Tribute to Paul H. Kangas

Tribute to Paul H. Kangas W8MOD / W4LAA
April 14, 1937 - February 28, 2017

Business news broadcaster Paul H. Kangas, W4LAA, of North Miami Beach, Florida, died on February 28. He was 79 and had been in hospice care. From 1979 until 2009, Kangas was the co-anchor of the popular “Nightly Business Report” aired on public television, on which he signed off wishing viewers “the best of good buys. He received an Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in Business and Financial Reporting from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

“With his booming voice, easy laughter and quick wit, Paul Kangas was a tremendous asset to ‘Nightly Business Report,’ right from its inception in 1979,” said Linda O’Bryon, who once co-anchored with Kangas. “He helped invent stock market reporting on television.” O’Bryon said Kangas, who worked without a script, had an “encyclopedic knowledge of the stock market.”

Kangas was among the original members of an informal group that began meeting more than 3 decades ago on 20-meter SSB. Group member Bill Cate, K5EEF, told ARRL that Kangas was “a favorite with all of us, a great and fun wordsmith, with whom we would play spelling and definition games all the time.” Cate has the opportunity to visit Kangas at home in 2014 and said he’d always remember “his wonderful hospitality, his engaging personality, and his great sense of humor.”

A graduate of the University of Michigan and the New York University Stern School of Business, Kangas was a US Coast Guard veteran and former stockbroker who broke into broadcasting as a stock commentator on Miami PBS station WPBT, becoming co-anchor of the “Nightly Business Report” in 1990. Tom Hudson, who succeeded Kangas after his retirement, said that Kangas “set the standard” for stock market reporting on television.

The Detroit Free Press called Kangas “the Walter Cronkite of business broadcasting.”

Paul was a *YOOPER FINN, originally licensed as W8MOD. The 1954 call book shows him living at 212 Hubbell Street in Houghton. Paul was the son of a dentist, and a very active ham in his teen age days, both from home and with a bodacious mobile signal. Paul was a "ham's ham", and always welcomed YOOPER ham visitors (even unannounced) to his Florida home. If he had the time, chances are that you would wind up on the water on Paul's boat. I worked Paul once as W4LAA and we spoke about different types of electronic keyers. He was a rag chewer, but also participated in many other aspects of ham radio.

*YOOPER FINN - Someone of Finnish nationality that lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Tribute courtesy of K8MFO