Dori wishes KIRO 7 TV’s Steve Raible happy retirement after 4-decade career

Longtime Seattle broadcaster Steve Raible announced Wednesday evening he is retiring after nearly 40 years at KIRO 7 TV.

The nightly news anchor and ‘Voice of the Seahawks’ said he would be leaving the TV station at the end of the spring to spend more time with his family. However, he will continue to do play-by-play announcing of Seahawks games during football season.

Raible started out as a Seattle Seahawks player, but knew all along that he wanted to be a broadcast journalist. Through his friendships with local sports broadcasters, he worked his way into radio and television gigs. Two days after getting married, he began a two-week stint hosting KING 5’s “Seattle Today” as a fill-in.

After working at KIRO 7 TV for about a decade, Raible was moved from sports reporting to full-time news. It was a startling announcement at first, but he relished the challenge and the meaningful work.

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“It just opened up so many more avenues, yes, but it opened my eyes up to how to prepare … to do newscasts and to understand your community and to be able to talk every day about the important issues,” he told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson.

Luckily, KIRO 7 allowed him to learn on the job from some of the veterans in the business, such as his then-co-anchor, Susan Hutchison.

“[News] is really important information that I think people want in their lives, and I thought, ‘I could do more in this community and be of greater service on that side of the desk,'” he said of the decision to make the switch.

Now, Raible said, it is time to pass the torch to the next generation of news reporters.

“Monique Ming Laven, my co-anchor, is the best in the business, and she deserves somebody who doesn’t look like her great-granddad,” Raible laughed.

“And I’m sitting at home recovering from knee replacement talking to you,” chuckled Dori.

With so much more time on his hands, Raible looks forward to traveling with his wife, Sharon, as well as spending time with their new great-niece in Bellingham and relatives on the East Coast.

“I’ve spent a lot of years eating out of Tupperware, or coming home, grabbing a quick dinner, running back to the station to do the 11 o’clock news, and getting home at midnight,” he said. “It just seemed like it was time.”

Raible said he still might appear on KIRO 7 from time to time, noting, “We’re not going to get in a raft and head off to some deserted island somewhere.”

He might even use some of his spare time to “heckle [Dori] at the station.”

You can hear Raible again next fall illustrating every exciting move at the Seahawks games, with Dori hosting the pre- and post-game shows.

“The way this season ended, the way this young team grew up, gosh, we could really be having some great fun next season,” Raible said.

Ever the admirer of high achievers, Dori was full of respect for Raible’s successful, tireless career.

“You have succeeded at the highest level in the NFL, and then in broadcasting, you replaced [longtime KIRO Radio and KIRO 7 broadcaster] Wayne Cody doing sports — and that is about as big a set of shoes … about as big a deal as you could have,” Dori told him.

Raible remembered that Cody gave him an important piece of advice: “You are letting the fans know that this is fun — you’re having a great time, and you want them to be a part of it.”

“Wayne never let the facts of anything get in the way of a good story,” Raible laughed.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.