Credit More OU Golf Champs

I truly enjoy Jay Upchurch’s work and especially the Sooner Magazine article about Anthony Kim [“Breakout Season,“ Fall 2008]! If he can steer clear of the serious distractions available to PGA tour players, he can be a long-term, phenomenal success.

Buried in the last column of your article was an almost insignificant error. The Sooners won the 1957 Big Seven golf title, and I won the medalist honor at the Conference Tournament in Lincoln, Nebraska, as a sophomore. To say the least, it was not an event to hold high in the record books. Three days where the rain totaled over nine inches, the temperature never got over 42, and the scores reflected the conditions. I remember shooting even par the final round with nine birdies on the card to win by several strokes. We won the tournament primarily because we knew better how to play in adverse conditions. We made it to the final team round of the NCAA that year at the Broadmoor.

I have jokingly been introduced as the “Defending Champion of the Big Seven“ several times since then. Not even Charlie Coe owned the title that long!

Editor’s Note: The Big Seven became the Big Eight Conference the following year, 1958, allowing Moore to retire the Big Seven title. The late Charlie Coe, one of the legendary names in University of Oklahoma golf, was OU’s first Big Seven medalist in 1948, having previously won the Big Six title in 1946, then took the NCAA championship in 1952. Others omitted from Sooner Magazine’s list of conference medalists were Robert O. Smith (1962) and Skip Graham (1969).

Nurses Lived on HSC Campus

The editorial in Fall 2008 mentioned “the construction of the first on-campus housing“ at the Health Science Center. That is not strictly accurate. My tour of the nursing program in the Spring of 1950 included a tour of the nursing dormitory on Phillips, south of Old Main.

When I returned after finishing a year and summer on the OU campus, that building was housing for interns and residents, and a new building for nursing had been built between Old Main and Children’s Hospital.

Classrooms were on the bottom floor, and two top floors were mandatory housing for nursing students, complete with house mothers and curfews.

Student nurses could sunbathe on the roof, and the construction workers across the street, building the VA hospital, were eventually high enough to enjoy the sight. This newest building was the first demolished when the present campus construction was begun.

I was one of the three first “pilot“ students in the new Bachelor of Science degree program, piggy-backed onto the three-year diploma program. I was also hired a year after graduation as assistant to Marie Mink in obstetrics, but was summarily reassigned to assist Nellie Farmer in pediatrics before I even started. Such are the turning points in life. Still wishing I had been assertive enough to say, “No.“

Little Station, Big Results

I have really enjoyed seeing the notes about KUVY and felt a need to contribute one more. I was a student there from 1949-1952 and enjoyed the wonderful training and experience I had there. The opportunity to actually broadcast play-by-play championship major college sports on that radio station that reached the dormitories on campus was instrumental in the success I attained in the broadcast field. Mike Treps and I actually printed and hand-delivered circulars to those dorms promoting our broadcasts of the Sooner sports, everything from football to wrestling.

I am retired now, after 30 years of major league baseball broadcasting for the Oakland A’s, NBC-TV and TVS networks. After graduating from OU, I worked my way up from a small station in Duncan, Oklahoma, to the University of Kansas Sports Network and WDAF, Kansas City, doing Big 8 basketball and football, before the Kansas City Athletics announcer job. I have said many times that without the training opportunity that KUVY and OU gave me, none of it would have happened. The management classes I took in the broadcast field helped me in my ownership of several radio stations through the years.

Another name that has not surfaced in the stories is Leonard Morton, who was a product of KUVY, and who spent years as a TV sportscaster in Tulsa.

It has been fun reading about the big part a little station played in so many careers. Thanks for keeping it alive.

Another Satisfied Customer

I was news director of KUVY in the 1964-65 academic year, which included coverage of the presidential election and a chance to be in the press area when President Johnson came to Oklahoma City.

Although I did not pursue a career in journalism, Dr. Sherman Lawton directed me toward his other profession, archaeology, which I did pursue. But the KUVY time trained me in public speaking, something that has done me well in many public lectures over the years.