the chance to spend a little time with Anne at her daughter Mollie’s home, where she had gone to live out her remaining years surrounded by kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids. It was a perfect final chapter, a member of our greatest generation living out her days in a setting that captured a slice of Americana. It was full circle for Anne. In 1976, she had apprehension about “moving from Rochester, where I was somebody, to St. Louis, where I was nobody.” Well, we know that problem didn’t last long.

But during that 2013 visit, as we watched a 25-year-old episode of Donnybrook that she popped into a VCR (yes, a VCR), she told me that the biggest surprise about returning home to Rochester was that she was still a “somebody.” She was still a celebrity, almost 40 years after leaving town. She was recognized at the store. She was asked to do some interviews. She probably could have returned to the air in her late ’80s.

What a tribute that was to Anne Keefe, a legend in Rochester, a legend in St. Louis.

SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.