KDOC Tops Boone’s Personal Chart : Singer Thinks Channel 56 Could Be a Hit as a Wholesome ‘West Coast Superstation’

Pat Boone is drinking a diet soda rather than milk, and he is wearing white tennis shoes instead of white bucks. But even without his trademark drink and footwear, the singer is instantly recognizable. The tanned, all-American face has aged well, and frequent exercise has kept him trim at age 54.

Dressed in white shorts and a T-shirt at his Beverly Hills home, Boone notes that he “did wedge in a little tennis this morning, which wreaked havoc with my schedule. But I figure if I don’t get a little exercise in along the way, I’ll just grind down.”

Boone is keeping busy these days with fingers in a number of performing, recording, business and television pies. He says his work as board president and part owner of KDOC, Channel 56, Orange County’s only independent commercial television station, is the activity that interests him most.

The station, based in Anaheim, employs 55 people and, according to operations manager Hoshi Moaddeli, reaches 150,000 homes. Boone says that he has “presided over every board meeting in the history” of KDOC, which celebrated its sixth anniversary Oct. 1, and that he’s exploring ways to invest more “hands-on” time there. To date, he reports, he has been “very active in the oversight but not in the daily management.”

One of the prime movers in getting the station licensed, Boone, who owns a 37% share in KDOC, says he has “been outvoted many times” on matters involving station management. “If I were running things, I would have even more Orange County-based programs,” he says. Now, only a handful of such programs air regularly, supplementing reruns of syndicated series like “Combat,” “Perry Mason” and “The Fugitive.”

Creating local programs from scratch is expensive, Boone concedes, but he is working on ideas for several new KDOC shows. He has completed two pilots, one for a variety show he would host himself and one for a live country-Western program to be filmed at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana.

Boone is also talking to Disney Studios about co-producing a “show of, by and for the teen-agers of Orange County” that would feature “music, dancing and virtually all creative expression” by adolescents. The show would be filmed at Disneyland. He would like to create a similar program for college students. Boone Productions, the singer’s marketing company, has created other KDOC shows in the past. One dealt with chefs in Orange County, another with business executives.

Calvin Brack, KDOC’s general manager, says final decisions on the new shows won’t be made before November. If the shows make the grade, Boone says, he might finally sell the large Beverly Hills property he has owned for 28 years and move to Orange County.

“I would really relish spending more time in the life of the station,” Boone says. “I will say, amongst all my other involvements, KDOC looms as the largest, most important and I think most promising outlet for the future.

“I have one really wild vision, and that is that KDOC could become the West Coast Superstation,” rivaling Ted Turner’s, Boone says.

Boone’s language is still as squeaky-clean as it was at the start of his career, when he advised American youth about morals in a book called “Twixt 12 and 20” and in newspaper and magazine articles with titles like “You Don’t Have to Wiggle.” Today, when Boone wants to express irritation, he says things like: “That’s always bugged the fire out of me.”

Thirty years ago when he made his mark as a pop music star, Boone received as much fan mail as Elvis Presley. He hosted several television shows and starred in 15 movies. During the 1970s, he and his family performed together on several prime-time television specials. (“If you have four very pretty teen-age girls,” says Boone, “you’d better keep the family together.”)

Boone has 13 gold records and two gold albums. In all, he says, he has sold more than 45 million records. Although he is long gone from the Top 10, he is still in demand with a sizable, if specialized, audience.

He gives up to 120 secular and religious concerts a year. He does charity benefits. Last summer he organized “Gospel America Tour ‘88,” which brought him, Deniece Williams, the Imperials, Kim Boyce and Johnnie Wilder to 22 cities in four weeks. “We all sacrificed (money) to an extent” to do the tour, Boone says. Still, plans are in the works for a 1989 road show.

He hosts a weekly Christian radio show from his home. The radio show, which has commercial sponsors, airs on 200 stations around the world.

“This has been sort of a passion with me, to get gospel music to a wider and wider audience,” Boone says. “We all listen to the radio in our cars, and it’s an easy way to reach millions of people, to get contemporary gospel music out there. It sort of takes people by surprise.”

Boone records Christian music for his own Burbank-based label, Lamb and Lion Records/Benson, writes spiritual-themed books (14, at last count) and works out ways to distribute more Christian-oriented material over the airwaves and into the shopping malls. His Christian viewpoint figures into his plans for KDOC, though not as directly as one might suppose.

Even though he is so deeply involved in Christian outreach, “I don’t consider myself religious,” Boone says, “because to me the word ‘religious’ or ‘religion’ has a certain exclusive or otherworldly quality that removes it from the category of practicality. I’ve grown past that.”

His vision for KDOC has always been to make it “a commercial station with a Christian station does air news

a few religious programs, and Boone would like to see more produced. “I think if I have more input we might make some changes,” he says. “I would love to see a couple of local ministers air regularly on Sunday.”

Yet, Boone sees KDOC primarily as a station designed to run “wholesome family-oriented shows done from a Christian perspective, but not overtly religious--a Christian perspective as opposed to a humanist perspective or an atheist perspective or a militant perspective,” he says.

Such programming--which includes reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Dick Van Dyke shows--offers an alternative to much of the “raunchy” programming on other stations, he says. Through locally produced shows, KDOC can “bring out and reward the best” in people, he adds.

So where does Wally George, the station’s notoriously abusive right-wing host of “Hot Seat Hot Line” fit into this vision?

Boone laughs. “His is a public forum,” he says carefully. “I didn’t have anything to do with that, although Wally gives me credit for his break into show business. I really can’t take credit, except I helped get the station on the air.

“Wally apparently does help provide the same kind of (pressure release) as the little valve on the teapot,” Boone says. “So I think--though I can’t say I subscribe to everything that goes on, the things that are said--it (the show) is an exercise in free speech. It’s not going to win any awards, but it has its following.”

Boone doesn’t watch George’s show very often. “I don’t have time to regularly watch any of KDOC’s programs,” he says, because his own career keeps him busy.

He does many solo concerts overseas, “so that keeps me in the air all the time. I just got back from Scandinavia.” Boone will be touring most of the next few months before taking two weeks of Christmas vacation with his wife, Shirley, at their house in Hawaii.

“It’s a busy life,” he says. “I thought when our kids all got married, Shirley and I were just going to coast along for the next 30 or 40 years, just twiddling our thumbs and trying to figure out how to spend our days. Those days quickly got filled. I took on much more than I should have.”

All four of Boone’s daughters are married now, and he has 13 grandchildren. Debby, the most famous of his offspring, recorded the best-selling “You Light Up My Life” in 1977. She lives in the San Fernando Valley, has recently toured as Maria in “The Sound of Music” and makes albums on her father’s label.

Daughter Laury, who lives in Kansas, records gospel music on Lamb and Lion Records. Eldest daughter Cherry, who six years ago wrote an article for McCall’s magazine about recovering from eating disorders, lives in Seattle. Lindy is in Irvine.

“We still, Shirley and I, want to get the girls together somehow for some more recording,” Boone says. Maybe, he fantasizes, during next summer’s gospel roadshow they could rent an extra bus and “have a day center or a day camp wherever we go. And we’d be together all the time for a month. That would be a thrill for me!”