It'll be hard to live without our anchor

"This has been a thrilling, thrilling ride — I can't imagine life without this." — KSL anchorman Dick Nourse

Hey, Nourse, me neither.

Dick Nourse, who has been anchoring the evening news at KSL since the invention of electricity, has announced that when he signs off Wednesday night that's it. He's outta here. Gone like something off Bonds' bat. Doing a Cronkite. Switching from "That's the way it is" to "That's the way it was."

He's 67 and contends he deserves it, all the while seemingly totally oblivious to the mess he's leaving behind.

That would be the rest of us.

I don't mean to be presumptuous and speak for everyone, but I'm guessing I'm not alone. It's not going to be easy without Dick Nourse closing out the day. He's the closest thing we have to a Swiss watch. Every night, there he is, belting out the news in that baritone voice and square jaw that was as made for TV as Jordan's jumper was made for the NBA.

Seriously, has heaven made a better anchorman? It takes something special to read the news for 43 straight years and not get on anyone's nerves. Dick Nourse never crossed the border one way into obnoxious or the other way into preachy or the other way into bubbly. He was always as solid as a $20 bill. It wasn't so much what he said as how he said it. He sounded like Mount Rushmore if it could talk.

And he did not age. He was always 45. He was 45 when he was 25 and he was 45 when he was 65 and he's 45 as we speak, two days before the R word.

The great part about him holding steady at 45 was that all those of us watching the Eyewitness News never felt like we were getting any older either.

Others on the telecast came and went — Shelley Thomas, who was as good in her own right as Nourse ... Bob Welti, world's friendliest weatherman ... sportscaster Paul James ... the great Jim Nantz ... most recently weatherman Mark Eubank, who retired this year from KSL after 16 years.

The '60s melded into the '70s into the '80s into the '90s into the '00s ...

... and Nourse never faded.

Who knows how he did it, but in a business where you're only as good as your last headshot or birthday, whichever looks worse, where contracts are written in disappearing ink, where you're constantly rated, where anchors are anything but, he was a fixture.