DePauw Stories

He practiced the coin flip five times on the sidelines. 

It was, after all, the biggest football game of the year, the Monon Bell game, the stands were packed with thousands of fans and countless more would be watching the nationally televised moment. 

“I wanted to get it up in the air,” Ken Owen ’82 said. “I wanted to show I had some prowess.”

Owen knows how to perform for the camera.

Obviously. He had spent nearly 17 years as a television anchor, more than 12 of those in Indianapolis, when in January 2001 he seamlessly slid out from behind the anchor desk to become DePauw’s executive director of media relations and, starting in July 2017, a special adviser to the president.

At year’s end, however, Owen will leave his prominent role at DePauw. And though he is planning a month-long trip somewhere warm, maybe a cruise, he isn’t exactly sailing off into the sunset; he’ll continue managing the Timothy and Sharon Ubben Lecture Series, which brings leaders of international renown to campus. 

Owen’s relationship with DePauw predates his employment here. As a prospective student following his mother’s footsteps (his mother’s father died when she was a sophomore, so she did not finish her degree), Owen visited campus on the Monon Bell game day in 1977. ABC was in town to broadcast the game, and even DePauw’s 30-6 defeat didn’t dampen Owen’s spirits. 

“I liked it,” he said. “It was the right size. I wasn’t really crazy about the whole football thing but I thought it was cool that ABC was here. It was, as I remember, a really overcast and cold day. It was not a chamber-of-commerce-weather day. But everybody was nice and I knew enough people and I guess I recognized that I could be on the radio from the first day. That was an important thing to me. And that I could play baseball, which I didn’t do in high school.”

Indeed, the White Sox fan and former Little Leaguer played right field for a semester but got into only one game, when he struck out three times. 

But more to the point, he started working immediately for WGRE, the student-run radio station, eschewing his previous dream job of disk jockeying in favor of a career that “might challenge me more cerebrally.” And so began his long career in broadcast.

During his senior year winter term, Owen worked for WIRE in Indianapolis and, two weeks in, the station offered him a job. A permanent one. “So my second semester senior year, I was the station manager upstairs at WGRE. I was on WIRE every night, reporting and anchoring, making four and a half dollars an hour and commuting,” he said. He graduated in May 1982 with a degree in communication. 

After a year at WIRE, he moved to WIBC, the preeminent news station in Indianapolis. On Feb. 1, 1984, he anchored his first television newscast for an upstart station that decided, seven months later, that maybe news wasn’t its thing. So an unemployed Owen contacted Lee Giles, then head of WISH-TV in Indianapolis, who had spoken at DePauw. Giles remembered him (“Never be afraid to approach someone,” Owen tells students. “Always look people in the eye. Smile. Give them your name.”), but didn’t have an appropriate spot for the 23-year-old. Giles offered to FedEx Owen’s audition tape to a station in Fort Wayne, however, and Owen got the job. 

Three years there, then to Asheville, North Carolina, for 22 months. Then to WISH for nine years and WRTV for two years. And then DePauw came calling. 

Would he handle media relations for his alma mater? “I still had a fire in my belly; I had flown to Cleveland two days before for an audition for the morning news there,” he said. “I still thought maybe I had some gas in the tank for television. So I turned (the job) down on the spot.”

Until then-president Bob Bottoms called and said, “just give me two years.”

That was 19 years ago. Over the years, Owen has dealt with some tough situations, but “it’s a real joy, even in the toughest days, to be carrying the knapsack for a place you love,” he said. 

And the best times? 

“What happened last (Monon Bell game day 2019) is up there, and I’m really thankful,” he said. 

Stevie Baker-Watson, associate vice president for campus wellness and the Theodore Katula director of athletics and recreational sports, explained how the coin toss occurred: “The Monon Bell game provides us with a platform to showcase the campus and members of our community. … As our athletics admin team considered who, or what, to showcase with the coin toss, I suggested Ken Owen. 

“He wears his love for the university and DePauw football on his sleeve and, given his departure from the university, this seemed to be a ‘bucket list’-like opportunity. At a Monon Bell planning meeting in October, we surprised him with this announcement and he was speechless. In the days leading up to the game, he shared his ‘practice’ via social media and it was then that I knew we had given him something he would cherish for many years to come. The coin toss was the perfect gift to express our gratitude.”

That’s pretty much the way Owen remembered it too. “I said, really?” he said. “That really means a lot. It really means a lot.”