75 Years Of News On 6: Georgia Jones Remembers

Today there are more women working as TV anchors and reporters than men, but back in the 1960s it was rare to be a woman in the newsroom.

For most of the time she worked at KOTV, Georgia Jones was the only woman working at News On 6. She worked for the station in the late 60s and early 70s. She said at the end of her time there, another woman started working at the station as an assignment editor.

The 60s at News On 6: A time when men were writing the news, reading the news, and shooting all the video. Jones wasn't the first woman at the station, but there was a time when she was the only one.

It all started with a phone call from Clayton Vaughn, about an open position for women's editor.

"And he told me that he had fired the last three. And then he told me about the job and then he said, 'Can you do it?’" Jones remembered. "Had he said, 'Would you like to do it?' I might have said, 'No, I'm not at all interested.' But he said, 'Can you do it?' And I said, 'Yes.'"

She told Clayton her work as a dancer with the Tulsa Civic Ballet is what qualified her for the job in news. 

"Because as a dancer, you are disciplined,” she said. “You take direction well. You know how to present yourself. You can fake it, which is very, very important. And you can also be honest with yourself — what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. And you're not intimidated by that."

Jones would anchor the noon broadcast alongside Bob Brown, then report stories for the evening newscasts. But the job wasn't all work. She remembers how well everyone got along, and what it was like being the only woman.

"I did not join in the salty humor because I'm just not amused by that sort of thing. But they pretty much recognized this is who Georgia is. I was newly married. I had my life, they had theirs. We never socialized outside,” she said. "There was lots of comradeship, lots of silliness that went on."

That silliness sometimes spilled over to the viewers at home.

"There were times when we would get to laughing so hard on air, that they'd have to throw to a commercial,” she said.

She said it was a time in television when there were no rules. Even her time off could be flexible, if there was a good story to be told along the way. 

"And Clayton also let me take a longer vacation than I was entitled to. Because my family loved to travel and we would go to Europe or this or that. Well, you can't do that in a week's time,” she said. “So he would give me extra time if I took along a Super 8 camera, little bitty Super 8 camera and brought home stories of interesting people in Europe."

Finding those interesting people and sharing those stories with Tulsans was her passion and a skill she eventually brought to the Tulsa Tribune, which her family owned.

"Going out finding my own people, the organizations, the arts, the humans. I somehow ran into a woman who used horseback riding to help people with mental illnesses. Things that were just really, really interesting and that's the kind of thing I respond to and that's the kind of thing the audience, or the readers respond to. I got that through my training at KOTV,” she said.

Jones still calls Tulsa home, still loves writing, and enjoys her husband, two daughters and five grandkids.

Her dance through life so far, has been a joy.

"Life is wonderful,” she said. “And what would have happened, had I not said 'yes, because I'm a dancer.’"

Jones coauthored a book with another dancer, Cheryl Forrest. The book is called "Roman Jasinski: A Gypsy Prince From the Ballet Russe." It shares the life story of the Polish ballet instructor, who taught Georgia.