Don Mozley

About nine o'clock Pacific War Time, the Domei code monitors picked up a strange sounding batch of dots and dashes, and a moment later these revealed themselves as a long series of five-letter cipher groups. And they were headed from Tokyo to Switzerland. Well, this looked like the tipoff, but of course it still wasn't anything very definite.

Ken Owen bent over his typewriter keys, the headphones chattering more dots and dashes into his ear. Phil Woodyatt, director of the news bureau here, and I strained our ears to catch the mumbled words of some Tokyo announcer. He was talking about how the great medical scientists of Nippon had discovered a surefire cure for chilblain. Perhaps, we groaned, it would be just another night of strained listening after all.

At about 10:50 p.m. Pacific Time, Phil was looking over Ken Owen's shoulder as the one finger, letter-at-a-time transmission spelled itself out on the long sheet of yellow paper. It was old stuff, repeats of broadcasts twenty-four hours old. Suddenly the sentence broke off in the middle of a word, and Ken's finger began typing quickly now the letters "FLASH," and then came "Tokyo eight fourteen. Learned Imperial message acceptance Potsdam Proclamation." While Phil shouted out the message I jumped for the teletype to CBS New York, and with jittery fingers pounded out the words which Ken Owen had just fished out of the ether. At the New York end, news editor George Herman watched the feverish message and called for the air.

Seconds later that all important eight-word bulletin had gone coast-to-coast on the Columbia Network — the eight words which are still the only clear announcement we have, even unofficially, that Japan has agreed to surrender.

— Don Mozley, on CBS Radio's bulletin announcing
Japan's surrender to end World War II,
as told to Frank Absher in 1997

Don Mozley broadcast for CBS Radio and KCBS/74 in San Francisco for 62 years, including ten years as a network correspondent in New York, San Francisco and the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Mozley was the youngest CBS News correspondent when hired in 1942, at age of 21. After covering World War II for the network, he was assigned to the atomic bomb tests at Bikini in the Marshall Islands, then came home to travel on the presidential campaigns of Sen. Robert A. Taft, Richard M. Nixon and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He later became news director of KCBS for fifteen years, where he also served as a news anchor and reporter, in addition to covering the automotive industry in his long-running "California Driver" features. He continues to provide new car reviews in "Don Mozley's Auto Test," which can be heard on the KCBS.com website.

Mozley was honored with the Excellence in Journalism Award by the Society of Professional Journalists' Northern California Chapter in 1986 in recognition of his distinguished career in broadcasting.

A widower, he lives in Kent Woodlands in Marin County.

Don Mozley photo (KCBS, 1978) courtesy of the Bay Area Radio Museum