Game 49: Susan Stratton - Kathy's Carrot Cake
Before Spectrum, before Time Warner Cable, before Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket, there was KCAL 9.For generations of Angelenos, Dodgers and Lakers games on KCAL 9 were a unifying transmission, a VHF beam into homes from Hawthorne to Sun Valley. Something about KCAL 9 felt more local than its competitors like KABC 7 or KNBC 4. The anchors felt like the charismatic kid in your 8th grade algebra class, the one who got Bs on purpose to not stand out, instead of assembly line anchors on other channels. Car chases felt more vibrant and alive when watched on channel 9, no ABC 7 heads up display required. KTTV Fox 11 wasn’t being name dropped by Snoop Dogg. He was getting “rich on the fakers who hate / Bakin' my cake / And catch the Lakers at 8 / On channel 9 / Pop a bottle of wine.” On Channel 9 with the rest of us. No cable package required.
When I sat down to do research on Susan and Dick Stratton, listed as “Director of T.V. Games, Channel 9,” my patriarchal mindset assumed Dick was the man behind the thousands of Laker games broadcast throughout the Southland. And while Dick, who died in 2019, was a T.V. director for Channel 11, it was his wife Susan who was the woman behind three decades of Laker broadcasts going back to 1977.
Susan grew up a sports fan in small town Pennsylvania, the daughter of a high school basketball coach who initially majored in Home Economics at Penn State. But a job working in the news department at a Washington D.C. ABC affiliate led her down the path to working in T.V. production. After marrying Dick in 1971, the couple moved to bustling Los Angeles where Dick was hired as an executive at Channel 11. Not long after, Susan started freelancing for KCAL 9 and found work producing and directing pre-season Rams games. The NFL is still more popular than the NBA today, but back in the mid 1970s, the NBA might as well have been a 2nd-tier league compared to football and the MLB. It was in that context that Stratton got hired as producer/director of Lakers games when KCAL 9 landed the team in 1977. A woman had never been in charge of televised basketball games, but this was only a year after the ABA-NBA merger. Other producers offered the job might’ve likened it to televised Frisbee.
Learning on the job with little support, Susan got off to a rough start. Lakers announcer Chick Hearn was vehemently against her hiring. According to Susan, it wasn’t because she was a woman, but instead was her having “no professional basketball experience.” But after an early season broadcast disaster against the New Jersey Nets, Stratton found unexpected support from the most unlikely of people: The Lakers’ jerk of an owner, Jack Kent Cooke. She eventually won over Hearn as well, who would regularly reference her by name on air throughout their 25 year partnership. By the time of his 2002 death, she was jokingly referred to as “the other woman” in Hearn’s life.
While it was Cooke’s successor Jerry Buss who came up with Showtime, the idea that Lakers games should have live music and cheerleaders and an in-arena night club designed to bring out Hollywood’s A-list celebrities, it was Stratton who made sure even the poorest Angeleno with a T.V. set was privy to the hottest ticket in town. By the early ‘90s, Stratton was the executive producer of Lakers telecasts, the head honcho. And in 1992, she hired a producer/Brutus by the name of Jeff Proctor who would later stab her in the back.
Three years after Hearn’s 2002 death, KCAL 9 received an order from parent company Viacom to cut costs. In Oct. 2005, the LA Daily News reported that this meant that the Emmy winning in-house team run by “Exec. Producer Jeff Proctor, Lakers Exec. Producer Susan Stratton, Lakers Director Mark Shah and five other technicians” would be fired by the end of the year. But two months later came good news: Proctor resigned from KCAL 9 to co-found an independent media company called ProAngle Media with the head of the Staples Center’s production arm. And this new company won the rights to produce Laker games for KCAL 9. There would be cuts to equipment and some personal, but the people responsible for running the show would remain.
Six months later at the end of the 2005-2006 season, Proctor fired the woman who hired him over twenty years earlier. “Sometimes difficult decisions need to be made,” he said. “Personally, I love Susan Stratton and she was the first person to hire me as a producer. But I felt it was time to make a change. ... It is never easy to replace an icon.” According to Tom Hoffarth of the Daily News, once Susan lost her biggest ally in Hearn, she was dead in the water. Stu Lantz was on her side, but I don’t think of Stu Lantz as a power broker in the Lakers organization.
Proctor’s move for power was short-lived and short-sighted. Just 5 years later, the Lakers signed a $3 billion deal with Time Warner Cable for the provider to become the home of the Lakers. After decades of free Laker games on KCAL 9 and cable-only games on Fox Sports West, Spectrum Sportsnet became the exclusive home of every Laker game. Unless you pay for this exclusive channel or illegally stream the games, it’s the only way to watch all 82.
------------------
Like Claire Rothman, Susan was a trailblazer in a male-dominated field. But unlike Susan, she didn’t have a say when it was time to call it quits. Corporate greed led to her downfall. One memo from an executive who was told by an executive who was told by the top executive reporting to the board of directors set in motion the chain of events that led to her downfall. However, her work is not only remembered by nostalgic fans like myself who, with one look at a grainy, synth-laded broadcast uploaded to YouTube, are flooded with warm memories, but also by her peers. In 2012, Susan was awarded the Governor’s Award by the L.A. Area Emmys, solidifying the role she played in spreading Laker Lore across Southern California.
———————————————
Kathy’s Carrot Cake
Cake Batter:
4 unbeaten eggs
2 cups sugar
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
3 cups raw carrots, grated
1 ½ cups salad oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
Optional (I add the following):
½ teaspoon nutmeg
Dash of ground cloves
¾ cup raisins
Frosting:
8-ounce package of cream cheese, softened
1 pound box confectioners sugar, sifted
Batter: Mix eggs, carrots, sugar, and oil until well mixed. Add the rest of the ingredients, mixing well. Pour into 2 well oiled and floured 9-inch round cake pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 40-45 minutes or until cake springs back in center when lightly touched. Cool 10 minutes before turning out; cool completely before frosting.
Frosting: Cream together sugar and cream cheese with a hand mixer on low speed. Add a little milk or vanilla to aid mixing.
Never underestimate a cake. I had gotten a little cocky over the last couple months of Goldstein and Gasol, from my first pie made with an hand-powered egg beater to my newer bakes made with my electric hand mixer, and was feeling pretty good about my baking skills. But this carrot cake was a new beast. A double decker cake. How hard could it be? The ingredients were nothing new, except for 3 cups of grated carrots.
Turns out grating 3 cups of carrots by hand is really fucking hard.
But once I got past that step, it wasn’t too hard. Just time consuming, on a busy Saturday where I got up at 10am and didn’t stop moving until the frosting was set at 7pm. The first cake came out just fine, but the second one was stuck in its pan. Finally, with a little help from a butter knife, I was able to plop it out without too much damage. I stacked the two cakes, covered it in frosting, and then took a knife to it. Perfect, both in taste and internal layering.
The next day, Kobe Bryant died. I ate a lot of this cake. 4 days after I baked this cake, it still remained moist and delicious despite sitting on my kitchen table. The leftovers are now in my fridge. I have so much goddamn cake leftover. If you’re reading this on the saturday this blog was published, come by my apartment and get some cake!
