‘Voice of Kadlec’ retires. What’s next for longtime news anchor, broadcaster Jim Hall

For more than 40 years the reassuring voice of Jim Hall has been heard across the airwaves of the Tri-Cities.

Longtime residents still talk to him about his 12 years at KEPR-TV, from sports reporter to news director and anchor.

For the 30 years since he’s remained in the public spotlight as the voice of Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland.

He’s shared Kadlec and other health care news through a weekly television show for 25 years — that’s well over 1,000 episodes of “Community Health Journal.” For 15 years he also produced “Kadlec on Call,” a weekly radio program and a podcast.

This month he turned 65 and entered a new phase of his life, retirement.

“Thirty years is clearly a long time, but when I look back, it seems to have gone pretty quick,” he said in a news release.

He graduated from the Washington State University on a spring Saturday in 1982. The next Monday he showed up for his new job as a fresh-faced journalist for KEPR-TV.

He quickly moved into sports reporting and just “loved it,” covering local basketball, football and soccer, he told the Tri-City Herald.

But big breaking news also seemed to find him.

Just two months into his news career he was on scene for an crash that shook the hydro racing circuit.

At the Saturday qualifying runs on the Columbia River for the next day’s Columbia Cup, Dean Chenowith flipped Miss Budweiser at 175 mph and died.

In a day before cell phones, KEPR had the only video and the station was flooded with requests from other news media.

From a position as sports director he became news director, working at KEPR in an era that saw major changes in the Tri-Cities, sometimes putting it in a national spotlight.

The Hanford nuclear site was making the difficult transition from plutonium production for nuclear weapons to environmental cleanup, the national media were regularly in the Tri-Cities to cover the Washington Public Power Supply System default of $2.25 billion in municipal bonds and the Columbia Generating Station, now the Northwest’s only commercial nuclear power reactor, started up.

For the final two years of his TV career he shared the anchor desk with his wife, Stacy Sorge, although few viewers realized they were married. They had met at KEPR when she was the summer intern and he was a sports reporter.

‘Voice of Kadlec’

In 1993, with no kids and no house, the couple took a leap of faith.

They both resigned with a plan to travel for a couple of months, regroup and decide what to do next in their careers.

Hall assumed he would return to working in the news business. But then Kadlec called.

The hospital had just emerged from a 39-day nursing strike, that left Kadlec and the community bruised.

Hall agreed to a short-term assignment to do some community outreach for the hospital. That grew into 26 years as the director of communications and four years as chief philanthropy officer.

Within a few years he was drawing on his broadcast news experience and education at the WSU Murrow School of Communication to produce and narrate a TV program that shared information about the hospital and health care, using Kadlec employees and other local health professionals as trusted medical experts.

He covered topics like the start of open heart surgery in the Tri-Cities in 2001 and the care options it opened up for residents.

Previously Tri-Cities patients had to travel to Spokane or Seattle for nonsurgical care such as angioplasty to open blocked arteries. The procedure required a heart surgeon be available in case of emergency.

The open heart surgery center helped the Tri-Cities become a place where air ambulances flew patients in for care from Eastern Washington and Oregon, rather than always flying patients out to larger cities for care, Hall said

He was moved by Kadlec caregivers organizing a bittersweet wedding in the hospitals’ chapel for a young woman dying of cancer. He remembers the “just married” sign hanging on the back of her wheelchair as they left the chapel as husband and wife.

But the biggest event of his career was the COVID pandemic.

For 100 straight weeks “Kadlec on Call” focused on the pandemic, with infectious disease experts from Kadlec and the Benton Franklin Health District frequently sharing information, among others. Even Gov. Jay Inslee agreed to be on the program.

Keeping the community informed through the COVID pandemic was a high point of his career, Hall said.

““I still consider myself a journalist,” he said.

Cancer treatment, retirement plans

Kadlec was not only the center of much of Hall’s professional career but also holds an important place in his and Stacy’s personal life.

It was where their two children were born. And it was where Hall was diagnosed with cancer..

He was open about his illness throughout his recently completed 18 months of treatment, which required chemotherapy, radiation, surgery and multiple hospitalizations.

“I’ve seen truly the best of what Kadlec has to offer,” he said.

He was overwhelmed with the kindness of hospital staff and the community, he said.

He and Stacy ate well for 18 months, he joked, as home-cooked meals, restaurant gift cards and Door Dash deliveries kept arriving at their doorstep.

All his scans and tests look good now.

For the next chapter of his life, he plans to continue to regain his health and also to support his wife, Stacy, who took a leave from her job as a second-grade teacher to support him during his cancer treatment.

And you may see him around the halls of Kadlec.

When he announced his retirement on his LinkedIn page, he had a message for Kadlec volunteers — those with “smiling faces helping and guiding our patients at the hospital, community members who serve on our foundation and community mission boards, young people learning that health care is a career worth pursuing.”

Their service makes Kadlec and the Tri-Cities special, he said.

Kadlec volunteers now are reminding him that he has not yet filled out an application to become one of them.

Volunteering, perhaps as a patient escort, is also part of his retirement plan, Hall said.

This story was originally published January 27, 2025 at 5:00 AM.