Goodie's Goodies

Los Angeles televiewers have learned to expect the unexpected from station KCOP-TV, which last year won national attention for its freewheeling program of comment by Pianist Oscar Levant (TIME, May 5, 1958). This week the station popped another big-name surprise on viewers. KCOP-TV's newest star: California's sometime Governor Goodwin J. Knight.

Goodie Knight's new job as newscaster (five minutes a day, five days a week) marks his first sustained public appearance since he lost out in his bid for the U.S. Senate last fall. Enforced leisure--and particularly, enforced silence--bore heavily on a man who, in top form, could reel off 250 speeches a month. Knight sunned awhile at Palm Springs, caught up on years of neglected reading ("I had never read Whittaker Chambers' book,*and I found it fascinating"), rented a Los Angeles apartment and bought into an insurance firm. When KCOP-TV proposed the commentator's stint, Knight was happy to have a new platform.

Goodie's charter in broad: to discuss any "political aspects of the news" he chooses. He promised not to be dull. "I'll take the news each day and give an opinion about it and its relationship to California politics," he said. "I'm going to throw in interesting little political nuggets. Yes, sir, I'm going to give the viewers some fruitcake."

*Witness, published in 1952.

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