Television, the Hamer Way
Father-son tandem of Dave Hamer and Roger Hamer own combined 76 years in the TV news industry
©by Leo Adam Biga
Appearing in the June 2019 edition of the New Horizons
Outside of Mike and Chris Wallace, there may not be another father-son tandem in broadcast journalism history with the pedigree and longevity of Omaha’s own Dave and Roger Hamer.
Retired television newsman Dave Hamer. 89. enjoyed a 1953 to 1991 career distinguished by many firsts. He was the first journalist to work at all three major Omaha network affiliates. He was America’s first local TV journalist to file stories from Vietnam. He was the first civilian reporter to fly a mission with the U.S. Air Force’s airborne command and control center, Looking Glass.
He covered the horror and hysteria of the Starkweather murder spree. As a street reporter-photographer, he covered storms, accidents, riots, political rallies and athletic events. He wrote-produced newscasts and documentaries, He captured the return to Omaha Beach of a Heartland veteran who survived D-Day. He gave back to his profession as president of the Omaha Press Club, the Nebraska News Photographers Association and the National Press Photographers Association. He taught TV news at UNO and co-chaired the annual News Video Workshop at the University of Oklahoma.
He’s been honored for his contributions to the field as an inductee in the Omaha Press Club’s Journalists of Excellence Hall of Fame and the Nebraska Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame.
Roger Hamer, 61, never intended following the family trade yet his 38-year TV news career now equals that of his father, Roger creates packages that see him do photography, reporting, editing. He also produces. He succeeded his father as a teacher at UNO. He, too..has earned much peer recognition for his work, including an Edward R. Murrow Award. He is well on his way to joining his father as a lifetime achievement honoree.
They have a combined 76 years in the business. Their professional paths formally intersected once, in 1991, when Roger, who began at KMTV, joined WOWT, where Dave worked his final decade. Roger is still there today.
“I kind of backed into the business. He never pressured me,” Roger said of his father.
“I don’t think I ever tried to talk you out of it either,” Dave told hm. “No, you never did,” Roger replied.
“i’ve been fortunate to always be surrounded by smart people very good at what they do. Of course, this guy,” Roger said, indicating his father, “helped me a lot when I was starting out. We would have lunch breaks in the edit booths at 3 (KMTV) and 6 (WOWT). I’d show him tapes and he’d critique them. We’d talk how to do stories. I learned a lot that way. He let me pick his brain. He was always generous in dealing with me.”
Then there came the workshop his father put on for newcomers and veterans.
“You don’t know how you’re going to act when your dad pops your videotape in and plays it in front of all these people and comments on it,” Roger recalled. “I hoped he was going to be as nice as he was when we were alone in the edit booths. But it was something along the lines of, ‘If this guy came in and wanted a job, I’d tell him to sell shoes,’ It was like the air in a balloon going out.
“But that was the best thing that could have happened because you need a kick in the pants now and then. The effort wasn’t there that he expected and that inspired me. It gave me a clue I could do better.”
By the time Roger established himself, TV technology transitioned from film to video. It’s since gone to satellite uplinks and digital streaming.
“Now he’s shooting live shots alone with a tiny camera,” Dave marveled.
“No truck, no cables, no nothing,” Roger confirmed.
“As long as you’re in range of a cell tower, you can send a live picture anywhere,” Dave said, “It staggers my imagination.”
“There’s an app on my phone called TVU Anywhere,” Roger said. “All I have to do is to call into the station. They pull me up – and we’re on. It’s instantaneous.”
“I try to avoid saying, I wish we had that back when I was in TV,” Dave said, “but I do wish we had that. But what goes along with this is that you’re under more pressure.”
“Yeah,” Roger said, “the technology is phenomenal, but it’s a blessing and a curse. The blessing is you can be live in a moment. The curse is the technology far exceeds our human capability of gathering information.”
Then there’s the rabbit hole of Google search results.
“With this avalanche of information you have access to, it can be overwhelming,” Roger said. “You have to determine when to stop because information overload can set in. There comes a point when you have to pull back and say, Okay, I know what I need to know.”
Roger’s grateful to have learned from a master like his father. “He’s a pioneer.”
A Wayne, Nebraska native, Dave Hamer segued from taking still photos in his hometown to stringing for KVTV in Sioux City. The eye he developed for composing portraits helped him transition to moving images.
A generation later his son Roger went from taking photos for the UNO Gateway and Papillion Times to breaking in at KMTV.
“The difficult part of going into motion (photography) was coming up with a closer,” Dave said. “You’ve told the story, but you have to have something at the end to cap it. You need the exclamation point.”
“Even now I struggle with closes.” Roger acknowledged.
They both love storytelling
“Every story’s got to have a beginning, middle and end. That’s utmost in television news,” Dave said. “You don’t just leave it hanging out there. I don’t think anybody ever told me how to do that. I just naturally fell into it.”
Both learned to cut in the camera.
Telling a story you pitched is preferred. “I had, and I think Roger has, the freedom to go to the front office and say, ‘Hey, this is a helluva story, We ought to do it.'”
Any excuse to get out of the newsroom.
“The daily routines never appealed that much to me,” Dave said. Same for Roger, who likes being “free from a desk” and “someone looking over my shoulder.”
Creativity and ineginuity come in handy on assignment.
“You run into situations you didn’t expect,” Dave said, “and you have to think on your feet, improvise and go with the flow. We always used to say, Have in mind where the story’s going to go but don’t be locked in because things will change. You’ll find better stuff than you imagined.”
When revisiting perennials, such as the winter’s first snowfall or spring flooding, Roger said, “the challenge is to make it different from the story before or different from what your competition’s doing.”
“That’s the fun part of it.”
Then there’s following your instincts and, as Dave said, “making your own luck” by being where the action’s at and seeing-capturing what’s happening around you.
The year Roger was born, 1957, his father helped launch Omaha’s KETV on the air.
“I had been there only a week,” Dave said. “There were only four of us in the news department. Six days a week were the norm. Sometimes Sunday, too, It was a challenge and great responsibility, but also fun. You had to do everything – shoot it, write it, maybe voice it.”
He left KETV for KMTV, where he worked the bulk of his career and where his colleagues included future network stars Floyd Kalber and Tom Brokaw.
“What his generation did set the groundwork for what we do today,” Roger said admiringly. “The whole idea of visual storytelling – of stories that are concise, make sense, have impact, elicit emotion and are accurate.
“Today, I think we’ve lost a little bit of that desire to find out as much as we can and make it as accurate as possible. In the rush to get things on the air NOW, we don’t always have the information to back it up exactly.”
“That’s a helluva challenge.” said Dave.
Adding to it is an ever more competitive environment.
“Now,” Roger said, “it’s Channel 7 tweeted this or Channel 3 tweeted that. Personally, I don’t care because I live by what I learned from old pros Steve Murphy and Mark Gautier – ‘I don’t care about being first, I care about being right.’ That doesn’t seem to exist like it used to.
“It’s a matter of feeding the beast” – otherwise known as the 24/7 news cycle. “You have to do all this social media stuff my father’s generation didn’t have to worry about or deal with.”
When Dave Hamer started, there were just two newscasts per day. “and even with that and the technology being so much slower,” he recalled, “we were still pressed for time.” “I wrote for nine years the six and ten o’clock newscasts on Channel 3. You barely got six o’clock on the air before you started writing the ten o’clock. You were always up to the wire.”
Early news pioneers didn’t have access to the vast amounts of video-on-demand content Roger Hamer and his colleagues have at the ready on devices.
“It would take us three or four days,” Dave said.
Today’s constant content demands and deadlines can be exhausting.
“You just don’t have the longevity of people in the field anymore,” Roger said. “People get burned out.”
Professionals with his equivalent experience in the biz, are “getting fewer and fewer,” he said, “and it bothers me because I don’t see the next wave of lifers coming up – and I wonder about that.”
Oddities and happy accidents are bound to happen over careers as long as the Hamers. Once. Roger shot news footage of a pileup on an ice-covered section of Leavenworth Street south of downtown. “We sent it out to NBC,” he said. A couple weeks later the video showed up in an SNL skit.
“‘They pirated my video for entertainment purposes. It took a couple months, but I got 750 bucks out of them and gave them a tongue-lashing. How do you know people didn’t die in that crash? That blurring of the line between entertainment and news shouldn’t happen. Once you send video somewhere you don’t have any control over what happens to it. But even if i don’t send it, somebody else will. Many different people have access to my video than ever before.”
Standard protocol is for networks to ask local affiliates to provide video.
“Sometimes it was a bother because I’d be working on my piece for the six o’clock and they’d want something right now,” Dave said. “You would do everything you could to get it there.”
“It just may not be right now,” Roger said. “I’m not going to send it to them until we air it. My obligation is to my station first.”
Dave once fielded an NBC request for footage of a blizzard raging in Nebraska. They needed about a minute’s worth. He dutifully shot the storm.
“The network’s Huntley-Brinkley newscast switched to Omaha live. I was on the phone with the producer from New York. He told us when to roll the film. We’d built it logically to show the storm getting worse and worse. Well, the last shot came up and the film broke. We were on live coast-to-coast and I was like, Oh, my God. The producer comes on and says, ‘Great job, Omaha, Man. what a storm – I couldn’t see anything in that last shot.’ We never told him.”
Memorably, Dave Hamer scooped the networks with his 1962 Vietnam reporting.
“The French had been kicked out in 1954. There was very little American involvement until about ’61 when we sent military advisers over. In April ’62 the first Nebraskan was killed in Vietnam – Army Special Forces Sergeant Wayne Marchand from Plattsmouth. He was wounded and captured in a firelight with the Viet Cong, then taken off and killed.
“We ran the wire story on the air. That was all we knew. Our general manager said, ‘What the hell was that all about? How come we’ve got people in – where is that place again? Within a month I was there because the front office said this is a story that should be told.”
Hamer and writer-producer Bob Fuller went as a two-man team.
“We did Marchand’s story, but while we were there we covered everything else we could find. We even did stories on Vietnam’s agricultural economy.”
The reporters stuck to a strategy.
“The first thing we did when we got in Saigon was check the overnight police reports for bombings, rocket fire at the airport and such to know what the hell was going on.
“We carried Department of Defense clearance paperwork that we never had to show. We had orders that allowed us to travel on military transport. If we couldn’t get military transport, we did what we could, even going by pedicab for God’s sake. Several times we hired a car with a driver. Sometimes we hired an interpreter. We could go anywhere we wanted. We checked in with the press office in Saigon when we got there and checked out when we left, They didn’t know where we were those three weeks. We were all over the country enmeshed in what was going on every day.”
Hamer and Fuller quickly learned U.S. involvement was larger than reported.
“There were 5,000 Americans in-country.. We went on helicopter support missions. Americans were flying planes and helicopters carrying South Vietnamese troops. The rule was fire only if fired upon,”
The entire western press corps in Vietnam then, he said, consisted of New York Times, AP and UPI correspondents, “and two guys from Omaha.”
“We had the whole story to ourselves. We did four half-hour documentary segments.”
The series was cited for special commendation by the Radio Television Council.
Fast forward three decades when Dave’s last major assignment took him to another war zone to cover Nebraska military personnel in Saudi Arabia.
Over time, he had offers to join the network in Washington DC, New York and Paris, but he and his wife Verla deferred each time. They liked Omaha.
Roger Hamer “tested the waters” in other markets but stayed put.
Father and son “competed” when Dave was at WOWT and Roger at KMTV. They were briefly at WOWT at the same time but never covered a story together.
Roger said there’s much they share in common. “One thing we share is we’re not the story – the people are the story. Nobody wants to see us. They want to see the people living the experience.” They each derive satisfaction, he said, “just knowing that we did a good job and put a good story together.” “You get those four, five, six stories a year where you go, I nailed it. That’s what keeps you going.”
“We show up with a camera and people stop what they’re doing because they know you’re going to tell their story. It’s important to them,” Dave said.
“You have to be genuinely curious and caring and want to be involved in your community, and in telling the stories of its people,” said Roger, who, like his father, is grateful for the many fine collaborators he’s worked with. “It’s wonderful to work with people as passionate as you are and who are dedicated to their craft.”
A love for teaching is something else they share. “I found teaching very rewarding,” Dave said. “The satisfaction of sharing what you know and seeing the light bulb go off is a big part of it,” Roger said.
Not to be forgotten, Roger added, “We’ve both been blessed being married to very strong, supportive women that understood what we do and tolerated it.”
Dave and his late wife Verla were married 61 years. “Verla was interested in what we did and was our best promoter,” he said. The couple lost their other son, Dennis, to a coronary occlusion in 2002.
The quiet-spoken, TV news trailblazer gets choked up talking about family. “I’m very proud of this guy,” he said, clasping Roger’s knee. “Roger is his own man, has made his own reputation. and lives it every day on every story. He earned the Edward R. Murrow Award. I was never even close.”
Roger appreciates what his father’s given him – from leading Scouts canoe trips to being “a great mentor.” “He taught me that if I’m not trying, if I’m not pushing myself, if I’m not putting product out I’m happy with, then it’s time to walk away.”
There may not be a third-generation Hamer in the field “Never say never,” cautioned Dave, a grandfather of two. Meanwhile, Dave writes a newsletter, Window on 53rd Street. he shares with family and friends. Like the man, it’s a warm, witty, sincere, humble take on a life well-lived and a career well-earned.
Though louder and more outspoken than his father, Roger is a mensch among newsmen just like his old man. A passing of the torch has occurred in another way. Where Roger used to be asked, Are you any relation to Dave Hamer?, now Dave is asked, Are you related to Roger Hamer?
“Roger and me reversed roles.” Dave said. “I’m very proud to be asked if I’m related to Roger.”
“I’ve always been proud of my dad, ” Roger said. “He’s my hero.”
Read more of Leo Adam Biga’s work at leoadambiga.com.
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!['I only just now became aware of this fine review of my Alexander Payne book that appeared in a 2014 issue of the Great Plains Quarterly journal. The review is by the noted novelist and short story writer Brent Spencer, who teaches at Creighton University. Thanks, Brent, for your attentive and articulate consideration of my work. Read the review below.
NOTE: I am still hopeful a new edition of my Payne book will come out in the next year or two. it would feature the additon of my extensive writing about Payne's Nebraska. I have a major university press mulling it over now.
Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film—A Reporter’s Perspective, 1998–2012 by @[1690777260:2048:Leo Adam Biga]
Review by Brent Spencer
From: Great Plains Quarterly
Volume 34, Number 2, Spring 2014
In Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film—A Reporter’s Perspective 1998–2012, Leo Adam Biga writes about the major American filmmaker Alexander Payne from the perspective of a fellow townsman. The Omaha reporter began covering Payne from the start of the filmmaker’s career, and in fact, even earlier than that. Long before Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, and Cannes award-winner Nebraska, Biga was instrumental in arranging a local showing of an early (student) film of Payne’s The Passion of Martin. From that moment on, Payne’s filmmaking career took off, with the reporter in hot pursuit.
Biga’s book contains a collection of the journalist’s writings. The approach, which might have proven to be patchwork, instead allows the reader to follow the growth of the artist over time. Young filmmakers often ask how successful filmmakers made it to that point. Biga’s book may be the best answer to this question, at least as far as Payne is concerned. Biga presents the artist from his earliest days as a hometown boy to his first days in Tinseltown as a scuffling outsider to his heyday as an insider working with Hollywood’s brightest stars.
If there is a problem with Biga’s approach, it is that it occasionally leads to redundancy. The pieces were originally written separately, for different publications, and are presented as such. This means that an essay will sometimes cover the same material as a previous one. Some selections were clearly written as announcements of special showings of films. But the occasional drawback of this approach is counterbalanced by the feeling you get that the artist’s career is taking shape right before your eyes, from the showing of a student film in an Omaha storefront theater to a Hollywood premiere.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the book is Biga’s success at getting Payne to speak candidly about every step in the filmmaking process. These detailed insights include the challenges of developing material from conception to script, finding financing, moderating the mayhem of shooting a movie, and undertaking the slow, monk-like work of editing. Biga is clearly a fan (the book comes with an endorsement from Payne himself), but he’s a fan with his eyes wide open.'](https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/t31.0-0/p480x480/11698974_10200574953971575_7380164938074896068_o.jpg)
!['MORE AFRICA TALES MEDIA
I joined @[1619391711:2048:Jamie Fox Nollette] and @[100001709629160:2048:Terence Crawford] for a taping of KETV's "Chronicle" public affairs program with host Rob McCartney. Stay tuned for the date and time when the show will air. Photo courtesy KETV.'](https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/t31.0-8/s720x720/11895041_10200655434463537_2065898640647327480_o.jpg)
!['Pam, having enchilidas tonight with our friends @[584511938:2048:Linda M. Garcia Perez] and @[1567029979:2048:Jose Francisco Garcia]. I couldn't make it. Hoping they send her home with an extra enchilida. Enjoy honey.'](https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtf1/v/t1.0-0/q83/s600x600/11038864_10200740278184577_2799446387615869609_n.jpg?oh=d47ee16d9958b2334f2f82ccc58b1b0b&oe=57115A87)
!['HOMETOWN HERO TERENCE CRAWFORD ON VERGE OF GREATNESS AND BECOMING BOXING'S NEXT SUPERSTAR
When hometown hero and reigning WBO world welterweight champion @[100001709629160:2048:Terence Crawford] takes care of business as expected against challenger Dierry Jean Saturday night (Oct. 24) at the CenturyLink, everything then opens up for him. The scuttlebutt is that he would fight Manny Pacquiao or, should he come out of retirement, Floyd Mayweather, in which case Terence would be fighting for the chance to be boxing's next great superstar. TopRank has already indicated they are looking to hand off the baton of King of Boxing to the right candidate and they are clearly grooming Terence to be that guy.
Anyone who knows Terence understands that he has been preparing for this nearly all his life. Nothing fazes him because he's come through a lot to get here and ever since getting shot in the head back in 2008 he's made boxing, outside of family, his singular focus. And now that he's already gotten this far there is no one and nothing that he will let stand in his way, not if he has anything to say or do about it.
In a way, he really doesn't have anything left to prove, other than showing that he truly belongs among the pantheon of contemporary and perhaps even all-time boxing greats. Only time will tell there. But it does appear he will get his opportunity to make his mark and knowing him he will take full advantage of it.
I have written before how Terence is in a long line of outstanding athletes to come out of North Omaha to do great things at high levels. In terms of boxers from here, he stands alone, with nobody really even close. Among all athletes from North O, I argue that he is the most accomplished in his sport since Bob Gibson dominated for the St. Louis Cardinals in the late 1960s-early 1970s. A case could be made for Gale Sayers as well. In terms of the most beloved, Bud's only close competition is Bob Boozer, Johnny Rodgers and Ahman Green, and maybe Maurtice Ivy.
It has been fascinating to see how in such a short period of time, ever since he won his first title as a lightweight in 2014 and subsequently defended that title twice in Omaha before huge crowds, he has won over such a large cross-section of folks. He has single-handedly resurrected the sport of boxing here and put this town on the national and international boxing map, thus giving this place one more thing to take pride in. And at 28 he may be the best known living Nebraskan now outside of Warren Buffett and Alexander Payne.
Omaha has gotten behind him and his passion for his hometown and for his North O community in a way that I don't think anyone could have predicted. It's very heartwarming to see, He already had a strong team around him in his Team Crawford crew of managers, coaches and trainers and now a whole team of advisers has come on board to help guide him and protect his earnings and to help him realize his vision for the B&B Boxing Academy. At Wednesday's meet-up down at the gym, there was an incredibly diverse mix of people present – B&B members, neighborhood residents, family, friends, movers and shakers and media, of course. Lots and lots of media.
The Omaha World-Herald has reported about Terence's heart for community and others and those are threads I've been writing about for some time. I have helped frame the B&B Boxing Academy story and I traveled with Terence and his close friend and former teacher, @[1619391711:2048:Jamie Fox Nollette] to Uganda and Rwanda, Africa to see first-hand his curiosity about and concern for people in need in the Motherland. I hope to follow more of his journey as time goes by.
Read my extensive reporting and writing about Terence at-
https://leoadambiga.com/tag/terence-crawford/
I will be covering his fight against Jean and so look for my impressions about that fight and many more things about Terence and his ever evolving story in future posts and articles.'](https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/v/t1.0-0/s600x600/12039372_10200852100220058_326535901349247407_n.jpg?oh=f87b25e7d91756b4f2f87d1e4aa00c5d&oe=56D6E1C8)
!['EXCERPT FROM MY UPCOMING NEW STORY ABOUT TERENCE CRAWFORD
IN THE NEXT REVIVE OMAHA MAGAZINE
@[100001709629160:2048:Terence Crawford] cemented his status as King of Omaha Sports Figures by dispatching Dierry Jean in a WBO super lightweight bout on October 24 before 11,000 hometown fans at the CenturyLink Center arena.
Crawford, who's quickly become The People's Champ, imposed his will on the game but overmatched contender from Canada. He dropped Jean three times and had him in serious trouble again when awarded a 10th round technical knockout. The Omaha native carried the fight from the opening bell, using superior boxing skills and decisive height and reach advantages to repeatedly back Jean against the ropes and in the corners, landing nearly at will when pressing the action. The few times Dierry managed an attack, Crawford countered with combination barrages that left the challenger bloodied and bruised.
The end was never in doubt because Crawford was never in trouble. It was just a matter of when Derry would go or when the referee would stop the scheduled 12-rounder.
The event marked another coronation for Crawford, who's gone from a hungry kid just looking for a shot to a mature champion on the cusp of being one of his sport's highest paid big names. Along the way he's captured the hearts and minds of a city he's proud to call his own. From the moment this local hero entered the arena that night amidst entourage members holding aloft his two title belts, the fighter exuded the confidence and star quality associated with sports icons.
In the days before the fight Jean and his manager called out Crawford, vowing to take his lightweight belt to Canada. When Jean trash talked during the bout Crawford first let his fists do the talking before variously chirping back, stomping the canvas and smiling at the crowd as if to say, "I've got this" and "He's mine."
During the HBO interview just after the fight's conclusion Crawford taunted Jean and his manager in the ring with, "Did you get what you were looking for?" The crowd erupted in cheers. He also got a big response when he answered commentator Max Kellerman's question about the source of his fierce fighting nature with, "Where I'm from…" and gestured to friends and family who share the same neighborhood he does. He also expressed love for all the support Omaha gives him. The way he handled everything, from the crowd to the media to Jean, and still took care of business showed a professional athlete with real poise and presence. The more the spotlight shines on him, the more the boxing world discovers he's also a humanitarian with a deep commitment to his community.
At the post-fight press conference, where WBO head Bob Arum sat next to him and all but crowned him the fight organization's next superstar, Crawford was the calm, confident picture of Boxing's Next Big Thing. Crawford's already the toast of this town.
READ THE ENTIRE STORY IN THE NEXT REVIVE OMAHA and
LOOK FOR IT, TOO, ON MY FACEBOOK PAGE MY INSIDE STORIES AND ON MY BLOG, LEOADAMBIGA.COM'](https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtf1/v/t1.0-0/s600x600/12196186_10200877284969661_1134190349754642721_n.jpg?oh=eb5af3b85f8b4377e31320ebef6eb726&oe=5719270E)
!['RANDOM INSPIRATION Got a call out of the blue yesterday afternoon from an 86-year-old man in Omaha. He's a retired Jewish American retailer. He'd just finished reading my November Reader cover story about The Education of a WASP and the segregation issues that plagued Omaha. He just wanted to share how much he enjoyed it and how he felt it needed to be seen by more people. [ 374 more words. ]
https://leoadambiga.com/2015/11/19/random-inspiration'](https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xla1/v/t1.0-0/p480x480/12241543_10200912545611155_3992960899687896090_n.jpg?oh=f67590bc9a3217ec2ebc57dbef468a66&oe=570CFB17)
Leo Adam Biga's My Inside Stories 