Kevin Cooney to retire: 'What you see is what you get'

After Kevin Cooney signed off the air, the staff gathered outside the hot lights shining on the anchor desk and gave him a big round of applause. For 33 years as anchor for KCCI-TV, Cooney has been the nice Iowa guy that came into living rooms through supper and cold nights and every crisis known to a city.

He announced his retirement on the 6 p.m. newscast Tuesday, right before the weather, a prime spot for Iowans.

"I've had the privilege of being in your living room for 33 years," he said, then had an uncharacteristic catch in his voice and a few seconds of dead air before he continued. "I'm going to be leaving the anchor desk in November."

His co-anchor Stacey Horst's voice broke, too: "You are a class act," she said. "You are a friend. You are a safe harbor. What you have given Iowa over the years is just immeasurable."

Then Cooney announced his replacement on the evening anchor desk: longtime reporter and anchor Steve Karlin, who was teary-eyed afterward.

"Kevin is the rock," Karlin said. "The term 'anchor' comes about because of guys like Kevin. You talk about an anchor. Kevin Cooney is an anchor. He's the main pillar that has held up this news department. They are big shoes to fill."

Later, after the set had cleared, Cooney said in an interview that he always recognized that it was a very special medium, being a part of Iowan's evenings.

He recalled advice from a former TV news anchor: Imagine you are talking to your wife. "I always kept that in the back of my mind," he said.

Cooney's calm delivery, high-pitched lilt at the end of a sentence, and neighborly, round-faced appearance played well to Iowans at 6 and 10 p.m.

"What you see is what you get with Kevin," said KCCI news director Dave Busiek, who once sat at the anchor desk with Cooney before directing his efforts the last 26 years. "The person you meet at the produce aisle of your grocery is the same as the one in here. He's got his feet on the ground and his head on straight."

Cooney always wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father Jim and mother Pat, both journalists with the Des Moines Register and Tribune. He joined the station in 1969 in high school, working on the production crew and later in sports before joining the station full time in 1974 after graduating from Iowa State University.

He left for the only time in 1980 for a two-year stint at KNTV in San Jose, Calif., with fiancé Mollie Smith before they returned to Iowa. Kevin and Mollie Cooney married and had three children.

"It was my hometown, and this was a really special place to work," Kevin Cooney said. "It really is like a family."

Central Iowa viewers watched the world — and his hair — change for more than three decades. In 1999, his curly mop was spoofed on "Late Show with David Letterman" on a segment on television news people with questionable hairstyles.

"I looked like I was from the cast of 'Hair,' " he said.

Iowa viewers must have looked beyond the hair, even as it tamed in later years. KCCI was consistently the local TV evening news ratings leader in Des Moines during Cooney's tenure. In polls and surveys by local media, viewers often named him as their favorite anchor.

It was his reporting chops and smarts that gained viewer trust, his colleagues said.

Karlin said no one covered election night better. And Cooney said politics was his passion. It's what his parents talked about at night over dinner when he was a kid.

He got amped up for the Iowa caucuses. He moderated debates, interviewed candidates. He covered the inaugurations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, and interviewed the latter aboard Air Force One. He also interviewed Clinton just hours after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and Barack Obama at the White House in 2013.

The interview with Clinton right after the president addressed a news conference set the tone for the bombing coverage that day, he said, bringing out the emotion in Clinton for the lives lost.

Cooney covered the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon in 1993, which included former Iowa State University students Thomas Sutherland and Terry Anderson. During a news conference, Anderson recognized Cooney from his days at ISU and the TV station and hugged him on camera.

But what he comes back to often is the flood of 1993 in Des Moines. There was no water in the city and he was doing the best to get information out to the public at times using a very crude version of an early cellular phone with a microphone pushed to its mouthpiece on air to interview city officials.

"That was basic TV," Cooney said, harkening back to the days when he read typewritten copy. "It was the classic moment of serving the public.

"But I never thought I would be telling people how to manually flush their toilets."

There were embarrassing moments, and Cooney paused for a moment of humility to recall which one to tell, he said, because there were so many.

One night as a young reporter, he got a call just before the newscast was to end that a well-known local judge had died. The man on the phone told him he was the coroner. Cooney called him back to confirm it and the line was busy and deadline was zooming in fast. He assumed the coroner was calling others. With minutes to spare, he raced the information to the desk and it was read on air.

"Never assume," Cooney said, laughing now.

It was a prank. The judge later called and told him he was having a party at the time and folks were showing up with casseroles, shocked to see the judge answer the door. Every time after that, Cooney and the judge would see each other and break out laughing.

The balance of his career was much more successful. In 1999, Cooney won the Jack Shelley Award from the Iowa Broadcast News Association, for his contributions to broadcast journalism in Iowa, and in 1994 won the James Schwartz Award for Distinguished Service to Journalism from Iowa State University. He won an Emmy in 2007 for feature reporting, saying he always loved to tell the stories of everyday people.

But times have changed in the media. He often wondered how many already knew what he was reporting before he said it on air, such is the new pace of information online. But what traditional media can still offer is that confirmation and context of facts, he said.

It was time to retire, Cooney said, not because he was tired of the pace or the changes, or because he didn't love the job. He still loves it, the combination of flexing your creative and curiosity muscles at once. But he worked nights for 40 years. He joked: "Did you know they show movies at night?"

He also joked that he often told people he did this job because he didn't know what he wanted to do when he grew up.

"I found out what I want to do when I grow up — and that is retire."