4
We Have Company
IT IS THE SINGLE MOST-ASKED QUESTION by college students who have chosen to major in journalism/broadcasting: “What advice would you give an aspiring journalist/broadcaster?” When I was in school, I had a three-step approach when meeting somebody who was working in TV. Shake their hand, look ’em in the eye, and fire off the question. I was an annoying student. Then I’d walk away and scribble down those nuggets of career advice.
For a guy who asked that question a lot, these days I love getting that question. It’s a chance to pass on my dad’s advice about being yourself and working harder than the next guy, and I get to share what I’ve experienced in terms of the value of good writing, solid reporting, and learning to do a variety of jobs.
That was the great thing about Macon and Spartanburg. I did everything—shoot, edit, and produce stories. I would sit with producers and learn how they formatted a newscast. So when I’m asked that question, a part of my answer is always, “Be versatile.” I liken it to spring training in baseball. When a manager has to trim his roster to twenty-five players as the season is about to start, and he’s down to that last spot, who gets it? Often it’s the guy who can do more than one thing. He can play both corners of the infield, maybe some outfield, and even fill in if the starting catcher gets hurt. And he’s a switch-hitter. By the same token, when a news director needs to make a hire and sees somebody who can report in the field, shoot video, edit, and even anchor a newscast, that guy is going to have an edge over somebody who’s one-dimensional. Oh, and there’s another thing I tell the “aspiring” crowd: never underestimate the value of timing and luck.
In the summer of 1983, I’d been a general assignment news reporter at WSB-TV in Atlanta for just over a year. A new news director had just been appointed. Rabun Matthews came down from Washington, DC, and on his first day, I was filling in for one of our vacationing sports reporters. The next day Rabun summoned me to his office. As I weaved my way through the cubicles of my fellow reporters in the newsroom, past the assignment desk, I had no idea what awaited me. Did he just want to introduce himself? Was this something all the reporters were doing? Should I start boxing up all my belongings? None of the above. He asked me if I’d be interested in moving from news to sports, and if so, I could be the new weekend sports anchor. Just like that (I’m snapping my fingers for effect) my career path was forever changed.
Timing and luck. At least that’s the way I viewed it at that very moment. It would be fourteen years before my view of timing and luck was transformed into a wondrous view of how God orchestrates every move in my life. How God connects the dots in ways I cannot fathom. Hold on to that thought. In TV parlance, it’s what we call a tease. More to come on that story a little later. Stay tuned.
It is going to sound very stupid when I say this (kind of my comfort zone), but the toughest thing about being the weekend sports anchor is you have to work weekends. That means, of course, that when all of your friends are planning fun stuff for Saturday and Sunday, your wife is telling them, “Oh, that sounds great, but Ernie’s working, so we’ll have to pass.”
I did, however, get a Saturday off in September 1984, though it was unplanned. It was the twenty-ninth, and I was just about to get out of bed and get ready to go downtown for the Georgia Tech–Clemson football game when Cheryl, then eight months pregnant with our first child, informed me this pregnancy would not be nine months in duration. We were the proud parents of Eric Deluca Johnson at 4:00 that afternoon. And honestly, we were clueless.
That’s the thing about being a parent for the first time. You can try to prepare for it and read baby books and talk to your friends who have been there, but you’re basically just learning on the fly. And it is glorious. Until it isn’t. Sometimes you’re downright scared. You can’t figure out why this two-month-old can’t hold down any food, and you’re spending your first Thanksgiving as a family in the hospital. And a doctor is operating on him for something called pyloric stenosis, which you learn affects a lot of firstborn males. The opening between the stomach and the small intestine thickens, and food has nowhere to go but on your favorite shirt again and again and again. Eventually, you start wearing your least favorite shirt because you know how it’s gonna wind up. But the doctors fixed our little guy, and we went merrily along, taking a thousand pictures of Eric doing everything and doing nothing for two and a half years until his little sister came along.
Eric was a lot like me growing up. In the old home movies my dad took of us in the fifties and sixties, with no sound and lots of camera shaking, I was rarely without a bat and ball. I absolutely loved baseball, and Eric was drawn by that same magnet. When I watched him play, I couldn’t help but think about my own childhood and my dream of playing in the majors like my dad had. Eric loved the game too and was good at it. And that’s where things can get a little sideways if you’re not careful. I’ve seen too many dads put too many unrealistic expectations on their sons, and suddenly, they’re not playing because they love the game but because you do. Before you know it, you’ve turned into the Little League manager’s nightmare: the Little League parent.
“My son should be playing shortstop.”
“My son should be hitting leadoff.”
“My son should be pitching.”
“You’re not using my boy the right way. He’s got big league talent, and he’ll never get there if you’re calling the shots.”
My dad was never like that. Thank God. He was a great teacher of the game, having played it at the highest level, and he was always helping me improve, but he let the coaches coach and respected the difficulty of their jobs. I tried to be the same way with Eric, but man, it’s tough, isn’t it, dads? You want so badly for your child to succeed, but you can unwittingly put so much pressure on him that the baseball field is transformed from a wonderland into a torture chamber, and a throwing error or a rally-killing strikeout means a lecture on the way home. It’s dangerous territory.
I always admired my father’s patience and restraint when watching me try to follow in his big league footsteps, and I was grateful, too, that he never made it a requirement that I play baseball. If I had wanted to hang it up, I could have, but that wasn’t going to happen. It was in my blood, and I played the game until reality set in during my second year at the University of Georgia. I was grateful for having played my freshman year, but being cut as a sophomore, while it disappointed me, did not shock me. I simply didn’t have the talent to make it a career.
Eric was a better player at his age than I was. I’ll admit that, and there was a part of me—the hopeful father part—that could see him making it farther than I had. I was disappointed when after making his high school team as a tenth grader he told me he’d had enough. The game just wasn’t fun anymore. He didn’t want to report to school an hour before classes started to work out with the pitchers. The game had lost its magic for him. He had hinted during tryouts that he was tired of playing, but Cheryl and I had urged him to stick it out—not to quit—thinking that if he was good enough to make the squad, his outlook would change. It didn’t, and that’s when we had our talk, and he had his say, and grudgingly I said okay.
Was it the right decision on my part as a dad? Should I have forced him to keep playing? My dad wouldn’t have done that to me, and I wasn’t going to do that to Eric. You know what made it tough? Our bloodlines. Growing up as Ernie Johnson Jr. brought its own set of pressures. I heard the talk as a kid. “The only reason Ernie made the all-star team is because his dad is the Braves’ broadcaster.” Eric was going through some of that same stuff, with a grandfather who was adored by baseball fans and a father who was a sportscaster. He had every right in the world to wonder if he was just supposed to play because of those ties. I didn’t want him burdened with that. I told him, “Big Guy never pushed me to play ball, and he didn’t push me to pursue a career in broadcasting, Eric. I did those things because I was passionate about both. Now here’s what you do. Find what you’re passionate about—what makes your heart beat a little faster—and then go after it with all you’ve got.” I don’t know what other dads would have done, but that’s what this dad did, with no regrets. And you know what? These days I can still find a blackberry when we pull out our gloves and the two of us—the sixty-year-old dad and the thirty-two-year-old son—step out on the lawn and play catch.
While I witnessed Eric’s birth at Cheryl’s bedside, that wouldn’t be the case with Maggie in April 1987. She would be delivered by C-section, and so I was told I’d have to leave the room at some point. I guess the last thing a doctor and his team need to be doing while they’re delivering a baby is scraping Dad off the floor. “All right, Mr. Johnson, it’s time for you . . .” I’m assuming the rest of that sentence was “to leave the room, and we’ll come and get you a little later” because I was already in the hallway. In time, I was invited back in to gaze at my baby daughter for the first time. I had certainly heard all the stories about how little girls get their fathers wrapped around their little fingers, and from my experience, I can verify that it is indeed true. It takes forty-three seconds. So in the span of four years, seven months, and nineteen days from our wedding day, the Johnson family was complete. Cheryl and I had decided having a boy and a girl was pretty much all we could ask for, not to mention handle.
That all changed a few years later.
I came home from work late one afternoon in the fall of 1990, and Cheryl posed this question: “You know what we need to do?” I assumed this was some type of dinner-related question to which I would respond that chicken or fish would be nice. It was not a dinner-related question. “I think we need to adopt a child from Romania. I watched the 20/20 story on ABC the other night and just cried at what’s happening to kids over there. How would you feel about going there to adopt one?” I was not prepared for this line of questioning. Nor was I prepared for the heartbreaking stories I would then read. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu had mandated that the country reverse its low birthrate and to that end had outlawed contraception, even promising “benefits” to women who gave birth to at least five children.
Much of Romania was impoverished, and many children were abandoned and sent to orphanages that soon became overcrowded and under-maintained. If a child had a handicap, he or she would wind up in one of the so-called Homes for the Deficient and Unsalvageable. When the Ceauşescu regime was overthrown in 1989 and the dictator and his wife were executed, the world would learn of Romania’s forgotten and neglected children and of the horrendous conditions in which they were living. And dying. We decided to try in some small way to help.
If you’ve ever been through the process of adoption, you know there is a mountain of paperwork. We filled out every form. There are home studies by adoption agencies to determine if you’re qualified to adopt. We went through a series of those interviews. In the spring of 1991, we were given the green light, found a group of other would-be adoptive parents who were planning a May trip to Romania, and signed up. Our intent was to adopt a baby girl in the eight-month-old range with no permanent handicaps. Our hope was that doctors here in the States could fix whatever illness she might be suffering from and give her a fresh start.
Cheryl would go to Romania with the group we had met. I would stay home and take care of Eric, now six, and Maggie, now four. I would have reinforcements in the child care department with my mom and dad and Cheryl’s parents, Lou and Joan Deluca, who by the way are just about the greatest in-laws in the history of in-laws. On nights when I had to work, one of those sets of grandparents would take care of the kids.
Cheryl packed for what we believed would be a month-long trip, tops. It turned out to be closer to two months. The adoption process was an exercise in international red tape and ever-changing rules. To try to circumvent some of that, my wife, on the advice of the trip organizers, brought a suitcase filled with bribes—cartons of cigarettes, bottles of whiskey, and more cosmetics than you’ll find at a Miss Universe pageant. They would all be used before her journey was over.
Cheryl left for Romania on May 16 and settled into a small apartment in Bucharest. After enlisting the help of a cab driver named Sorin Decu, who also served as her interpreter, she made her first visit to an orphanage in a village outside Bucharest. On May 21, on one of those rare occasions when we were able to secure a phone line, Cheryl detailed that visit for me. As she waited in the lobby, a nurse brought out a child. It was not an eight-month-old girl but a boy, not quite three years old. He had been abandoned in a park at birth. He could not walk. He could not speak. On the other end of the phone, my wife was having trouble speaking. She was in tears.
“Hon, I met this little boy today. The first child I saw. The nurse told me, ‘Do not take. Boy is no good.’ Ern, he has so many issues, he’s so much more than we said we could handle, but I don’t know if I can go the rest of my life wondering what happened to him.”
Her words hung there, demanding a response, for ten seconds, with neither of us speaking. Sometimes you are captured, even on a scratchy telephone line halfway around the world, not by the words you’re hearing but by how they are spoken. Those words were coming from some inner recess of Cheryl’s heart, some place not easily accessed, some place for which only an abandoned, hopeless Romanian orphan had the key. Suddenly, all the things we had talked about and all the things we had written in the required adoption paperwork about the severity of a child’s condition we were willing to take on became secondary.
“Then bring him home.”
His name was Aurel Mihai Urzicaneau. Mihai is the Romanian version of Michael, and that’s what we would call him. Getting him home would require patience, determination, and resolve. Three qualities my wife has in abundance. We hit numerous roadblocks in the process. In fact, at one point, Romania put a temporary stop to all adoptions, but since Cheryl had already started the process, our case was allowed to continue. And those bribes—they came in handy. Can’t get your hands on the necessary paperwork to complete the next step in the process? Give the clerk a bottle of whiskey or a carton of Kools, and suddenly a form that was supposed to take four days is there the next afternoon. Want the nurse to give Michael a little more to eat? One of those American makeup kits did the trick. Cheryl learned quickly that if you’re going to play the adoption game in Romania, sadly, you have to play by certain rules. She’s my hero.
Meanwhile, back in Atlanta, I was preparing a homecoming gift for Cheryl. I had decided to chronicle the events at home as Eric and Maggie and I did life without Mom for nearly two months. I would scribble down notes every day about what we did, and then late at night when the kids were in bed, I would compose “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” It told a tale of blackberry moments as well as nights of utter frustration and even an episode that perfectly illustrated the fact that Dad had passed down his handyman gene to me . . . unfortunately. Here are some excerpts.
May 21, 1991
I left the Techwood studios a little after two in the morning and just drove, windows down, stereo not quite blasting. I drove to my old neighborhood and saw the house I lived in when our family moved to Atlanta. Drove down Roswell Road past the apartment complex where a drunk driver clobbered me and my sister Chris one night almost twenty years ago. Drove past Cheryl’s old neighborhood in Norcross and all the while just tried to put all of this into perspective. While I want to believe that things will go smoothly for Cheryl over there, I don’t want to take anything for granted. While I already consider Aurel Mihai a member of our family, I’ll truly believe it when I see him and Cheryl at the airport.
May 29, 1991
Major faux pas by yours truly today. Eric went back to school after yesterday’s sickness, but I failed to check the calendar and thus failed to attend kindergarten awards day. Eric didn’t mention it until after taking his bath tonight, and then he proceeded to take from his backpack the certificates he had won while the other parents watched. Eric won the reading award and the citizenship award for his class, and I wasn’t there. All I could do was conjure up these images of Eric walking to the podium to pick up his awards when his name was called and scanning the audience for me and Mags. He was so grown up not to make a big deal out of it. And to cap it off, after I read a couple books to the kids before bed, Eric came downstairs with the Best Reader Award for me.
July 1, 1991
It was now time to start getting things ready in earnest, and the first task was to assemble the crib used by Eric and Maggie for Michael. Feeling the need for a work area that would be spacious, I chose the den despite the fact that the crib would go in Eric’s room upstairs. I figured, not having taken the time to measure, that the crib would fit through the door of Eric’s room. I started at 12:45, and within fifteen minutes, I had finished . . . I thought. Actually, the sides of the crib were on backward, so I disassembled it and within twenty-five minutes had reassembled it.
My success was diminished somewhat when Maggie asked me why I hadn’t just put it together in Eric’s room (just what I needed to hear from a four-year-old). Eric helped me carry the crib upstairs. I would have had an easier time fitting a 1976 El Camino through that bedroom door. So at 1:55, I was outside Eric’s room again disassembling the crib. After moving all the parts into Eric’s room, I put the crib back together, but now the frame that holds the mattress would not fit. So I made the decision to once again take it all apart. It was 3:00, and I was back to square one. Shortly before 4:00, I finally finished. I stood back and admired my work, disregarding the fact that just about anybody else in the country not only would have completed the job but also would have watched Gone with the Wind and been pretty deep into Crime and Punishment in the same period of time.
July 5, 1991
Cheryl’s not back yet, but she will be tomorrow, so this will be the final chapter. The kids and I hit Toys “R” Us today for crib sheets, a car seat, and a couple toys for themselves, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the next day—what it will be like when Cheryl and Michael get off the plane. We plan to have vanilla wafers for Michael and flowers for Cheryl, and there will be family members there, and it’s just gonna be . . . nice.
Cheryl is on her way home now and called today from Frankfurt. I could tell by the first words out of her mouth that she was in the best mood she’d been in since May 16. There was a sense of total relief and accomplishment that I couldn’t have been imagining. She had done it, and in twenty-four hours, she could begin telling me detail by detail just what it was like over there. That’s really the story worth telling. Welcome home.
On Saturday, July 6, Cheryl’s plane touched down in Atlanta, and now all the Johnsons and all the Delucas would get their first up close look at this kid named Michael, whom we had only seen in photographs. The doors at the international concourse were those automatic kind that slide open and shut, and we really couldn’t see through them. So every time they slid open, we’d sit up or stand up and hope that Cheryl would appear. There were a lot of false starts.
Then the doors slid open and out walked this incredibly courageous woman pushing a stroller that appeared to be about as frail as the passenger it carried. Everybody was hugging and kissing and crying and . . . gazing at this blond-haired boy. A month shy of his third birthday, Michael was tiny and silent, aside from making a few indiscernible sounds. These skinny legs were sticking out from a pair of shorts, and the white socks on his feet had slid down near his heels. He wasn’t wearing shoes because he couldn’t wear shoes. His left foot was turned in at the ankle at nearly a ninety-degree angle. He was passed from one family member to another like a gift that everybody wants to see on Christmas morning.
And what a gift he was.
And now a footnote to this Romanian adventure. I mentioned that Cheryl was aided in her journey by a cab driver named Sorin Decu. He took her wherever she needed to go. He was able to break through the language barrier at every step and give Cheryl the answers to the myriad questions she had.
After Cheryl was back home, we heard from Sorin that he was attempting to emigrate to the United States. He had the proper work papers and was ready to travel to the United States while his wife and two children stayed behind. Once Sorin was able to establish himself in the American workforce and in time become a citizen, he would be able to bring his family over. It would be a two-year process. For the first six months of his US stay, I guess you can say we adopted him too.
We turned one of the rooms in the basement into his home. He stayed with us, working every day, eating at our kitchen table, even babysitting Michael so Cheryl and I could go out for dinner every now and then. In time, Sorin saved enough money to afford a place of his own, and it felt as if one of our own kids was moving out.
Sorin stayed in touch, letting us know how the process of bringing his family to the United States was going and inviting us to the Romanian church he had discovered. And when we attended his citizenship ceremony, it was as if we were celebrating one of our kids’ graduations. Eventually, his perseverance was rewarded, and he welcomed his wife and kids to the United States as they left their homeland for a whole new life. Two years later Sorin and his wife welcomed another son into the world.
They named him Michael.