KCCI news kingpin Kevin Cooney prepares to sign off

Everything except his hair suggested that Kevin Cooney was destined for the news business.

Cooney, 63, retires Nov. 24 after 33 years as KCCI-TV's anchorman and a lifetime in journalism. When he joined the Channel 8 anchor desk in 1982 — an era when ESPN, CNN and MTV were mere fledgling cable networks — he delivered the news alongside the two men, Paul Rhoades and Russ Van Dyke, who had pioneered the role in 1955 at forerunner KRNT.

As Cooney hands down his job to colleague Steve Karlin, he leaves a business built around not so much the shared ritual of the 10 p.m. newscast but that phone in all our hands.

"It's like stepping into a huge pair of shoes," Karlin, with 27 years at KCCI, said of succeeding Cooney. "And I don't mean clown shoes."

Cooney with his perennially top-rated newscast has been everything to Des Moines that Will Farrell's fictional "Anchorman" character Ron Burgundy is not: steady, rooted, genuine, warm, unflappable.

Although they're both funny.

Cooney is situated near the entrance in the recently refurbished KCCI newsroom. So he taped a paper "receptionist" sign to the side of his desk.

The face of KCCI, indeed.

Cooney's wife and fellow broadcaster, Mollie, first met him when she sat behind him in one of Jack Shelley's journalism classes at Iowa State University in Ames.

"His hair was so curly and kinky," she said. "It didn't grow long, it grew out. All I saw was this huge head of hair. That was my first impression of him. I couldn't see the teacher."

Cooney's hair could be its own independent, unruly organism; it never seems to look the same in any two photos. Even David Letterman in 1999 poked fun at the anchor's mop.

That a male anchor would be so thoroughly critiqued on his coiffure delighted Stacey Horst, Cooney's co-anchor for the last decade,

"All the women in the newsroom thought, 'Finally!' Somebody will know what that's like," she said.

Cooney announced his retirement in May as he sat next to Horst and struggled not to choke up.

"I've had the privilege of being in your living room for 33 years," he told viewers.

Cooney's 'deep, deep roots'

What most of his audience doesn't realize is the depth of Cooney's family ties in journalism — including newspaper journalism — in Des Moines.

"He's just so plugged into this community," said his news director and former co-anchor, Dave Busiek, who has been shoulder to shoulder with Cooney for decades. "Grew up in Beaverdale. Went to Holy Trinity. Dowling. Iowa State. He's just got deep, deep roots in this community. He's got a huge family. His brother's got a bar. He finds out stuff. People tell him stuff."

Both his parents, he and two of his five siblings all worked in some capacity at The Register & Tribune (the "RNT" in KRNT).

His late mother, Pat, was the first woman hired on the newspaper's copy desk.

His dad, Jim, 94, was longtime city editor for the afternoon Tribune and "keeps me honest to this day in terms of grammar and editing," Cooney said.

"In high school he was a pretty loquacious kid," Jim said of his son.

As a copy boy, Cooney grabbed news off the wires — tore sheets of paper from the teletype machine, story by story — and distributed them to the appropriate editors.

The father never expected his son to follow in his footsteps at the newspaper.

"He was lucky that he got into TV when he did," Jim said.

Cooney became enchanted with TV as an 8- or 9-year-old Boy Scout on a tour of the KRNT studios. He got a peek behind the scenes of Bill Riley's "Variety Theater."

"It literally was like pulling back the curtain," he said.

Cooney convinced his dad that despite the household's TV blackout during Lent that the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan" qualified as a news event

In the wake of the 1965 floods a young Cooney filed his first news story.

"We had gotten out of school to sandbag, and I took my camera with me to take pictures," he said. "Now why would a sixth-grader take a camera?"

In seventh grade Cooney and a classmate wrote a play for Holy Trinity's graduating eighth grade in which they portrayed newsmen Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

Cooney graduated from Dowling High School in 1970 and four years later from Iowa State.

Longtime KCCI photojournalist Cortney Kintzer was 16 years old in 1975 when he and his 8-millimeter camera beat rookie newsman Cooney to a fire across the street from Terrace Hill. Kintzer captured not only of the blaze but also classic footage of Cooney in action.

From anchor to 'Bapa'

From the start Cooney "always found it much more interesting to be on the sidelines," he said, "to be an observer."

Retirement will let the anchor ease back to enjoy a view from the metaphorical bleachers, where he can embrace his role as "Bapa" to grandchildren Marshall, 2, and Evy, nearly 4.

Cooney's wife and fellow broadcaster, Mollie ("Gollie" to the grandkids), switched to a daytime, part-time schedule more than 30 years ago. The couple made a brief foray to San Jose, Calif., to work before returning in 1982. They got married in 1980 in Des Moines and have raised three children.

The couple's son, Alex, 31, is a photographer. He and his wife, KCCI producer-turned-teacher HIllari, are Evy and Marshall's parents. Daughter Meredith is an attorney in Seattle. Liz is program director for a YMCA in Northfield, Minn.

"It's kind of like somebody going off the high dive," Mollie said of retirement. "I'll let him go first and see how he lands."

Cooney's bow more or less signals a generational shift in the notoriously stable Des Moines TV news market. Former WHO-HD anchor John Bachman, who led his final broadcast in November 2012 after 40 years, already has tested the retirement waters.

I caught up with him on the phone — where else? — on the golf course in Florida, where he had just swung a 79.

Bachman also has taken up painting.

"I do miss covering the political side," he admitted.

But he prefers his steady diet of golf, good fiction and playtime with the grandkids.

The thing that most news junkies, let alone news anchors, have in common, Bachman observed, is their unflagging curiosity about everyday life.

"You have time to really follow that curiosity" in retirement, he said.

Besides golf and grandkids, Cooney loves bicycling.

He can watch his beloved Chicago White Sox.

But he's also going to give himself time to figure out what he wants to do next.

Floodwaters, presidents and fatherhood

Unless Cooney is an adept con artist, it has been rather obvious that he exudes love for his work.

And remarkably still does: In an industry renowned for grinding down journalists into bitter cynics, Cooney has maintained his enthusiasm. He still talks about the day's headlines with genuine zeal.

Appropriately enough, one of his favorite jobs beyond the anchor desk was supervising KCCI's newsroom interns for about six years.

"You can be a newspaper writer and be the meanest son of a bitch in the whole world and nobody knows it," said Michael Gartner, the former Register editor and NBC News president who owns the Iowa Cubs and has known many Cooneys. "But it comes through on television."

As KCCI producer Chris Ludlow put it: "Kevin's different, in the sense that he really digs it."

Cooney did cultivate a reputation for waltzing onto the new set at the last minute.

"It kind of adds to that urgency," he smiled.

But for colleague Cynthia Fodor, Cooney has been that literal anchor.

"Sitting next to Kevin, no matter what would happen," she said, "he could take the reins and finish your sentences for you as a co-anchor and just guide you through a show and help make it easy for you even when all hell was breaking loose around you — which most people don't see."

Highlights among the chaos of breaking news included the return of hostages Terry Anderson (an Iowa State classmate) and Tom Sutherland from captivity in Lebanon.

Cooney's initial broadcast during the floods of 1993, as Des Moines lost its drinking water, stretched off and on for some 14 hours.

"There's a little bit of joy there," Karlin explained of Cooney in those crucial moments, "because you're doing what you're charged to do in this profession."

In a crisis the anchor is most fully and immediately in service to his or her community.

Cooney's interviews with presidents included a session with President Clinton in the White House on the day (April 19, 1995) of the Oklahoma City bombing.

In service to the headlines Cooney kept a nighttime work shift that saw him bop home for an hour or two in the evenings to enjoy a quick dinner or to catch a school play or swim meet. He was in everybody's living room but his own.

Son Alex once remarked to his parents that he was the only one in the family who didn't wear makeup.

Bapa, sans makeup, now will have most evenings at home. Mollie is keeping a wary eye on the TV remote, unsure she wants to cede control.

"This crazy business allows you to do things and go places and meet people that you otherwise wouldn't have maybe access or opportunity," Cooney mused.

Then he elaborated on his point with a theoretical pitch: "If you talked to some 20-year-old kid and said, 'Hey, I've got a deal for you. I've got a job where you might not make very much money, but here's what you're going to do and here's where you're going to go.

"How many 20-year-old kids wouldn't say, 'Damn, you know what, I could do that for a couple years.'

"And then it's like, crap, you're hooked on it."

And in that moment you realize that even at the close of his career, Cooney still sees the TV news business through the eyes of a 20-year-old.

That may not be a news flash, but it still feels reassuring and inspiring to this viewer.

Note: This column has been corrected to indicate that Paul Rhoades, not Jack Shelley, was one of the first anchors at KRNT. Also, Kevin and Mollie Cooney got married in Des Moines.