Dr. Robert “Bob” Sanders, who spent more than three decades teaching generations of broadcasters at what is now East Texas A&M University, died Saturday, Oct. 3. He was 83.
Sanders arrived in Commerce in 1974 and spent 34 years on the university faculty, serving as director of broadcast instruction and head of Radio-Television. He taught at the institution through two of its names, East Texas State University and Texas A&M University-Commerce, before retiring in 2008.
For many of his students, though, he was simply “Doc.”
Sanders was born Dec. 25, 1942, in Friona, Texas. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees at West Texas State University before completing a Ph.D. in communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1976. He served in the U.S. Army, including a tour in Vietnam, before building the career in broadcast education that would bring him to Commerce.
By the time Sanders retired, the City of Friona credited him with producing more than 2,500 television programs covering news, sports, public affairs, community events and political debates. He also served two terms as president of the Texas Association of Broadcast Educators. A proclamation honoring his retirement credited the broadcast program he led with producing professional anchors, engineers, editors, writers, entertainers and producers.
His obituary remembers him as a mentor to generations of students and as host of “Talk of the Town,” a weekly local television program produced by students.
I was one of those students.
Sanders was my academic adviser and led the Radio-Television division of the Department of Mass Media, Communication and Theatre while I attended Texas A&M University-Commerce from 2001 to 2005. He worked alongside Dr. Gerald Haskins, his longtime colleague and fellow broadcast educator, and later Dr. John Mark Dempsey.
Sanders' standards were high, and his students generally learned quickly what those standards meant.
Being on time for a practicum call meant arriving early. If you didn't know how a piece of equipment worked, or needed some fact, procedure or other information that was readily available in a book or another resource, Doc had a memorable instruction:
“Look it up, sap!”
It was funny. It also wasn't really a joke.
He expected students preparing for careers in broadcasting to become resourceful enough to solve problems themselves. Broadcasting rarely affords the luxury of waiting for somebody else to figure out what went wrong.
My own path into the profession began, in no small part, with Sanders.
During the spring of my senior year of high school, I attended a Saturday college preview day in Commerce. Sanders put a group of prospective students to work in a television studio. In about an hour, we planned, blocked, shot, recorded and produced a 60-second commercial for Mr. Coffee.
I ran the teleprompter, learning to move the script at the pace of the person on camera so we could get through the shot without another take.
It was a small exercise. To a high school senior wondering what studying broadcasting might actually look like, it was enormous. Instead of being told about television production, we made television.
I enrolled.
As one of Sanders' students, I sometimes found his expectations daunting. With the benefit of more than two decades working in broadcasting, I have come to appreciate them enormously.
He could be patient. He could also decide that you had been given quite enough patience and it was time to figure the thing out. Both were useful lessons.
Sanders' wife, Kay, once described elements of his military broadcasting experience by comparing them to scenes from the 1987 film “Good Morning, Vietnam.” Whatever stories lay behind that comparison, the connection between broadcasting, service and teaching ran through much of his adult life.
And the measure of a broadcast educator's career may ultimately be found in what happened after his students left the classroom.
Some went into newsrooms. Some became engineers, producers, writers and on-air personalities. Some built careers far from Commerce. The university's broadcast program was already sending people into a competitive industry when I arrived, and Sanders expected us to be prepared to join them.
I did.
Twenty-three years after I first began working professionally in over-the-air broadcasting, I still encounter moments when something Doc Sanders taught me turns out to have been less about completing an assignment and more about how to do the job.
That is a teacher's legacy.
Sanders and his wife moved to Merritt Island, Florida, in 2014 to be closer to family. He is survived by Kay; their children, Michelle Terrell and Darin Sanders; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. In his official obituary, his family suggests memorial contributions to a local animal rescue organization or St. Francis Hospice of Florida.
