I didn’t get it initially.
I’m not a Western New York native, though I should be an honorary member since I feel like one having been here since 1970.
Back then, the Eyewitness News team on WKBW-TV (Channel 7) of anchor Irv Weinstein, weatherman Tom Jolls and sports director Rick Azar were dominating local news as they would for a quarter of a century.
The idea that a short, stocky, bespectacled anchor who used alliterative phrases like “pistol-packing punks” to describe criminals and “Buffalo’s blaze busters” for firefighters could be No. 1 was foreign to a newcomer who grew up on Long Island watching New York City anchors like Bill Beutel, Roger Grimsby and Chuck Scarborough, who all appeared to be right out of Hollywood’s central casting.
It took several years before I understood the connection that the chemistry Channel 7’s long-running anchor team had to the region’s allegiance in what were the halcyon days of local television news.
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People who are now under the age of 40 probably felt last week how I did in the 1970s. They probably had no idea why there was so much nostalgia after Jolls became the last of the legendary trio to die.
![Irv Rick Tom](https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=150%2C111 150w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=200%2C147 200w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=225%2C166 225w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=300%2C221 300w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=400%2C295 400w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=540%2C398 540w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=640%2C472 640w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=750%2C553 750w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=990%2C730 990w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=1035%2C763 1035w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=1200%2C884 1200w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=1333%2C982 1333w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=1476%2C1088 1476w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/ca/dca1c312-057f-11ee-8e83-3be70923d0cf/6481000e69b40.image.jpg?resize=1677%2C1236 2008w)
From left: Irv Weinstein, Rick Azar and Tom Jolls.
Weinstein, who arrived at Channel 7 in 1964, was far from the typical TV news clone. The little guy with glasses successfully survived numerous competitors at WBEN then WIVB-TV (Channel 4) and WGR then WGRZ-TV (Channel 2); changes in the way news is covered; and the lifespan of five Buffalo News TV critics who tried to explain the unexplainable – the reason for Weinstein’s unprecedented ratings success.
Weinstein may have captured the trio’s success best when they were inducted into the Buffalo Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame in 1998.
“I think Rick, Tom and I worked because people felt we were approachable, we were regular guys,” he said. “We were like the people next door. People in Buffalo could relate to us.”
“Essentially, we were the product of another era in broadcasting. Today, people come and go and stations are bought and sold like grocery stores.”
Keith Radford, who co-anchored alongside Weinstein before having the inevitable job of replacing him as WKBW-TV’s main anchor, augmented Weinstein’s sentiment in an interview last week after the death of Jolls in explaining the trio’s success.
“Tom being every mother’s son, Irv kind of the gruff funny guy and Rick was doing the Bills games (as analyst),” said Radford. “How much more popular can you be than being associated with the Bills? It was just the perfect combination that fell into place at the right time in TV news history. Will that ever happen in TV today? No.”
Here are a couple of other things that describe their popularity while also illustrating why their dominance will never happen again:
Back in their dominating day, a local Oldsmobile dealership named a car after Rick Azar in 1975 – the Cutlass Azar.
The Irv Special, named for one of Weinstein’s favorite dishes, is still on the menu at Chef’s restaurant.
And the appeal of the trio, especially Weinstein, was not limited to Buffalo. Weinstein was so popular in Southern Ontario that former “Saturday Night Live” and movie star Mike Myers – who grew up in Toronto – invented a drinking game in which players had to take a sip of Molson beer every time Weinstein said one of his trademark lines about fires and murders.
Myers concluded by joking that there were so many fires and gunbattles one August evening that he almost died of alcohol poisoning.
Myers sent Weinstein an autographed copy of his book “Canada” that had a couple of pages about Myers growing up in Toronto watching Weinstein.
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From left: Rick Azar, Irv Weinstein and Tom Jolls.
While young anchors and reporters these days typically train at journalism schools, Weinstein and Azar dabbled in acting before entering TV, which was often a path to broadcasting back then.
The dapper Azar, who graduated from Canisius College, studied acting in New York and once substituted for Dick Clark as host of “American Bandstand.”
Weinstein’s initial goal was to make it in California as an actor. As a teenager, he skipped college and headed west and met Robert Mitchum through a friend.
“I was totally speechless,” Weinstein recalled in a 1983 interview. He finally asked Mitchum how he could get into the movies. Mitchum said he was having trouble staying in the business himself and couldn’t offer any good advice.
Believe it or not, once upon a time even the bashful Jolls, who many people call the nicest man they have ever met in broadcasting, played a psychopath who killed an old lady in the Lockport Little Theater production of “Night Must Fall.” Talk about miscasting.
How genuine was Jolls? He was the rare TV performer who tried dying his hair to hide the gray, quickly decided it looked phony and stopped it.
Local TV anchors – along with the Bills and Buffalo Sabres – remain celebrities in town. WIVB’s Jacquie Walker and Don Postles have been on local television news longer than Channel 7’s trio. WGRZ-TV’s Maryalice Demler is about to celebrate her 30th anniversary at the NBC affiliate. Her co-anchor, Scott Levin, has been at the station for 25 years.
They – and Radford, who is retired – all are legends or approaching legendary status and still are rewarded for their longevity as their stations battle for news supremacy.
But with so many more choices and ways to get news, audiences today are a fraction of what they were in Channel 7’s heyday.
As popular as the current anchors are, I’m sure they understand that none of them likely will ever have a car or a restaurant meal named after them or inspire a drinking game.