Believe it or not boys and girls, there was a time when you could turn on the TV set and magic would happen. At the end of the 1960s Tucson may have had only 3½ commercial channels — Channel 11 didn’t even come on the air until the afternoons — but there was more creativity and imagination then than what we see today with channels upon channels  inundating us with reality programs preying on the hapless.

Jack Jacobson was the first TV guy I met here when I moved to Tucson in 1972. He called himself Jake. But others knew him as “lovable Dr. Scar,” the host of horror flicks. He also did a character named Ignatz Hammerschlob, a theater doorman.

I was a “stringer” — a correspondent paid by the word — for the show business publication weekly Variety. Tucson was a busy production venue for TV shows and movies. To try to make some more money I contacted the TV stations to see if I could write about things they were doing. 

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Jacobson was promotion and program director at KGUN 9. The day I met him at the station’s studios on North Sixth Avenue he was working on a new logo and some graphics “Arizona’s Big 9” was about to put on the air. To hear him tell it, these would be the most exciting things to hit Tucson TV since it had been invented. But that’s the way he was about everything he did.

We never worked together but we stayed friends. Around 1980 or so when I was writing a media column for the Arizona Daily Star I attended a national convention of TV show distributors and TV station executives. The producers would entertain and sell their shows in elaborate hotel suites. Jacobson was station manager of KTVK, the ABC affiliate in Phoenix at the time. He agreed to let me tag along with him and the station’s owners.  

One of TV’s most popular daytime shows at the time was Phil Donahue. You can imagine how stunned I must have looked when Donahue interrupted his conversation with others, yelled out Jacobson’s name and came over to talk with us. The two had worked together in Dayton, Ohio, where Donahue’s show had started.

It has been about a year since I last saw Jacobson. He had finished, or was about to finish, his latest book, “The Sky Blazers,” about soldiers who formed a comedy and musical troop entertaining Allied Forces during World War II. He’d know about that, he was awarded a Bronze Star for it. The book is due to be released in June (order online at www.potomacbooksinc.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=187472 .)

Jacobson also worked to use TV for good causes such as the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon and pledge drives for PBS station KUAT-TV 6.

Jacobson died early the morning of March 23. He would have been 88 Thursday (April 2). Friend Ray Lindstrom has put together a tribute page at http://homepagecontent.homestead.com/JackJacobson.html

I realize that when Jacobson was around I felt there was a chance — a slim chance — the magic of TV could still happen.  Now I guess I’ll have to face reality.

A mass will be offered for Jack Jacobson at 11 a.m. Saturday (March 28) at SSt. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, 1375 S. Camino Seco. Interment will follow at Our Lady of the Desert Cemetery.