Floyd spent his final professional years as a news anchor for WLS-TV, ABC's Chicago owned-and-operated television station. He retired following the 6 pm broadcast of 2/27/98.

Hardship characterized Floyd Kalber's early years (these details are based on an article that appeared in the alumni newsletter of the Journalism School of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in the spring of 1995; Floyd had spoken to students there the previous December).

Floyd Kalber was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on December 23rd, 1924. His parents were divorced when he was a child, and he and his two brothers were obliged to live in an orphanage before his grandmother reunited the family on her small farm (eight and a half acres) west of Omaha. Financial difficulties plagued the family (these were the depression years) even after Floyd's mother remarried.

Floyd served two years with the Army in the South Pacific. In 1946 he returned to Omaha and enrolled in the journalism department of Creighton University. But he dropped out of college after a semester to work at KGFW radio in Kearney, Nebraska (a station which now includes Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger on its program roster). Slightly short of two years later, he became a sportscaster at a newly-formed radio station in Peoria, Illinois.

Floyd saw television for the first time in 1949 when he went to New York to cover Peoria's Bradley University's efforts in the National Invitational Tournament. Figuring that video was the medium of the future, he quit his job in Kearney and moved back to Omaha where the age of television was about to dawn.

Here's a brief chronology of Floyd Kalber's television career:

1950: KMTV, Omaha, hires 26 year-old Floyd Kalber as its first television newsman. The newsroom has a staff of one. Kalber alernates as on-air talent, control room director and studio production man.

1951: Kalber covers severe flooding in Kansas City. KMTV has no film cameras, so Kalber acquires one from a local detective agency and flies to St. Louis (in a Strategic Air Command jet upon which Kalber somehow hitches a ride). Since KMTV lacks film processing and editing facilities, Kalber somehow persuades rival station WOWT to develop the film stock. KMTV runs the unedited raw footage, the only video of the flood viewers in Omaha saw. In 1984 (on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of KMTV), Floyd recalled, "That was the greatest feeling in the world....We learned what television news was all about. We learned what it could be. And what the fantastic potential of it was: to serve a community, to serve viewers, to educate and to inform---that television news didn't have to be just Union Pacific films and Playhouse 90, and Ed Sullivan and the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts."

1958: Kalber's coverage of the manhunt for mass-murders Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate brings him to the attention of NBC News executives.

1960: Kalber becomes mentor of a new KMTV hire, twenty-year-old Tom Brokaw. (Brokaw's first assignment is to cover the opening day of Omaha's public schools). Brokaw later recalled (when Floyd retired---for good---in 1998), "The newsroom, under the influence and guidance of Mr. Kalber was absolutely politically correct---in Floyd's terms. It was all white. All male. It was all testosterone. It was all conservative. Barry Goldwater got more votes in the KMTV newsroom than he did in Arizona." [Curator's note: Floyd had already moved to Chicago by the time Goldwater ran for the presidency. But it's a good line].

1962: Kalber is hired by WNBQ (later WMAQ-TV), NBC's owned-and-operated television station in Chicago. He initially serves as Midwest correspondent for "NBC Nightly News (these were the days of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley). But within three months, he replaces Alex Dreier as the station's principal news anchor. With weatherman Harry Volkman and commentator Len O'Connor, he moves channel 5's newscasts to the top of the ratings. But after WLS-TV institutes a "happy talk" news format in 1968, channel 5's ratings begin to fall.

1975: Hoping to reverse the ratings trend, WMAQ-TV news director Ed Planer plucks Jane Pauley from an anchor job at WISH in Indianapolis and pairs her with Kalber as an anchor team. Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Coakley visits Pauley in Indianapolis and concludes that "this future dispenser of news to countless Chicagoans knows virtually nothing about Chicago." But the Tribune's Marilynn Preston later characterizes Pauley as "a Breck girl with brains." Channel 5's "News Center 5" concept (rolled out in September) flounders. (The station promoted the new news set ("Come See What We've Built!") but not the talent). NBC researchers in New York determine that not one WMAQ-TV reporter has estsblished an identity in the market. Harry Volkman, Len O'Connor, anchor Jim Ruddle, reporter Peter Nolan and documentary producer Scott Craig jump ship. Ed Planer fires reporter Keith Klein and closes down the Northwest Indiana bureau.

1976: In May, NBC announces that Kalber will move to New York to become newsreader for the Today Show (Kalber would later refer to the "Today" years as "horrendous"). Ed Planer hires Ron Hunter to replace him. Jane Pauley takes up a post at the Today Show in October. Back at WMAQ-TV, news Director Sheldon Hoffman (who has replaced Ed Planer) says that "the field is open" for Ms. Pauley's successor. Kalber remains with the "Today Show" for three and a half years, then moves to NBC Special Projects. On the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Floyd observed, "I think we all know we all know what has happened to local television news all over the country. I think that there are a lot of us in electronic journalism, a lot of you, who join with me in hoping that it will return to what it once was. I think it will."

1981: Kalber retires from NBC.

1984: Hoping to boost sagging ratings, WLS-TV lures Kalber out of retirement to anchor its 6 PM newscast.

1998: Kalber retires from WLS-TV at the end of February.

2004: Floyd Kalber dies on May 13th at the age of 79.