Posted Fri. April 22 2016 courtesy SeattlePI.com
Three of the people in this picture are leaving KING/5 News. From left, KING/5 News meteorologist Jeff Renner, anchor Dennis Bounds, anchor Jean Enersen and sports anchor Paul Silvi say goodbye to Enersen in 2014 on her final night as regular anchor of the KING/5 evening news. Bounds, Renner, Enersen and investigative reporter Linda Byron are departing as part of a “voluntary retirement program.” See more photos of Seattle TV anchors through the years. Photo: JOSHUA TRUJILLO, SEATTLEPI.COM / SEATTLEPI.COM
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Dennis Bounds, who has held the evening anchor’s chair at KING/5 News for 22 years, took to Facebook last Friday morning to announce that he is retiring next Friday.
Bounds is departing along with some of the station’s other top notch talent — and a lot of its institutional memory.
“I can finally announce that I will be retiring from KING 5,” he posted. “My last day will be next Friday (April 22).
“I never thought I’d be part of a voluntary retirement program, but the offer was too good to refuse. So now it’ll be no deadlines, more golf, more reading books and hopefully not driving my wife crazy.
“I’m riding off into the sunset with a number of people at the station including my on air colleagues Jeff Renner, Jean Enersen and Linda Byron.”
Enersen retired in 2014 after 42 years as a news anchor at the station, the first female news anchor in America. She has continued to do special projects and health reporting.
The on-camera departures are only part of the story. Under a voluntary retirement plan offered 6 years ago, off-camera talent is also taking leave of the station.
“There are other hard working employees you have never heard of who also took the buyout,” Jesse Jones, the former KING5 consumer reporter now at KIRO, wrote on his Facebook page.
It would be hard to underestimate the contributions to broadcast journalism made by those departing KING/5 News.
Renner anchored the station’s comprehensive, imaginative coverage of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, effortlessly blending the science of volcanology with the impact on lives in Southwest Washington. The coverage was buttressed by the brilliant work of cameraman Mark Anderson.
As an expert in mountain weather, Renner has spent three decades telling Washington recreationists how soon their weekends will be rained on after a lenticular cloud appears over Mt. Rainier.
Byron is a 26-year veteran of the station who has focused on police misconduct, winning a national Edward R. Murrow Award for her project “Bully with a Badge.” She is legendary as a relentless, tough questioner.
Bounds has been at KING/5 News since 1991, and moved into the anchor’s chair in 1994. He originally hails from North Dakota.
Jesse Jones summed up thoughts of many in the Seattle news community, writing: “I’m burned I won’t get to see their work anymore.”
READ MANY MORE SEATTLE NEWS STORIES HERE AT THE SEATTLE P.I. WEBSITE
We all know Jeff Renner as the professor of precip & Jean Enersen as the queen of KING.
Note to Corus/BCTV. This is a class act.