By KRISTIN J. BENDER | Archive & Museum Committee

“Bring your daughter to work day” didn’t exist when I was a kid back in the 1970s. But my father, Phil Bender, did it anyway. He was a rebel like that. Or maybe he was just ahead of this time.

As a director and announcer at KTVU Channel 2 in Oakland, he worked odd hours, weekends and holidays. That made it easy for him to snatch my younger sister and me and haul us to Jack London Square, where the station overlooked the waterfront. We always brought our roller skates and some tunes.

The 1970s were a heyday for programs like Dialing for Dollars and Creature Feature, and Dad was key to them airing each week. When the studios weren’t a flurry of TV personalities, sound engineers, and camera operators, the linoleum floors made a great skating rink. Jen and I would whirl past the props, grooving to the sound of the Doobie Brothers and Bee Gees coming out of our 8-track player. We became such regulars that we noticed when the brand of hot chocolate in the break room changed and someone swapped the red phones, which always seemed so mysterious, on all the desks for black ones.

Days spent whirling through darkened studios or watching Dad work the control room, which always seemed like something NASA might use, remain some of my most cherished childhood memories.

Dad was 45 when a doctor told him he had multiple sclerosis. That was in 1984. He kept working, though, never slowing down until a few years later when he finally took to walking with a cane. He had a great deal of pain in his legs by then, and had trouble making the drive from Danville. He retired in 1988.

That’s not long before I started my own journalism career. I’d wanted to be a reporter since I was 10, when I founded The Mustang Monitor, a newspaper named for Mustang Drive, the street where I grew up. My father encouraged me, happy to support his eldest daughter in her ambition to one day follow him into the game. He’d help me Xerox each weekly edition and staple the four or five handwritten pages together. I’d deliver them to the neighborhood kids, who seemed happy to read the recipe, health tip (my mother was an ER nurse), and silly cartoon that accompanied whatever I deemed newsworthy.

Recounting who won the swim meet, plans for the next school carnival, and how to treat a bee sting satisfied my nosiness and desire to write stories. That was true until one day in June, 1979, when a burglary and rape occurred around the corner from my house. As word of the crime spread from house to house, my curiosity piqued. I got on my skateboard and rushed to the scene, Hello Kitty diary in hand. As memory serves, I had no idea exactly where the assault occurred, but being in the general area was enough. I searched for details, eager to discover the truth. I spent hours at it, not sure what I was looking for or what I might find. I hoped to see a police car roll by, or someone peeking from behind the blinds. Everything caught my attention – it might be important! – but all I found were discarded Jolly Rancher wrappers and aluminum pop tops.

And a love for chasing a story. I didn’t find one that day, but dad beamed with pride at my tenacity and hustle.

He remained my tireless cheerleader through high school and college, where I studied journalism. When I announced, in my early 20s, that I hoped to become a TV news anchor, he offered to “pull some strings” and help me make an audition reel. I ultimately decided to go into print, but his excitement never waned.

Dad died suddenly on April 7, 1998, after contacting sepsis from a bout with gangrene in his foot. He was 59. I’d barely started my career. For years, it saddened me that he never read my work at the Oakland Tribune, where I spent nearly 15 years as a reporter, or at the Associated Press, where I spent several years covering breaking news and supervising a team of reporters.

About four years ago, I decided to leave the print world and try my hand as a writer at – you guessed it – KTVU. More than a few people there knew I wasn’t the first Bender to pass through the newsroom door. One long-time sports director even regaled me with an amusing story about Dad often carrying a putter to practice his swing whenever he had a moment.

I’d be overstating things if I said dad is something of a ghost at the station, but not by much. Every once in a while I get the sense he knows I’m there.

And that he’s proud of me.

Kristin J. Bender is a news writer at KTVU in Oakland. She also serves on the Archive & Museum Committee of the San Francisco/Northern California Chapter of The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.