Legendary Sacramento Anchor Stan Atkinson Dies at 92
Atkinson reported for KCRA and KOVR as an anchor for nearly 40 years. He retired from local news in 1999.
At one time local paper The Sacramento Bee called him 'the man who owns Sacramento.'
At the age of 25, Atkinson embarked on a career in Sacramento at a station that had just gotten off the ground. It was 1957, and in walked a fresh-faced, youthful man with a tight crew cut. He'd been recruited from a small television station and the owner of KCRA at the time, Gene Kelly, had no idea he'd been hired. Kelly turned on his TV one night and saw the 11 o'clock newscast only to show up in the morning editorial meeting the next day asking 'who in the hell ever hired that damn kid?!'
Instead of firing him, Kelly kept Atkinson, beginning a decades-long relationship between KCRA and Stan Atkinson. They had a newscast in the beginning…it was 10 minutes long. Five of it was sports.
Television news was different in the 1950s. For one, it was sponsored and those sponsors' products showed up on set. The entertainment had a fried pie company. The network's 'Huntley/Brinkley news hour' had Camel cigarettes. And Stan Atkinson had Hostess.
'The floor man would roll in a table that was decorated with open or still packaged Hostess Cinnamon Dainties,' Atkinson described in a 2015 interview. 'And, it was up to me to open a package, pull one out, hold it up, take a bite, and say, Hostess Cinnamon Dainties. I'd say. Got it. Hostess Cinnamon Dainties. I'd take another bite. Get them.'"Atkinson was a principal fundraiser helping to raise money to build the $2.2 million California Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the State Capitol grounds," the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences said on its website.
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