STAN BOHRMAN, 63, FORMER NEWS ANCHOR ON KYW-TV

Stan Bohrman, 63, a former Channel 3 (KYW-TV) investigative reporter and news anchor who won a variety of accolades during four decades in broadcasting, died Thursday in Los Angeles.

Mr. Bohrman died of cancer at Tarzana Medical Center, according to his son David, a producer for NBC-TV. He had returned to Los Angeles, where he was raised and first made his name, during the waning days of his career.

By the time he retired in 1990, Mr. Bohrman had come full circle: from doing radio and television in his hometown, through positions at stations in San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, St. Louis and Minneapolis, through the anchor's post at Channel 3, and then back into radio in New York and Los Angeles.

His arrival in Philadelphia in 1980 was heralded by news releases that spoke of his career's eclectic highlights. In Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, for instance, he co-hosted a daytime talk show, Tempo, with Regis Philbin and Maria Cole, widow of Nat "King" Cole. In San Francisco, he won awards for a report on Vietnamese war orphans and coverage of the conviction of Patty Hearst.

But in Philadelphia, he was always best-remembered for a particular interview that took place shortly after he joined the station as a reporter on its "I-Team" investigative unit.

He had staked out the Chestnut Hill home of former Mayor Frank L. Rizzo on Nov. 10, 1980, for a story on the number of police officers who were providing security for Rizzo.

The former mayor, unhappy with the attention, confronted the I-Team's camera crew and Mr. Bohrman. In the course of 2 1/2 minutes on tape, Rizzo called Mr. Bohrman a "creep," a "lush," a "crumb," a "lush coward," a ''yellow sneak" and a variety of other colorful names.

KYW management complained that city police officers stood by while Rizzo damaged their video equipment. But Rizzo was hardly contrite. Later on, in fact, he took credit for helping Mr. Bohrman's career - Channel 3 promoted him to anchor less than a year later.

"They made him an anchorman," Rizzo said in a radio interview. "Tangle with me, and you become a star."

Stardom can be a fleeting thing. In February 1983, KYW let him go, and accounts at the time said his appearance was largely to blame. The Inquirer's Lee Winfrey called him "an admired investigative reporter who was thought to be deficient in the cosmetic aspects of TV."

Mr. Bohrman can still occasionally be seen on TV. In one of those rare life-precedes-art events, he played the anchor on the movie The China Syndrome. The make-believe station, in the fictional portrayal of a nuclear meltdown, was Channel 3.