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Philly news veterans remember Larry King as a civil, ‘everyman’ interviewer who should be emulated

“He was a product of a different era when the role of a talk show host was to be a conversationalist and not a practitioner of the incendiary and the divisive,” Michael Smerconish wrote.

Larry King answers reporters' question at a press conference for Seoul Digital Forum in Seoul, South Korea, in this May 2011 photo. King, who interviewed presidents, movie stars and ordinary Joes during a half-century in broadcasting, has died at age 87 in Los Angeles.
Larry King answers reporters' question at a press conference for Seoul Digital Forum in Seoul, South Korea, in this May 2011 photo. King, who interviewed presidents, movie stars and ordinary Joes during a half-century in broadcasting, has died at age 87 in Los Angeles.Read moreLee Jin-man / AP

The man with the deepest voice on television for decades wasn’t loud or angry and rarely divided viewers, and local broadcasters and journalists who met and worked with Larry King say there’s a lesson to be learned in that.

“The show was never about Larry,” said Vernon Odom, a longtime 6ABC reporter who retired in 2018. “His show was about the guests. He played the game the right way.”

King, who hosted Larry King Live on CNN for more than 25 years, died early Saturday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 87. According to CNN, King had been hospitalized with COVID-19 in late December.

Longtime local broadcaster Larry Kane, who worked with King in Miami decades ago, said the Brooklyn native was often accused of asking “softball” questions, but he thinks the approach allowed guests to open up.

“He could approach controversies in a friendly way that didn’t make the interview uncomfortable,” Kane said. “He brought a real radio approach to television, a real conversational tone.”

» READ MORE: Larry King, broadcasting giant for half-century, dies at 87

Ed Eisen, a board member of Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia, said King once gave him sound advice back in the ’60s when both were working in radio in Florida. King, he said, told him to go into the newspaper business because it was “far more stable.”

King would be remembered as a “great broadcasting communicator,” Eisen said, and “a lousy husband.” King was married eight times to seven women, including Philadelphian Julia Alexander King, his sixth wife. They divorced in 1992 after three years of marriage.

Former Inquirer television columnist Gail Shister said King was the quintessential generalist an audience could relate to.

“He never pretended he was a scholar and never prepared for interviews,” Shister said. “He wanted to be the everyman, in every interview. He would ask the kind of question everyone wanted to know.”

Shister said King was crucial in making CNN the formidable power it is today.

Longtime talk radio host Michael Smerconish, who hosts his own show on CNN, where he paid tribute to King on Saturday morning, said Larry King Live was where “America would go to find out about the burning issue of the day.”

“Larry was so skilled in the art of conversation,” Smerconish said.

Civility, Smerconish said in an email to The Inquirer, may have been King’s greatest attribute.

“He was a product of a different era when the role of a talk show host was to be a conversationalist and not a practitioner of the incendiary and the divisive,” Smerconish wrote. “He didn’t wear ideology on his sleeve. We could all take a lesson from that.”