Pryor Center Presents Series Continues March 3 With ‘Arkansas News History: Exploring the KATV Collection’

The Pryor Center Presents lecture series presented by the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences continues with ‘Arkansas News History: Exploring The KATV Collection.’  

Step into Arkansas’s past with the Pryor Center’s Randy Dixon and KUAF’s Kyle Kellams as they revisit some of their favorite Pryor Center Profiles radio segments.

This event is offered online via Zoom at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Mar. 3. The event is free and open to the public, but please register online in advance. 

For the past year, Dixon has been a weekly guest on Ozarks at Large hosted by Kellams on KUAF, the NPR radio station in Northwest Arkansas. The pair has examined historical personalities and events highlighted with audio clips that Dixon has discovered in the KATV Collection archives.

Keith Richards, left, and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones being escorted out of the Fordyce, Arkansas jail after being arrested for drug possession on July 5, 1975. From the KATV Collection.

KATV Channel 7, the ABC television affiliate in Little Rock, began broadcasting in 1953 when all news footage was captured on film. In the late 1970s, when the station was making the transition from shooting news stories on film to recording on videotape, the news director, Jim Pitcock, created the KATV News archive.

In 2009, KATV donated the collection of 300 hours of film and 26,000 hours of videotape to the Pryor Center. The MediaPreserve, a Pennsylvania-based company, is currently restoring and digitizing the collection.

The oldest film footage is available on the Pryor Center website at pryorcenter.uark.edu, and the rest of the collection will be made available as it processed.

Join us March 3 as Dixon and Kellams revisit some of their favorite Pryor Center Profiles segments and share the historical footage.

Randy Dixon is the director of news media and archives at the Pryor Center. Before coming to the Pryor Center, Dixon spent more than three decades of his media career at KATV News in Little Rock. He oversaw the donation of the collection to the Pryor Center in 2009 and is now organizing the digitization of the archives.

A crater left by the explosion of a 9-megaton Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missile in Damascus, Arkansas on September 19, 1980. From the KATV Collection.

Kyle Kellams is the news director at 91.3, KUAF, the NPR affiliate for Northwest and Western Arkansas. For more than 30 years he has produced the station’s news magazine, Ozarks at Large. The program is heard every Monday through Friday at noon and at 7 p.m. and Sunday mornings at 9 a.m. 

Upcoming Pryor Center Presents lecture series events include:

• Apr. 1 – Kevin M. Fitzpatrick and Matthew L. Spialek present ‘Hurricane Harvey’s Aftermath,’  register now

• Apr. 21 – Caree A. Banton presents ‘Election and Identity Politics: Interrogating Group Belonging in Black and White Republics,’ register now

About the The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History: The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History is an oral history program with the mission to document the history of Arkansas through the collection of spoken memories and visual records, preserve the collection in perpetuity, and connect Arkansans and the world to the collection through the Internet, TV broadcasts, educational programs, and other means. The Pryor Center records audio and video interviews about Arkansas history and culture, collects other organizations’ recordings, organizes these recordings into an archive, and provides public access to the archive, primarily through the website at pryorcenter.uark.edu. The Pryor Center is the state’s only oral and visual history program with a statewide, seventy-five county mission to collect, preserve, and share audio and moving image recordings of Arkansas history.