I tell every young person who asks me for career advice the same thing: “Find the thing you want to do, or even the broad area where you’d like to work, choose the path of least resistance, and plot a course for your way in.”
For me, circa 1973, the thing in “find the thing” was a job in broadcast media, and the path of least resistance was a small-market TV station. It didn’t feel small at the time, mind you, but I realize in retrospect that were I to have attempted to break into the business at the very top (aka big-city TV market), I would almost certainly have been met with failure or, at the very least, stagnation. Going in at the top of any high-power, high-status industry, you run the real risk of being trapped with no chance of advancement. In the case of broadcasting, you end up going for coffee for the experienced superstars, while the station manager hires experienced broadcasters out of the small and medium markets. When it comes to breaking in anywhere, you’re better off turning the bombastic conventional wisdom on its ear and, instead, going small.
The small-market “farm team” training I was getting in North Carolina was energizing, and I cannot stress this enough for anyone serious about breaking into the world of television news broadcasting in particular: plot a course that begins in a small town, because what happened to me is what can happen to anyone in a smaller market television news operation.
It was five o’clock on a Thursday when word quickly spread through the corridors of WTVD-Raleigh/Durham that news anchor Chris Key would not be doing the news that evening. In fact, effective immediately, he would no longer be working at the station.
Max Powell (News Director): Tesh, do you have a sport jacket?
Me: Yes, sir, I do own one, but I don’t have it here.
Powell: Well, grab one of Skip’s jackets [Skip Carpenter, the weatherman] and get ready to go on the air. You’re anchoring the news tonight.
I was about three months into my daily job developing the WTVD news film and infrequently filling in for cameramen and reporters. I had never anchored the news before. I had never even been on the news set. I was in shorts and sneakers. And now—actually, in fifty-eight minutes if I was being precise—I would be delivering the nightly news, sitting between veteran sportscaster Don Shea and weatherman Skip Carpenter.
What happened? Rumors were flying, but there was no time to indulge them. Chris was gone, and in less than an hour I had to figure out how to act like Walter Cronkite—those were the only two things I knew as facts. I remember very little about what happened when the red light went on over the camera at 6:00 p.m. that night. I do remember how soaked with sweat Skip Carpenter’s spare coat was when I handed it back to him. And when we signed off the broadcast, I don’t remember any balloons being released or confetti in the air. Sportscaster Don Shea simply said, “Well, you got through it, kid.”
When I returned to the newsroom to grab my car keys, the room was empty and Max Powell’s door was closed. I imagined he was scouring a drawer full of résumés and demo tapes from potential anchormen. When I returned the next morning to start my film-developing duties, Max asked if I had brought my sport jacket.
“Uh, no,” I answered. “I wasn’t sure that—”
“Well, go back home and get it!” he bellowed with a tone I’d heard my dad use when I left a wet towel on the bed. “Marni will start the film processor.”
One week went by. Then two. Three. I was still anchoring the news, but I definitely felt like I had a target on my back. Fortunately, I had some experience reading the news on WKIX radio, and I was still working the Bill Leslie “fake it in front of the mirror” live stand-up rehearsal technique every day. The biggest challenge for me was not looking like I was frightened to death. That day and over the next several, I also dug out old scripts from the station archives and worked on emulating their style. Then, for the live broadcast I had to memorize each news story so that I kept my head up and faced the camera, instead of looking down to read the copy. Since we were live, I knew I also had to learn the time cues leading into the Cronkite national news. For the first four nights I got cut off midsentence while trying to say, “For Skip Carpenter and Don Shea, I’m John Tesh. Please join us aga—”
Captaining the anchor desk in Raleigh was a classic example of being in the right place at the right time. If I hadn’t had my foot in the door at WTVD, processing the news film and filling in as needed, this enormous break never would have materialized for me. When the coach called my number, I was ready to play. I had been “found ready” in the darkroom.
Years later, while teaching a course in television production at the New School in New York City, I would retell the WKIX and WTVD stories to illustrate what I call the street-smart technique of being “found ready.” This concept of training oneself into readiness has always been popular in the Broadway theater world and has been the plot for a number of classic films where a chorus member is suddenly called up into action as a last-minute replacement for the ailing star of the show. No one has any idea that she has learned all of the leading lady’s lines until she steps into the role and shines. There are many folks who believe they can interview for a job and then the company will train them. It’s wrong thinking. I believe that the moment we dismiss the thought of starting small, of leaning into apprenticeship—no matter how experienced (or proud) we regard ourselves—is the moment we begin to shrink from advancement and growth.
You must never disdain an apprenticeship with no pay. In fact, it is often the height of wisdom to find the perfect mentor and offer your services as an assistant for free. Happy to exploit your cheap and eager spirit, such mentors will often divulge more than the usual trade secrets. In the end, by valuing learning above all else, you will set the stage for your creative expansion, and the money will soon come to you.
—Robert Greene, Mastery1
Whether it was the prayer, the visualization practices to manifest my purpose, or raw persistence (or a combination of them all), what happened to me in the thirty-six months following my first night anchoring the Raleigh TV newscast was what one journalist later described as “an unparalleled flurry of advancement and success in the world of broadcasting.” It began with a change in the tide that was disrupting the entire local news landscape in the United States.
In 1973, a trend had emerged in the world of broadcast news to have news teams present the news, rather than just read fifteen minutes of news headlines from behind an old wooden desk. Major national networks were spending tons of money on glass and stainless steel anchor desks, symphonic news-theme music, logo design, and promotion. Pricey consultants were hired to conduct market research and, based on that research, station directors often demanded that their anchor teams project a friendly and even funny demeanor. It was all very show-business focused. It even had a name among industry insiders: “happy talk news.”
The relationships and banter between news-team members became crucial to developing a relationship with the viewers. So, for example, viewers would sit down to watch the local six o’clock newscast and would see the anchorman poking fun at the weatherman for missing a forecast; the weatherman taking a jab at the sports anchor for his goofy tie; and the sports anchor jabbing the news anchor about his lousy golf game. If this sounds a lot like the cast of the movie Anchorman, there’s a reason for that—the film was set in 1975 and drawn from the real-life 1970s local-news world.
The challenges this presented to station directors were many. Not only did they have to fill twice as much airtime as they used to, but now they had to find a pipeline to “presentable” on-air personalities. In the mid-1970s, news teams were a veritable cast of performers. There were news anchors, weathercasters, sportscasters, investigative reporters, consumer watchdogs, and entertainment reporters. In some of the larger markets, stations were pouring millions of dollars into hiring this talent, building them flashy studios, and purchasing billboard advertising to promote them.
This free market for broadcasters spawned as many opportunities for growing mid-tier markets as it created problems for stagnating local ones. The William Morris Agency created an entire division devoted to representation of local news anchors. Headhunters sprang up as well. One in particular: Sherlee Barish.
Sherlee Barish was a gravelly-voiced, tough-as-nails broadcasting industry headhunter based in Manhattan. In the summer of 1973, I came across an interview with her (“Honey, I know where all the bodies are!”) in TV Guide Magazine, and I made a mental note that if there was ever one person who could get me to where I wanted to go, and if I had the means or opportunity to get in contact with that person, she was it.
Never one to shy away from potentially getting too far out over my skis, once I had been on the air at WTVD for about four months, I made the bold (and what turned out to be fateful) decision to mail Sherlee a VHS tape of my work. The tape was a gross collection of news reading, banter with Don Shea and Skip Carpenter, and a couple of two-minute reports on local fires and car chases. I had no idea if it would reach her, or if it would end up on one of those notorious slush piles that agents often talk about, but two weeks after slapping a wall of stamps on the envelope containing my WTVD demo tape, Sherlee called.
“Hello, John?” The voice was a Broderick Crawford whiskey-and-Marlboro rasp.
“Uh, yes, this is John. Who’s speaking please?” And then in one long, run-on sentence, it poured out.
“John, this is Sherlee Barish. Listen, I received your tape, which is very raw and you don’t have much experience, and why did you write a résumé all in lowercase? Anyway, there’s a station in Orlando called WFTV that is looking for an anchorman and reporter and they like you and want to pay you $17,000 a year to come work for them, they need an answer by tomorrow ’cause they are looking at some other people so call me back tomorrow morning with your answer ’cause they want you to start in two weeks.”
Click.
I was making $7,280 a year, so this was a huge raise. But the decision was not about money. It was about more opportunity.
Max Powell was not surprised when I gave my notice. He was a member of that old-school breed of broadcasters who slept next to three police scanners. He never arrived at a local fire after the fire department. He put a hand on my shoulder and said simply, “Go get ’em, Tesh. We knew you wouldn’t be here long.”
When my last day arrived at WTVD-TV, I was so anxious to start my new position in Florida that I rented a U-Haul trailer, packed up everything I owned, and drove six hundred miles straight through the night from Raleigh to Orlando. When I arrived, exhausted, in Orlando ten hours later, I left the U-Haul locked to the car with a bicycle cable lock and crashed at the Howard Johnson near the WFTV-Orlando studios. Twelve hours of sleep later I ventured out of the motel for a fresh change of clothing. There was no U-Haul. My first thought was that the kind people at the front desk had moved my trailer to the rear parking lot to be out of the way. What I soon learned was that they had done no such thing.
When I called the local police to tell my tale, I was informed that I had, regrettably, arrived in town in the middle of a U-Haul trailer crime wave. Twenty-two travel trailers had been stolen in Orlando in the previous ten days. Terrific. The next day I borrowed a hundred bucks from the WFTV news director and bought a jacket, shirt, and tie. Detectives never recovered the contents of my U-Haul. Most notably I lost all of my prized Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin albums, plus about a hundred 8-track tapes. Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, Blind Faith, and more. All gone. A greater crime, I know not.
Compared to WTVD in Raleigh-Durham, Orlando was the big time. Disney World had opened two years earlier and the population in Central Florida was exploding. Even more impressive as far as I was concerned, Orlando had a teleprompter and four cameras. That was one prompter and three cameras more than WTVD. I mean, seriously, a teleprompter? That I got to use? Up until this point I had been memorizing the nightly news and doing a bad job of it. Reading a teleprompter took a little practice—the first week I resembled a deer caught in the high beams—but after a few weeks I became proficient enough that I was also able to master the “fake look-down” that Walter Cronkite used every night and made America believe he knew everything.
This was broadcasting heaven. John Chancellor and David Brinkley were on NBC; Walter Cronkite was on CBS; Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith were on ABC; and I was on . . . WFTV Orlando. To celebrate, I took my first WFTV paycheck ($325—that’s $1,921 in today’s money) and bought two shirts and three ties. That was two shirts and three ties more than what I had after a night at the Howard Johnson. It wasn’t taking me long at all to settle into my new digs.
Then, four months into the Orlando gig, the phone rang for me in the newsroom following the six o’clock broadcast.
“Young man!” came the deep, refined voice of a man who sounded eerily like Charles Emerson Winchester III from M*A*S*H. “You’re coming to work for me!”
“I’m sorry, who is this?” I glanced around the newsroom.
“This is Irving Waugh, president of WSM Television in Nashville, Tennessee.”
Whoa. In 1974, WSM-TV was the dominant newscast in Nashville. Unlike most stations in North America, WSM ran a full hour of news at 6:00 p.m. and a half hour at 11:00 p.m. Nashville was also one of the first markets (along with St. Louis) to shoot their news footage with electronic video cameras instead of film cameras (this was known as ENG—electronic news gathering). These state-of-the-art news-gathering tools created an enormous amount of competition between stations in every market for live on-the-scene reporting. It was also a key element in the discovery and rise in popularity of Oprah Winfrey, who was, at that time, a nineteen-year-old street reporter in Nashville for rival station WLAC. She was reporting live on everything from brush fires to garden parties (and she could ad lib for hours). If you subscribed to Broadcasting magazine, you knew about WSM-TV.
“I’ve been watching you,” Mr. Waugh boomed through the phone. “I’m in town for a conference and I spied your work on the Channel 9 News. Give me the address of your station, and I’ll have my secretary messenger over a plane ticket. Is next Tuesday good for you?”
“Next Tuesday?”
“Yes, Tuesday, Tuesday. You’ll fly to Nashville on Tuesday morning and I’ll have you back in Orlando by Wednesday evening. It’s a short flight. You’ll be fine. You’ll meet our other anchors and our news director and we’ll see what’s what. I look forward to it.”
Click.
What just happened? Why does everyone in the news business hang up without saying goodbye? I had so many questions, namely because this did not feel like a request from “Irving Waugh, president of WSM Television in Nashville, Tennessee;” it felt like a command. Delivered like something out of Ice Station Zebra: LAUNCH COUNTERMEASURES!
I looked around the newsroom again to see if anyone was cracking up. Newsrooms were notorious for their elaborate phone pranks. I detected none of that now. One hour before the 11:00 p.m. broadcast, the WFTV security guard handed me an envelope labeled “Personal and Confidential.” Inside was a plane ticket (dated Tuesday) and instructions regarding the car service that would meet me upon arrival at Nashville Airport (it would take me straight to the station).
WSM was Nashville’s leading newscast because of its news team, led by uber-popular anchorman Dan Miller and weatherman Pat Sajak. Miller was the embodiment of what TV news executives called the “quintessential anchor.” He was a performer way beyond his pay grade and current standing in Nashville. He was that rare combination of good looks and a voice that would rattle the television set. He had just enough southern in his baritone to leave you warm and fuzzy while simultaneously delivering even the most harrowing, sanguine breaking news stories. He also had a reputation for being kind to his fellow broadcasters. Dan was able to provoke thoughtful answers from his interview subjects, who would often forget they were in the middle of an interview. He was smooth.
Watching the team broadcast the Tuesday six o’clock news from the WSM control room with Mr. Waugh, I was mesmerized. My first thought was simply, Why am I here? It was the most perfect news team I had ever seen. In this mid-size market these were serious, polished broadcasters who could banter back and forth with ease. Miller was rock solid. Sajak was hilarious. It was clear why this was the number one news program in town. So again, why was I here?
The answer came soon from Mr. Waugh. All three network news divisions (NBC, CBS, ABC2) had been chasing Dan for the past two years. They had all been screening his tapes and using them for focus group testing. He consistently scored off the charts in likability and trustworthiness. Dan had turned down huge money offers from Chicago, NYC, Philadelphia, and Miami because he loved his life and work in Nashville. He was a single parent, raising two young daughters who were happy and comfortable. But like the star quarterback in high school, Dan Miller was being heavily recruited, and everyone has a price. Irving Waugh, news director Mike Kettenring, and the entire news organization knew it was only a matter of time before the right deal came along. They were constantly in danger of losing their WSM-TV News franchise signal caller and they currently had no backup quarterback.
Mr. Waugh introduced me to the makeup artist. “Slap some pancake on this young man, Barbara, and let’s see what we’ve got here.”
I was not prepared for an audition. Silly me.
Miller and Sajak were wrapping up the newscast. The stage manager escorted me toward the WSM “Scene at 6” news desk. Miller jumped to his feet with a broad smile.
“Hello, John Tesh. We’ve been waiting for you! Please take a seat. Irving wants us to talk for a while and the guys in the booth will record some of it. Let me introduce you to these crazy camera people. Also, say hello to Pat Sajak!”
Pat trotted over for a handshake and quick hello. I felt my pulse climb into fight-or-flight mode. Cortisol ripped through my bloodstream. It wasn’t like I was meeting Walter Cronkite. Why was I so nervous? Perhaps it was because nine months ago I was developing news film and getting coffee for reporters at a Raleigh-Durham TV station. Maybe it was because a little more than a year ago I was living in a pup tent in a park, smashing concrete with sledgehammers.
Dan sensed my nervousness, so when the tape rolled, he guided me through the process. This was no direct-to-camera teleprompter performance. Irving and Mike would say later that they wanted a look at my ability to have a conversation. Dan and I spoke in front of the cameras for a half hour. He was wonderful. When it was over, I felt nothing but relief and an overpowering urge to return to my proper place as the fledging anchorboy in Orlando.
Instead, I found myself with Mike and Irving in Irving’s palatial office. Irving explained that Nashville viewers were incredibly loyal and that it took them a very long time to warm up to new on-air personalities. Mike only wanted to know about my experience with field reporting. He had just been hired out of his New Orleans news director position and brought with him dozens of accolades and awards for local news coverage and investigative reporting. It was clear that Irving was serious about his news operation. I could learn a lot from Mike; that much was clear just from this brief interaction. He had mentor written all over him.
My flight was scheduled to depart for Orlando in two hours. People kept sticking their heads into Irving’s office to say hello.
“John, say hello to Bob O’Connor. Head of sales,” Irving said by way of introduction.
“Get in here, Huell! John, this is Huell Howser. Huell does our Happy Features segment. I guess you could say Huell owns this town!” Laughter all around.
Huell’s voice sounded like something out of Hee Haw. I would later learn that his features were the most popular segments on the nightly newscast. Even more popular than fires. His features were also usually the longest. (My favorite was his twelve-minute report on a pig who rode on top of a pickup truck.)
Huell would go on to host the California’s Gold television series for PBS. Pat Sajak would leave for a Los Angeles station in 1977, then for Wheel of Fortune in 1981.
In a single moment, a person can choose to change everything. Change doesn’t have to take a long time, it happens the instant we decide.
—Benjamin P. Hardy, Slipstream Time Hacking3
What I thought was an impossibility a year earlier when I walked into WKIX, or nine months earlier when I stumbled into WTVD, or even nine hours earlier when I’d gotten on the plane in Orlando, had, in fact, already occurred. It was becoming very clear that I already had this job. This parade of warm hellos that Irving had ushered through his office wasn’t good old-fashioned southern hospitality, strictly speaking. It was the Welcome Wagon.
It was now up to me to appear as normal as possible as Mr. Waugh kicked everyone out of his office and got serious, just him and me. Man to potential anchorman. Irving did not mince words. They needed a three-year commitment. They would offer me $34,000 a year to co-anchor the six o’clock news with Dan and to be a field reporter on Mike Kettenring’s news team. This was double my Orlando salary. More importantly, it was an opportunity to swim in a much larger pond.
How do you tell your current boss, who hired you out of obscurity only four months ago, that you are “leaving to pursue other interests”? (Yes, that’s what I said.) How you do it is, you walk into your general manager’s office, tell him to his face, and then sit there for as long as they want to keep you so you can hear all about the investment they have made in you and how you are betraying everyone at the station by leaving after only four months. And you sit there and say nothing, because they are right. I sat there and endured a litany of character assassinations and threats of legal action. I felt like a jerk. I was a jerk. But I had not signed a contract with the Orlando station. There was little they could do. I gave two weeks’ notice.
I was a pariah. Had Orlando station owner Walter Windsor not plucked me out of obscurity in Raleigh, Irving Waugh never would have seen me on that television in his hotel room, and this job in Nashville never would have existed. It was dishonorable behavior. It felt ungrateful. It was also the right decision, both in the moment and in retrospect, because it aligned with the purpose that guided me out of my pup tent and the persistence that kept me out of it for good.
“Young man, you’re coming to work for me.” Those eight little words had just manifested in a stunning piece of good fortune. One that would set into motion, within a couple of years, both my broadcasting and music careers, on a scale I only ever dreamed of but never thought truly possible.