The death of Murphy Martin, the former Channel 8 anchor and Texas Stadium announcer, is one of those events that remind an old-timer like me of how irrevocably Dallas has changed from the city that shaped me as a teen and young adult. When Martin was dispensing the news at 6 and 10 with Bob Gooding, Dale Milford (soon to become a congressman) on weather and sports guy Verne Lundquist (soon to move on to bigger and better things, and to forget that he ever hosted "Bowling for Dollars" from Grand Prairie), Channel 8 was mired in third place in the ratings, and had been forever.
It was a time when Dallas and Fort Worth seemed like truly separate places — before D/FW Airport, before the word "metroplex" — that had been forced into a metropolitan area marriage by demographic bureaucrats in the Census Bureau. You could see undeveloped countryside in traveling between the two cities. And in that environment, there were two Dallas stations, Channels 4 and 8, and two Fort Worth stations, 5 and 11. To me, watching Channel 5, by far the market leader because it played to an audience in the far-flung rural counties, was like tuning in the news from a station in Waco. It just didn’t seem to care about Dallas. And Channel 11 was better known for Icky Twerp, the host of "Slam Bang Theater," and endless reruns of ’50s TV shows. I’m not even sure it had a news division.
In Dallas, the station to watch was Channel 4, led by the very serious Eddie Barker. (And later added a glamour factor with Judy Jordan, the first woman to anchor a major newscast in the market.) Channel 4 was affiliated with CBS then, and CBS was the national ratings leader. Channel 8, then as now, was an ABC affiliate and didn’t have the audience, but Gooding, Martin, Lundquist, etc., kept trying. Channel 8 didn’t become a player until the mid-1970s, when the unlikely pairing of Tracy Rowlett and Iola Johnson and news judgment of Marty Haag propelled them from third to first.
By that time, Murphy Martin, though, had moved on. I’ll always associate his voice with visits to Texas Stadium. It seems appropriate that now that he’s gone, that the stadium itself won’t be around much longer.
