OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – Producing and collecting, Gene Allen’s long life includes lots of both.
After a long career shooting film and video, writing copy, and working on political campaigns, he retired to continue the practice in long form.
“I decided I was going to start doing some real writing,” he laughs.
He’d written three books, but one subject kept coming back to his own career beginnings, first writing radio copy, then seeing that first television flicker in a Stillwater store window.
“I remember thinking, ‘this is what I want to do,’” he says.
Gene still has the letter he wrote to land a job with WKY in 1950.
He went quickly from writing radio scripts to TV, describing pictures for the first time, shooting news footage, then documentaries with the best of what E.K. Gaylord (then the station owner) could muster at Oklahoma’s first TV station.
Allen insists, “He made it possible for us to have the best equipment and to hire the best people.”
“You’d come in one day and probably do something no one had ever done before.”
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Allen had two turns at WKY-TV.
His historical documentaries on subjects like the 101 Ranch and on earlier photographers like Benny Kent took him across the state.
He didn’t have to convince his guest how fun that could be.
“It was a great time,” he sighs. “It was a really great time.”
Allen started thinking about writing this book a decade ago.
The stories took a while to gather, then photographs, and funding, but ‘The Vision and the Dream’ follows what he witnessed 75 years ago when the world suddenly had moving pictures on a screen people could purchase.
TV changed everything for him, and for us too.
The Oklahoma History Museum is officially opening an exhibit on the first years of Oklahoma television July 25, 2024.
Gene Allen will be at the opening reception to sign copies of his book ‘The Vision and the Dream: WKY Comes to Oklahoma’.
For more information go to okhistory.org.
Great State is sponsored by Oklahoma Proton Center
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