When Lisa Lyden joined KOAA (Channels 5&30) in 1983, she shared an office with Lee Douglas, then the station's weekend sports anchor.

Douglas says they hit it off right away. The cheerful, likable young anchor was a natural.

"She used to sing some of her country songs as she got ready for work," Douglas recalls.

It's now exactly 25 years later and, Douglas said, Lisa is just the same.

"She hasn't changed at all," he said. "She's one of those people I think the average person would love to get to know."

Which, said Rob Quirk, her co-anchor since 1991, is the secret of her success.

"When you see her on the air, she's got that smile and that sense of humor," Quirk said.

Off the air, she's the same, he said.

"She doesn't turn on some switch and become some different person," he said.

Douglas said that when people stop him in the grocery store, they always ask about Lisa and Rob.

"The question they ask is, ‘Is Lisa as nice as she seems on camera?'" Douglas said. "And the answer is yes."

Lyden has helmed the city's most successful newscast for a quarter of a century - she must be doing something right. For her part, Lyden thinks the camaraderie she shares with Quirk, Douglas and weather anchor Mike Daniels off-screen creates a comfortable place for viewers at 6 and 10 p.m.

"We're a tight-knit bunch," she said. "They're like my brothers. People in the public, they can see you really like each other."

Douglas, the only one who predates Lyden at KOAA, left the station for a time and later returned, which gives Lyden seniority rights on the local NBC affiliate's remarkably stable news team.

Her vantage point behind the anchor desk has given Lyden a prime viewing place to watch Colorado Springs grow. Powers Boulevard, back in 1983, wasn't much more than cow pastures. The city itself was a third of its present population.

The stories she covered will take you back. Lyden covered the Cabbage Patch doll craze and the airport opening. Daniels remembers closing one program with a story on a rap group, back when rap was the brand-new thing. The story was cut short for time, and the cameras switched unexpectedly to Lyden, who was rapping along at the anchor desk. (It wasn't Lyden's only musical foray: She sang with a country band, released an album and tried out for "Star Search" once - long before "American Idol.")

In its monthlong Lyden retrospective, KOAA has shown the parade of fashions and hairstyles she's worn on the air. The shoulder pads, the man's tie, the big hair of the early '80s and the spiky hairdos of the late '80s.

The technology has changed, of course.

Back then, news cameras were monstrosities that weighed 50 pounds, with the required equipment. Reporters had to find a pay phone to call in from the field and anchors wrote their scripts on typewriters.

KOAA's staff was half its current size, and there were only two news shows a day, at 5:30 and 10 p.m.

Lyden's job, however, is pretty much the same.

"You're just telling the stories," she said. "You're still gathering news. The stories are still changing every day."

Being a TV anchor is a lot less glamorous than many people think, Lyden said, at least in Colorado Springs.

She and Quirk write most of their own scripts and sit in on the news meeting to plan that day's shows.

The pay is not, she said, a "gazillion dollars."

But this is home.

Staying her whole career in Colorado Springs wasn't Lyden's original plan. A native of Florida, she came out west to go to Western State College in Gunnison, then spent her first year as a professional journalist in Grand Junction before coming to KOAA as a 21-yearold weekend anchor.

She was, at the time, Mike Daniels said, "babe-a-licious."

"Still is, though," Daniels said.

She had several opportunities to move on, Lyden said, but she couldn't leave the mountains and the skiing and biking and everything else Colorado has to offer.

With her first 25 years down, how much longer will Lyden be on the air?

"I have no idea," she said.

"Not another 25, I can tell you that. I will not be the Barbara Walters of southern Colorado."

That doesn't mean, though, that she doesn't still love her job.

"I love that you come into the office and what you do stays the same," she said, "but there's always something exciting and new going on."

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CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0275 or awineke@gazette.com