By JILL ROSENFELD
Staff Reporter
When Nelson Davis was 18 years old, he packed up his Samsonite hardcase in his parents’ Niagara Falls home and took a bus to a small town in the Fingerlakes region of New York state. Davis had been hired over the phone to work at a radio station there, and he was excited about the prospect.
“I remember to this day meeting the owner of the station,” Davis said. “It was the first time I was denied something because of race. He took one look at me and said, ‘This might not be the right town for a colored boy.’ So I got back on the bus and went back to Niagara Falls.”
Davis says he considers that episode the beginning of his adulthood.
Today, Davis could be one of the minority success stories that he celebrates in his KTLA-TV Channel 5 show, “Making It!” Davis created the show in 1988, and on June 28, KTLA will air its 300th episode.
Every week, at the low-viewership hours of 6:30 a.m. Sunday and 1 a.m. Monday, “Making It!” tells two entrepreneurial achievement stories from the L.A. area, and features a civic leader discussing issues that affect small business.
The show has profiled everyone from a homeless woman who started her own clothing design business, to the founder of now-publicly traded Gemstar Inc.
Davis has won two Emmy awards as executive producer of the show, as well as awards from the U.S. Small Business Administration and other organizations.
The show is hosted by KTLA news anchors Sharon Tay and Larry McCormick, and is sponsored by an impressive array of companies, including Atlantic Richfield Co., Bank of America, Pacific Bell, Southern California Gas Co. and Walt Disney Co. The early-morning show has remained on the air in part thanks to FCC guidelines that encourage good-faith efforts on the part of broadcasters to provide community affairs programming.
Davis’ personal history parallels some of the success stories told on the show. By the age of 14, he had made up his mind to be on the radio “I didn’t know that black people didn’t do that back then,” he says.
He didn’t want to spend his life in the public housing projects where he grew up, or in Niagara Falls, for that matter, and radio became his link to the broader world. His father was illiterate, but both parents encouraged him to educate himself.
“If there’s a lesson from the people we profile, if there’s a universal trait, it’s that successful people don’t recognize limitations like race,” said Davis. “It’s what I call positive naivete. You don’t see limitations, no matter how improbable the goal. Even if you want to send someone to the moon.”
Davis worked in radio in his hometown, and then in Ontario, Canada, where he hosted a TV travel show in the mid-1970s. He came to Los Angeles because he wanted to be a game-show host. His role models were Dick Clark, Merv Griffin, and “Soul Train” host Don Cornelius, all of whom had expanded their on-air work into production companies.
Needless to say, there weren’t and aren’t many black game-show hosts. Despite interest from individuals at the networks, despite having a top agent, and despite going through many auditions and even making a pilot, Davis never found the on-air work he wanted.
He settled for working behind the scenes, and in 1980 joined NBC, eventually becoming director of daytime programming. His role was to work with and develop game shows. Griffin hired him to produce the pilot episode of “Jeopardy.”
Davis left NBC because of a boss he said made him miserable. He conceived of “Making It!” in 1988, encouraged by a friend who had created a similar show in Chicago.
McCormick finds the show a welcome relief from the world of local news. “We’re telling positive stories about people who have taken great risks, had faith in their ideas, made great sacrifices and succeeded. It’s a nice contrast to the sometimes dreadful stories we report on the news,” he said.
