Mention the "count and amount" to many Arkansas television viewers from the late 1960s through most of the 1980s and the cheery smile and friendly voice of Beth Ward making calls on Dialing for Dollars are sure to be remembered.
Beth Ward Haynie was a fixture as Beth Ward on noontime shows, weather reports and talk show interviews on Little Rock television stations KARK-TV, Channel 4, and KTHV-TV, Channel 11, for 37 years before retiring about 10 years ago.
Ward Haynie of Little Rock died Thursday from complications from heart surgery, according to a news story posted on Channel 11's website. She was 74.
She worked at Channel 4 from 1968 until 1986, according to the Channel 4 website. She began work at Channel 11 in 1987, retiring in 2007, according to its website, but could still be seen in local commercials. At the time of her retirement, she was the longest on-air personality in the Little Rock TV market.
Ward Haynie started her first TV job as co-host with Tom Bonner on Channel 4's noontime Dialing for Dollars show after moving to Arkansas from her native Virginia. The hosts would pick a slip of paper containing phone numbers then spin a wheel to get the "count" to know which number on the slip to call -- for example, 4 down. If the person called knew the count and the jackpot amount, they won the money.
Daily viewers got to know "Tom and Beth" as TV family.
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"Beth was one of the best television personalities I've ever known in my life," Bonner recalled Friday. "I just can't say enough good things about how good of a personality she was on the air."
Dave Woodman, another former, longtime fixture on local television, said Friday that he has "very fond memories of working with her."
"I kind of equate her with Carolyn Long," Woodman said, referring to a former Channel 4 news anchor. "Beth and Carolyn had the talent and the personality that went through the camera lens and through the television screen to connect with you wherever you were viewing it."
Ward Haynie penned her own obituary. In it she wrote of a "life full of blessings," mentioning her television career as standing out among them.
"It was enjoyable," she wrote. "Meeting so many wonderful people, being around my friends, gaining knowledge daily and watching that ever changing weather forecast. It was a terrific thirty-seven years."
Woodman said he will read Ward Haynie's obituary at her funeral service today at their church, Immanuel Baptist. Woodman also participated, he said, in the funeral of her husband of 43 years, Charlie Haynie, who died in May.
Anne Jansen Broadwater, a former Channel 11 news anchor, agreed that Ward Haynie was "one of those who was able to connect through the glass screen" through her personality and "heavy dose of Southern charm." Ward Haynie was also a role model and pioneer for other women in the industry, she added.
"There really were not that many women on television when she was involved, especially on the local channels, who did what she did," Broadwater said. "She took the lead and she was able to carve out a career that she wanted. For those of us who worked with her, the young women who worked with her, she was always the consummate professional and was a great role model in teaching us self-respect and teaching us what we deserved in terms of having a say in the stories we did and how we are to be viewed and treated by co-workers."
Woodman said that through Ward Haynie's long career, her years on Dialing for Dollars really stuck with people.
"People still tell me today that when their mother, or their grandmother, died, they found pieces of paper where she'd written down the count and the amount for years," Woodman said. "These people waited to be called. Just Beth's personality and the character of Dialing for Dollars itself just made her a sweetheart to people. They loved her and her moral fiber. It's a loss."
Bonner recalled how Ward Haynie joined the noontime show he had been co-hosting with the late Lonnie Gibbons, who was also in sales for the station and wanted more time for that work. After Ward Haynie was seen in a commercial, she was interviewed for the job, saying she had done "lots of stuff" in television back east, Bonner said. She got the job and was instantly popular, he said.
"She co-hosted a couple of weeks with Lonnie and me," Bonner said. "She did so well she was hired immediately. Beth was just an enormous hit. Everybody loved her."
After many years of working together, Bonner said, he asked Ward Haynie about her TV work before coming to Little Rock. It was then that she confessed that the extent of her experience was "carrying a bowl of cereal" onto the set of a children's show, saying one line and walking off set, Bonner recalled.
"'If you knew I didn't have experience, you never would have looked at me,'" Bonner said she told him. "That's my favorite Beth Ward story."
Metro on 12/10/2016