If Wikipedia, and a couple of other sources have it right, Warner Brothers, moved from their original lot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, over to their current location in Burbank, in 1928, one year after making the first “talkie” The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson, on the old lot back on Sunset, my home away from home at KTLA for more than twenty years.

After Warner Bros. left the lot, it was eventually purchased by the “Singing Cowboy,” Gene Autry, who established “Golden West Broadcasters.” KTLA, was a part of that. Autry, eventually sold Golden West to an arbitrage company who in turn sold the company to Tribune, as in “The Chicago Tribune,” headquartered in Chicago. They owned the place, or were in negotiations to buy the company, when I was hired by KTLA, circa 1986.

The timing now strikes me, as I grow older and realize that Warner Bros. move to Burbank happened only twenty years after I was born, not even the blink of an eye in the cosmic scale of things. Beyond that, legend has it that the brothers were in Pittsburgh, prior to their move to California. It was there, in the Burgh, that they interfaced with my wife’s family in East McKeesport. One of my wife’s ancestors, it is said, made a loan to the Warners, enabling them to make the trip to Los Angeles. I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s a good story.

So, it was with six degrees of separation knocking around in my head, when KTLA sent me over to the Burbank Studios, to cover the birth of the “WB,” or the “Warner Brothers Network,” on television. Majority ownership would be divided, with Warner owning 64% and my employer, The Tribune Company (KTLA), owning 25%.

It turned out, that the CEO of Tribune Broadcasting and Exec. VP of the Tribune Company at the time, was Jim Dowdle, the former general sales manager at KSTP in Minneapolis, back when I was there working at my first job in commercial broadcasting, from 1968 to 1973. I remembered Dowdle, and he remembered me, so you can imagine how the six degrees thing was bouncing around in my head as I escorted him out onto the lawn in front of the executive bungalows at Warner Brothers, for an interview about the creation of the new WB Network.

To Jim Dowdle’s credit, he made no attempt to control the interview in any way, despite his powerful role with the company that employed me. Pretty sure that not every executive would have done that. But Dowdle, did. He left it alone and answered all my questions.

Some years before the birth of the WB, my maternal grandfather, Herb Stinton, had bumped into Dowdle, at a lunch counter down in St. Petersburg, Florida. Chance meeting that it was, I continue to be amazed that it happened at all, one of the most powerful figures in the history of the Tribune Company sitting next to a retired small town depot agent for the Soo Line Railroad up in Minnesota, sharing quips over coffee at a lunch counter. I assign no meaning to it, other than sheer happenstance. Not unlike my wife’s ancestors making a loan to the Warner Brothers. If that in fact, ever really happened. If you keep moving around enough, you’re bound to keep bumping into some of the same people, I suppose.

Jim Dowdle, remembered among other things as the man who brought Harry Cary to the Cub’s broadcasting booth, died in 1999. May he rest in peace.