Joe Moore has announced his retirement from Panama City, FL, NBC affiliate WJHG.
Moore has worked at the station for 43 years. According to the station he has gained a reputation as being a “solid, non sensational journalist.”
Before coming to WJHG in 1971, Moore worked in radio. During his tenure at WJHG, he worked as news director, VP of news and acting station manager. He currently anchors the noon and 5:00 p.m. news.
Click here to see the page the station has put up with stories about Moore. He spoke to WJHG about his memories of working in live TV:
And on live T.V.–anything could and did happen. “We didn’t have a teleprompter then — we had the scripts.. you know the 6 part scripts that everyone in the studio and control room had.
But then we got to the teleprompter stage a little bit later and we’ve had some fun with the prompter. “We had the kind of assembly line prompter that the paper scripts would go on there and the camera would shoot down and all of the sudden something would show up. A Tom Hipps cartoon or some wild script that wouldn’t really think would be appropriate for the news you’d be sitting there reading and then all of the sudden it would come up ooooohhh here we go.”
“We used to have the old podiums and you’d start reading the news and you find somebody rubbing your knee and it was Tom and he was under the podium.”
“All of the sudden I hear this putt, putt, putt. Tom had an old car, a comet that was rusted out, and it came running through the garage door there and it came right towards me, and I broke up. Here I was trying to be very serious about somebody had just died in Pembroke Pines and this car was coming toward me, and nobody could see it.”
“Instead of Tom getting in trouble, it was my fault.”Bill Hudson, “So finally Ray Holloway, who was our station manager at the time, God Rest His Soul, He had to do memos to everybody saying no matter what it takes, don’t allow Tom Hipps to be anywhere near Joe Moore.”
Joe, “Tom and I joked so much that we were forbidden from working with each other. He could not come in the studio if I was in the studio, and if he was still alive he’d tell you. That’s right Moore. I had a lot of fun poking fun with you.”
Back in the early days, Joe had a very different look which changed dramatically through the years, including the time he got a perm.
Joe helped kick start the careers of many aspiring journalists – like Fox News Anchor Shepard Smith and many, many others.