I remember a buzz of excitement racing through the newsroom at NBC 7 in 2001. A Holiday package had arrived for Bob Dale with no return address. Longtime employees knew what was inside, and so did Bob.
A little background: Bob Dale was a television icon in San Diego for most of a half century. He was the afternoon movie host on KFMB Channel 8, whose crafty interviews could humanize the most insufferable prima donna and bring out the best in Don Rickles. For a time in the 1960s his Zoorama broadcast from the San Diego Zoo on CBS-TV was seen by over 16 million viewers a week.
I got to know Bob in the 1990s when we were both working at NBC 7, where he had already become the station’s beloved weatherman for two decades. If meteorological conditions were benign, there might be time for the audience to be gifted with a little bit of wisdom or a show business recollection from Bob Dale, and there was nobody better. He was a genuinely genial genius of a storyteller, especially at Christmastime when every year the mystery package would arrive.
It all began, he said, sometime in the late 1960s when he got a phone call at Channel 8. The man on the other end simply asked, “Hey Dale, you want some booze balls?” “Ok,” he replied, “but who is this?” In a gruff voice the caller barked, “none of your business.” A few days later a package arrived containing foil wrapped chocolate candy crème balls that Bob would describe as “chrome plated hand grenades” soaked in liquor and incredibly delicious. Not realizing their spiritous potency, he opened the box live on air, passed them around the anchor desk and bit into one. “I began sweating and loosened my tie.” He remembers everyone on set was laughing.
Thus began a tradition. Each year at Channel 8 and thereafter at NBC 7, the booze balls arrived with nary a clue as to who was sending them, and every year he would tell the story and bite into one live on the air to the delight of viewers. Until one year when the box arrived, but this time a note was enclosed. He read it aloud:
“Dear Bob, you will never know how much joy your gruff-voiced friend received from sending you the special Christmas candies. He just recently passed away. One of the last things he said was ‘Make sure Dale gets his booze balls.’”
Thinking back, I cannot imagine there was a dry eye in the city. Bob Dale closed the card, looked into the camera and seemed to be genuinely moved. He knew he worked in a newsroom where the investigative staff could have figured out who had been sending the package all those years and would continue to for a half dozen more. But he told his audience he would never do that. “You know why?” he said. “Because it’s none of my business.”
