It was meant to last six months.
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Instead, it endured for almost 37 years.
Next Friday evening, half a lifetime beyond his original deadline, Ray Dinneen will sign off and step out from behind the NBN news desk for the last time.
For the veteran news anchor, it will be so long, farewell and good night for now and ever more.
The guy who has been a fixture of our living rooms since Big Dog was in puppy school and Romper Room in rompers is leaving the studio. Friday night's bulletin completes the final shift in a career remarkable for its unerring constancy. At 60, Dinneen will unclip the lapel mike, wipe off the make-up and slip readily into retirement.
Who could imagine evenings without him? To a generation he's been as perennial as Nobbys, as constant as a nor-easter, familiar as a favourite lounge chair - an image and voice etched into the collective memory. Don't adjust your sets. The man will be gone.
In 1974, when a young country announcer scored a job at NBN Television in Newcastle, he assured his bride he would stay six months, learn as much as possible and then, hopefully return to Melbourne.
That promise had stretched into 1976 when Dinneen, on leave in Melbourne, was offered a gig with Channel 0 (now Ten). He returned to Newcastle and told NBN general manager George Brown that he intended to resign
"It's the money, isn't it?" Brown quizzed.
"No, I just want to go back to Melbourne."
"No ya don't. It's the money."
With that the executive reached for a pen, scribbled a figure on a scrap of paper and thrust it in the newsreader's face.
"You bastard!" Dinneen blurted on realising he had been well and truly trumped.
At home that night, he confronted his wife Cheryl with the news that he would not be taking the Melbourne job.
"Why?" she asked, aghast.
He held up the note: "George made me an offer I couldn't refuse."
Other newsreaders would be attracted by the lure of the bright lights, but that was as close as he came to leaving Newcastle. The Dinneens were here to stay.
In his time Ray Dinneen has seen the conversion from black and white to colour, analogue to digital and survived a succession of ownership coups, a couple of which shook the regional broadcaster to its foundations. He presided over the news desk throughout the 1991 aggregation revolution that stretched NBN's horizons from its Hunter backyard to the entire northern NSW region, an empire reaching from Gosford to the Gold Coast.
On any given evening, NBN news commanded an audience greater than the top-rating stations in most capital cities with the exception of Melbourne and Sydney. Ray Dinneen might not have made it to the big smoke, but many a city anchor would have envied his reach.
This year marked his 45th in the broadcasting game. Now, 60, his career kicked off at 15 when ABC Radio in Melbourne gave him a start as a technician. His understanding of how a studio worked eased him into an announcing job with the ABC's 3LO, a role that involved a bit of newsreading.
The announcer had entertained the idea of moving into television when, in 1973, he spotted an ad for a job at RVN2 Wagga. His ABC experience ensured it was his for the taking. He and Cheryl (they had married the previous year) packed the car and crossed the Murray into NSW.
Like most country broadcasters, RVN2 ran on a shoestring budget. Staff numbers were thin, multi-skilling essential. The new boy worked as a reporter, shot and edited film and read bulletins. "Whatever it took" was the credo in getting news to air.
"One day the cameraman got crook so I grabbed the camera raced to the job which was a Marist Brothers school reunion, only to realise that I'd left the camera battery back at the office," Dinneen remembers.
" 'I'll be back in a moment,' I said, and flew back to work to grab the battery. When I returned 20 minutes later they were still standing where I'd left them. So I shot some vision, took it back, edited it and wrote a script."
Each day the all-rounder would drive out to Wagga airport for a meteorologist to draw up a synoptic chart as the basis for the local weather report. Then the newsman would head back to the studio to read the bulletin including the weather report.
Multi-tasking required speed of thought. Nearing the end of a mid-evening news update, Dinneen was directed to throw to Festival Hall, Melbourne, where Merv Williams was hosting TV Ringside.
"I was watching on the monitor and it didn't look like they were ready at Festival Hall," Ray recollects.
He was right.
After a few moments of pictures but no host, Wagga heard Williams, off-camera, remark: "Check out the sheila in the third row. Look at the f- - - - - - diamonds on her fingers!"
Before you could say "technical malfunction", Ray was back saying, "Well, they're obviously not quite ready for us at Festival Hall."
The Newcastle opportunity arose early in 1974. Cheryl wasn't keen. Ray proposed six months, just long enough to grab valuable experience in a bigger market before the promised return to Melbourne.
That was more than three decades ago. Two children, a couple of mortgages and a grandchild later, the Dinneens are still here.
Ray started as an announcer and graduated to the newsroom when George Brown asked him if he wanted to be a journalist. Financially, it was not exactly the leg-up of a lifetime.
"It meant starting at the bottom as a cadet reporter at a time when I had a wife, child, mortgage and car payments to support."
In 1975 Brown moved the announcer-reporter to the news desk alongside the venerable Murray Finlay. Their partnership lasted 10 years, a period in which Brown out-trumped the first and last offer to lure Dinneen back to Melbourne.
If there was a point at which Ray hooked his star to Newcastle, that was it. As was customary in those days, Brown hauled Dinneen down to NBN's watering hole, the Delany on Darby Street, to close the deal.
In the next 20 years, Dinneen's became the region's most recognised voice.
"I guess it's pure familiarity," he theorises. "If I was standing in a bank queue, the person in front would turn around at hearing my voice."
It became as much a part of the city's aural backdrop as the bells of Christ Church or a ship's horn on the harbour.
"One of the customs at NBN was for staff members to bring in their newborn babies. If I'd go up to the babies and speak, they'd react to my voice. People laugh when I tell them that, but I've seen it so many times now."
It takes a rare personality to handle the constant reality of being instantly recognised, perpetually wary of the unguarded moment. In the shopping mall, out for a family weekend, enjoying a meal at a restaurant, your life is never quite your own. After 15 years in metropolitan television production this writer got close enough to identify the ego-inflating signs, the narcissism and paranoia that afflicted all but the best adjusted.
Television's audience reach means recognition is part of the territory. The challenge is in how you deal with it.
"In a town like this you've got to get used to people noticing you in the street," Dinneen insists.
He appreciates that parody is pretty much par for the course. Like most in the industry he became a fan of the Jane Kennedy, Santo Cilauro, Rob Sitch, and Tom Gleisner production Frontline and its fictional anchor Mike Moore, a figure supremely corrupted by his on-screen exposure.
The syndrome was captured wickedly in the 2004 comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, in which Will Ferrell played a news anchor who was confident and well-dressed, but also ignorant, egotistical, misogynistic and narcissistic, and knew almost nothing of the news.
When it comes to our stars of sport, entertainment or media, down-to-earth Newcastle has always offered enough reality checks to keep everyone grounded.
Happily out of the metropolitan maul, Ray Dinneen was never on the radar of satirists who fed on the exposure afforded the likes of Ray Martin, Bert Newton and Nine's cricket team. But Hunter fans still had their fun. In 1985, when ex-ABC announcer Anna Manzoney joined him at the news desk, graffiti artists daubed "I gotta gal called Anna Manzoney" along the length of a sports ground fence.
Surely there had to be a song-line for Ray, too!
There was; an adaption of Blondie's Denis.
"Oh, Din-neen, doo-be-do, I'm in love with you . . ."
In the real world of ratings wars, settling on a winning formula is paramount to news success. Winning the news slot sets up the entire evening when prime time generates the highest advertising revenue.
Anna Manzoney would depart in 1988 to be replaced by Tracey Reid who would hand on to Chris Bath (1992-95), followed by Melinda Smith (1995-06) followed by the incumbent Natasha Beyersdorf.
Meanwhile, Ray Dinneen remained the constant, a stable presence in the station's absolute rule over regional news.
The great stories of the past 30 years would become his career milestones.
"One Saturday night in May 1974, we had just wrapped up a telethon and everybody was down the Delany celebrating before heading to a party at Wal Morrison's place," he recalls. "At about 3am Cheryl was almost blown off her feet by the wind as we walked home to our Bar Beach apartment to be confronted by our spinster neighbour in tears. The rain was so strong water was gushing through walls of her apartment."
The newsreader was awoken early the next morning by a phone call. He was required urgently to read a bulletin: A bulk carrier was on Stockton Beach and sections of the city were in ruin courtesy of what became known as the Sygna storm.
Dinneen was holidaying in Melbourne on December 28, 1989, when cameraman Stewart Osland and reporter Ross Hampton delivered their famous footage of the moment an earthquake struck Newcastle. Dinneen would return to work to spend the ensuing months dispensing the latest on the damage and the recovery process.
And so it went, through mine disasters, Knights' grand final parades, flood, triumph and scandal.
On September 11, 2001, Jodi McKay was at the late-night news desk preparing to read the final bulletin. Ray Dinneen was home in bed when his son Martin tapped on the door to announce that aircraft were flying into New York buildings. The 9/11 attack and its aftermath would lead bulletins for months.
Ray Dinneen says that he has adopted a set of basic tenets that has allowed him to retain focus on the next bulletin. He never looks at the tapes of his work, never listens to himself and never takes himself too seriously.
"In addition to that, the remaining rule is just do the best you can."
Delivering the news is indeed a craft that requires care and precision.
Ray Dinneen: "You don't just read words. Rather, you endeavour to convey word pictures. I form the picture in my mind then I convey that in words. [Former ABC newsreader] James Dibble did that very well. His audience never had to work to understand what he was talking about."
For the bloke who wandered north all those years ago, Newcastle has been good to Ray and his family. And he's been good for the town.
Raised in footy-mad Victoria, he was already a fully qualified umpire when word got around the local Aussie rules community that the new bloke in town might know how and when to toot the whistle. He has been umpiring ever since.
That brief negotiation with George Brown all those years ago might have nailed the Dinneens to the city, but it was the arrival of their children, Catherine and Martin, that completed the emotional compact.
"They're real Novocastrians," says Ray with some pride, "born at the old Royal Newcastle Hospital."
Catherine has given them a granddaughter in Emma, with another baby on the way. Martin followed his father into football and the media, winning Aussie rules grand finals with Newcastle City and working as a journalist with the Newcastle Herald.
Retirement won't be such a jolt. Cheryl, employed in health administration for more than 25 years, has smoothed the way by calling time on her career. Ray says he has been planning his out-point since thinking about it in April when he turned 60, formulating a plan and then making a final decision in September.
He has no regrets about leaving a career that delivered the three essential Ds: discipline, dollars and dignity.
What to do on that very first day can be a nightmare for new retirees used to leading busy lives. But it won't be a problem for Ray Dinneen who has enjoyed walking, jogging and swimming in the great outdoors all his life.
"On the Monday, we're going to get up early and go for a run or walk and maybe a swim. Rest assured, we'll be busy."
You'd like to think he'll be home by six, if only to kick back on the couch to watch the opener roll on the first post-Ray Dinneen bulletin as Paul Lobb bids Newcastle good evening.
At that moment, might the new retiree feel just a tiny pang of longing?
"No, no regrets," he says. "It's been fabulous. I wouldn't change a thing."