Watching our candidates for the U.S. Senate debate on KET this week, I was glad that the host in the middle was my friend Bill Goodman and not me.

Now 87 and retired seven years from a long and mostly enjoyable stint producing and moderating KET’s programs on “public affairs” –meaning politics—I have lost my zeal for struggling to coax politicians to come clean and say something original and insightful about government issues and the elective offices they seek.

When KET’s founding executive director, O. Leonard Press, first told his bosses that he wanted to do programs about politics, several objected that a state-owned broadcast network would have no credibility with such. This was in another century, when one of the most watched PBS shows on the South Carolina network was how to dehorn and castrate cattle.

Press, ever resourceful, finessed the doubters by promising to hire independent panelists who would be reporters from outside media.

So, 40 years ago this November “Comment on Kentucky” went on the air with a weekly editor from West Kentucky, me, as moderator, perhaps because I was that year’s president of the state press association.

A year later I moderated KET’s first statewide televised debate between a Democratic candidate for governor, Julian Carroll, and a Republican challenger, Robert Gable, a coal operator. A.O. Stanley and Ed Morrow it wasn’t –they were the legendary opposing candidates who stumped the state together in the early 1900s, giving each other hell during the day and drinking together at night—but it was lively enough. Despite the agreed upon rules against props, Gable surprised me and Carroll with a large dinner bell that he said he would ring “every time Mr. Carroll tells an untruth.”

I warned him to put it away, but he rang the damn bell at least twice before I threatened to stop the show. The “truth bell” made as many headlines next day as the candidates’ remarks which I have forgotten , and that was the ancestor program of what Bill Goodman gave us Monday night.

Before nearly all the elections that followed, there was some sparring about the rules and who would or could or could not participate. Unlike this year , however, when a federal judge blocked a minority candidate, we were pretty free and open about our air time, even interviewing on a separate night perennial candidates without a chance but dear to memory such as Thurmond Jerome Hamlin, who lived in an abandoned school bus, Doris Binion. who discussed her pet pig, and Fifi Rockefeller who—well, don’t ask

As referee of the one and only face-to-face match granted to us by candidates Grimes and McConnell, Bill Goodman tried hard, tossing out questions about Obamacare to McConnell, who is against, as we knew, and about Grimes’s admiration for Bill Clinton, who she said supports growing the middle class “the right way” but her concern about the incumbent president (“we have differences”).

While the candidates hurled at each other the same brainless rhetoric on coal for which they have spent millions in paid advertising, I remembered a campaign story about a dog law we used to tell in Logan County where I was the editor in my youth.

A troubled farmer who had lost several sheep killed by dogs pursued an elderly candidate for magistrate with the question, “how do you stand on a dog law?” As this was a touchy subject in rural Kentucky, the old politician ducked a reply. But as he stumped across the district the farmer followed him at every rally, shouting from the crowd: “how do you stand on the dog law?”

Finally, at Russellville, the candidate said, “Yes, I am in favor of a dog law.”

“What kind of dog law? That’s what we want to know,” called out his tormentor.

“Well,” said the candidate thoughtfully, “I favor a good strong law—one that will protect the sheep, but be fair to the dogs!”

--- Veteran journalist Al Smith of Lexington is writing a third memoir to be published next year.