Maureen,

I really love your blog. I found it when I was googling “Sounds of Late Summer” and fell into your site. I started reading one article but found myself reading them all! I was happy to see that like myself, you love birds. I find myself searching the sky at every turn to see a new or interesting bird. I have even resorted to “calling” the Osprey when I ride on the canal on most days. It is amazing how much you can see when you really start to look. The same is true when you really listen. I have been blown away by the cicadas that practically “scream” during the midday sun in these late, summer days.

Through the years I had enjoyed watching you as the ever charming and professional TV Anchor but I never knew your real talent as a writer. I enjoy reading your insights on different topics and also the insights and comments of your subscribers. I will definitely find myself as a “regular” to your site. Thanks for sharing your wisdom, thoughts and a piece of yourself with others in the CNY area. Linda Quinn

The aforementioned comment is from a kind and knowledgeable lady I’ve known for many years.   Linda Quinn is a registered dietitian and someone we turned to as a credible source for our stories about food while I was employed by WTVH-TV.  Linda now represents New York State Apple Growers and they are lucky to have her.  She is a treasure.

I last saw Linda at Dana Decker’s wine store in Old Fayetteville several months ago.  It was great to reconnect and to meet her husband for the first time, so Linda, this article is inspired by you.  Thank you for your lovely post.

____________________

I wonder if readers most enjoy my two-cent observations about the news, or stories of my every day life, or tales of my family history growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts.  It’s hard to tell because all comments are ridiculously positive.  Someone level some criticism, please, and kids, I don’t mean you.

Now to the birds.  I have become the Crazy Bird Lady of Berkeley Park.  All who know me realize I pick up hobbies at the exclusion of everything else.  Last winter I had beads and pieces of silver and wire spread all over the kitchen table for two months as I dove into my jewelry habit again.   We ate our meals in the dining room, or more often standing at the little kitchen island, because the table was “taken over” by one of “mom’s projects” as Charlie affectionately refers to the mess.

See the chickadee perched atop the feeder?

My ebay obsession has occupied the dining room since February.  All the junk I’m pulling from the bowels of the basement and the rafters of the attic get pulled to the first floor for photographing and temporary storage near the dining room window while I wait for my online auctions to end.  My lovely room in the center of the house masquerades as an antique store turned post office with “treasures”, boxes and bubble wrap all piling up.

Now it’s birds.  With apologies to Christian and all who enter my home, more often than not, you’ll find me frozen still like stone in the middle of my kitchen, watching the dive-bombers come in from the woods to the five bird feeders and one suet cage hanging around my patio and outside my kitchen window.  If I move I’ll scare them away and they’ll face certain starvation.   They need me.  How they found sustenance between the last time I was into birding at my old house fifteen years ago and now, I’ll never know, but I have a reason to get out of bed every day.

In yet another way that I have turned into my mother,  I marvel at the variety of backyard birds visiting my feeders.   Mom used to speak of the goldfinches, titmice, chicadees and cardinals that she spotted at our home on Chandler Street in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Now I’m doing it.  In fact, had I not had this involuntary training in backyard birdwatching as a teenager, I might be starting completely from scratch at identifying the most obvious of backyard birds.    So thanks Mom, for your daily lessons in which bird was which, because they are all visiting me now in Syracuse.

A bird feeder and a suet cage attract nuthatches and woodpeckers outside the breakfast room window

What surprises me even more, is Christian seems entertained by the activity out the window too.  He doesn’t show any interest in knowing one species from the other, but he does stop on his way to the refrigerator to notice there’s a bird hanging upside down eating fat just outside the window.  Is he going to turn into his mother too someday as I have?  Or will he become his dad and smoke cigars?  Ick.

Today, under the threat of rain, I cooked my own bird suet.  Now that’s pathetic.  I rendered beef fat from the P and C grocery store at Nottingham, and added peanut butter, bird seed, cornmeal, popcorn and stale cereal.  As of this writing, it’s still solidifying in the fridge, but the little bits I attempted to spread on the bark of an oak tree and which fell to the ground were gobbled up quickly by Otto, my combination garbage-disposal-mini-dachsund who will probably begin throwing up or pooping on my bed around 2:00 am.

Robins love the birdbath and I love the giant wind chimes by the patio

Linda, you refer to the screaming cicadas at this time of year.  Are you hearing the crows as well?  We have a roost or a pre-roost, I’m not sure which, in the University area and as soon as the weather chills, thousands of crows begin to migrate here from dusk till dawn until spring.  It’s another sign of the season.  The crows haven’t blackened the skies yet, but the Syracuse University students returned to the neighborhood today for the start of classes on Monday.  Soon I’ll hear the roar of football fans in the Carrier Dome right from my front yard, and I’ll hear the crows in the trees out back.

Instead of exercising, I stand like stone at the birds at these feeders, so I don't scare them away from outside the busy kitchen

So far, I’ve observed northern cardinals, chicadees, tufted titmice, white-breasted nut hatches, hairy woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers and gold finches at my feeders, along with the robins, crows and bluejays who swim in the birdbath.  Please tell me what you all have in your backyards.  I’d love to know.

Now can someone please post a comment about vacuuming?

In fifty years of broadcasting, we used to refer to the WTVH-TV building in Syracuse as “our James Street studios”, but now it is closed and reportedly emptied of its contents because on the same day that 40 employees were fired this month, the movers came and loaded much of what was in the gigantic building onto a truck; destination unknown.

Having worked at that place for 25 years, I would say much of what was inside was a hodge podge of various styles of office equipment; metal desks, lots of shelving units, file cabinets and a few pieces of Stickley furniture.   The Chippendale conference table, upholstered chairs and executive desks in cherry always looked out of place, belonging as much in a streamlined mid-century building as Bauhaus at Versailles.  It didn’t match and it’s now all gone and that at least, is not a loss.

The cavernous area behind dual studios A and B was more interesting.  A combination garage, basement, attic and museum to Syracuse broadcasting history, it stored fragments of old sets and props and still more office furniture, stacked to the ceiling for lack of a better place to put it.  I used to wonder what the owners of the television station intended to do with it.  Did they think we’d make shows with that old stuff again when the audience favored syndicated programming from Hollywood?  So, aside from some sentimentality, that stuff is no loss either.  Perhaps it could have been pitched a long time ago.

But what happened to the tapes?   There were several rooms with thousands of rolls of film and videotapes bearing the images of every event that happened in Syracuse in fifty years.  Were they copied digitally onto some master frame and taken elsewhere?  Did the General Managers who came from out of town and left every couple of years even care about the history logged on those tapes?

Chief editor John Ellis who was dismissed along with several other long-tenured behind-the-scenes workers a few years ago was the unofficial keeper of station history.   In the comment section of my article entitled “A Tribute to my Former Colleagues”, dozens of Channel 5 veterans from around the country shared their memories and included praise for John for his ability to disappear among the racks on the second floor, and five minutes later extract the precise 15 seconds of “file tape” essential to the telling of a new story.  He was a one man video catalogue.

I recently asked John if he knew what happened to the tapes, which represented not only the history of a region, but the work ethic of a television station.

Few news stories occur when it’s sunny and 75 degrees.   The smokey house fire on a broiling hot day, the murder in an apartment in January when crews stand outside for hours waiting for an official statement, and on every story in between, all that heavy equipment that has to be lugged, set up and broken down, one to four times per day per crew of two.  You’ll see the emotion of the victims on those tapes, but you won’t see the empathetic souls who taped and interviewed them, nor the tears they fought to hold in.  All that is on those tapes and I’d like to know the plans for them.

John emailed a heartfelt essay of being the “reluctant historian” of WTVH.   He feels the connection to all those tapes that I predicted he would, and I’ll share his words on the blog tomorrow.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might make a trip to Northern Ireland sooner than planned.  Three murders in the last five days don’t seem cause for international alarm, but for those who remember The Troubles, the killings are foreboding.

It’s hard to believe, but decades before the world focused on the struggle between Islamic Fundamentalists and the West,  the war between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland was the most serious conflict on the globe.

On assignment; Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1988

“The Troubles”, as they’re called over there, are not a battle about religion; the Pope hasn’t been involved in 500 years.  It’s really about political dominance and economic opportunity.

For centuries, control of Ireland fell increasingly to the British, until a partition agreement in 1921 divided the island in two; the primarily Catholic Republic of Ireland in the south, and the Protestant Northern Ireland in the northeast corner,  governed as part of the United Kingdom.

While most of the population in each country accepted the split, political and economic advantage in Northern Ireland favored Protestants because theirs was the government in power.  Catholic rebels vowed to unite an independent Ireland; the loyalists or British were determined to keep their presence on the province.   It was a conflict that stewed as mostly a national story until the turbulent 1960s saw an outbreak of violence and hunger strikes and then it was on every TV in the world.

Central New York has close connections to Northern Ireland.  Like much of the Northeastern U.S., many of our ancestors emigrated from Ireland before the partition.  Our former Congressman James Walsh (R-NY) sponsored the Irish Peace Process Cultural and Training Program in 1998 and was an agent of the breakthrough Peace Accord that same year that removed the country from the headlines.

And an Irish woman named Kathleen Kelly settled in Syracuse and since 1980 has brought 6,500 pre-teens from Northern Ireland to central New York with the Project Children organization.  Kathleen hopes the children will return home after a summer with American host families to reverse decades of intolerance.  There is no purer form of detente than what a child sees.

Photojournalist Dan Roach tapes street scenes.

In 1988 I went to Northern Ireland with a producer and a photojournalist from WTVH-TV to research a report on Project Children.  We identified two children from Belfast who would come to Syracuse that summer, a Protestant boy and a Catholic girl to see what their life was like before their stay in the U.S..  Never did I fear for my safety as I did that one week.

The claims that Protestants had better housing, better education, and better jobs due to their majority rule in British Parliament was confirmed, and resentment among Catholics was complete.  Both sides had been killing each other since the 1960s so no one trusted anyone, including us.

When Dan Roach and Paul Burke and I stopped in a pub for a beer one night, the subtle questioning about our politics felt so much like surgery we got out of there sooner than you can say Londonderry.

Maureen with Sinead, a Project Children girl bound for Syracuse

We learned while taping our interviews, you’d better not stand too close to the tall concrete walls that divide Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, or the sound of your presence will prompt a rock or molotov cocktail thrown blindly from the other side.  We backed away many times.

Trouble at a wall which divides neighborhoods by religion.

If America is challenged by race, at least the combatants can  identify the enemy.  With much less to go on than the color of one’s skin, the information needed to practice your prejudice in Northern Ireland comes from where the other person lives and conducts his business, and because the interest in such things is so obvious, it’s considered as rude to bluntly ask for a person’s address as it is for us to ask “how much money do you make?”  So strangers go through a complex conversational dance to determine if the new acquaintance is a loyalist (Protestant) or a Republican (Catholic).  Sometimes mistakes are made and if the examiner is part of a paramilitary group he might order the wrong person be shot in the knee cap, a common form of intimidation and punishment in Northern Ireland.  In that case, sorry.

Paul and Dan, off the clock in Belfast

The landscape of a Belfast neighborhood, 1988

Not since 1999 has there been a political killing reported in Northern Ireland, but that changed Saturday with the fatal shooting of two British soldiers.  Monday a police officer was shot and killed.   An Irish paramilitary group claimed responsibility for all three.

Protestant and Catholic political leaders rushed to condemn the acts this week,  a rare unified statement observers hope will be enough to prevent more violence, but there’s a tense undercurrent.  In Northern Ireland,  an eye for an eye mentality usually answers three killings with three more. No one wants to return to the bloodshed that crippled this picturesque and culturally rich corner of the globe.

Keep an eye out for the news coming out of Northern Ireland.   In the meantime, I’ll submit a primer on The Troubles tomorrow.

Long before I began this blog, WSTM-TV anchor Matt Mulcahy started his.   His article about my dismissal from WTVH-TV where we had anchored together for six terrific years was about the most gracious thing anyone has ever done for me.

I saw Matt and dozens of the most wonderful faces representing decades of employment at TV5 at Riley’s Pub on Syracuse’s northside last night.  For it’s proximity to channels 3 and 5, Riley’s is the “Cheers” of Syracuse television, the most convenient and comfortable place to slug down a beer and a piece of pizza after work.

I have no idea of the actual head count, I never got in the building.  The party out the back door in the parking lot was a blast all by itself.  Never had the pizza, never even got a drink and my friends should be thankful for that because I would have spilled everything down everyone I spent all night hugging.

The only time photojournalists were included in the State Fair postcard

Matt dropped this off in the comment section this morning, but I would love to post it as an article, because there is no description of last night that I could write as well.   Matt, I don’t think you’ll mind, as I kept in your plug for channel 3 at the bottom.  One of us has to keep working to support this group!  Here goes:

RILEY’S REUNION

The din of small talk, clinking glasses and wait staff excusing themselves through the shoulder to shoulder crowd laid the rhythm track for a rapid succession of conversation. One after another familiar faces stepped through the line past the antique bar and deep wood panels of the great Syracuse neighborhood institution Riley’s. Those of us who found a treasured space held our ground and greeted the newcomers as if we were in a reception line. It wasn’t a wedding reception, but more of an Irish wake. A toast to Syracuse’s first television station WTVH Channel 5.

By now you know the story of pending shutdown of the building at 980 James Street. This gathering was not about the building, but rather the blood, sweat and tears of the people who made it run. It was only fitting that longtime producer Lou Gulino organized the gathering. He started thinking he might get ten or twelve old timers together to share war stories of carrying the camera and sticks, of chronicling local history, of laughing at what went wrong on the air and behind the scenes. He didn’t get just ten or twelve… the count pushed over fifty.

The group was intergenerational and interdepartmental. Broadcasters with a Channel 5 past reached back to the 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s. The group from this decade was able to match some faces with the stories they may have heard about past glories and mistakes. There were engineers and directors, reporters and anchors, producers and photographers. There were more gray hairs than their used to be, more pronounced crows feet and maybe an extra pound here or there, but the personalities were the same. They came to life recalling the late night shifts, the hours spent in news cars and the uncontrollable laughs that should not have made air.

Mo Green, Lou Gulino, Terri Peters. Wake up Lou, it's Rip Time

Lizzie Ayers hugged everyone…twice. Maureen Green’s familiar smile beamed. Bob Kirk, Dave Bullard, Rich Isome, Tom Hauf, Donna Adamo, Scott Atkinson, Randy Wenner, Terri Peters and Bill Carey are some of the other names you know, but hardly an inclusive list of people who energized the reunion or who once produced the news. Those people include Jay Labarre, Dan Roach, John Duffy, Joe Picciotto, Pete Peters, Don Rugg, Bryan Honeywell, Greg Turner, Kevin Rinaldo and Butch Charles. Others like Steve and Molly Herwood, Katie Kramer, Dan Young, Rob Jason, Loren Tobia, Jodi Milewitz and Peter Spartano. My apologies for the rest of the names that escape me as I prepare to post.

Randy Wenner wears his memorabilia proudly. All year long.

There were so many names and faces the crowd squeezed out the back door into the remarkably warm late winter air. That catching up continued on the edge of that ten space parking lot. Kids, careers and everything else needed updating. It was the stories that made the night sing. They could hardly be interrupted long enough for a string of digital group photos taken from the back stoop that leads to that lot.

It was a rare television gathering where the crowd grew before the news was off the air for the day. This group is no longer running on that schedule. The old days at Riley’s were a different story. The Election Nights, the stories around the long table in back, the pitchers of beer and lunches where plans were hatched. Tonight it seemed fitting a notepad passed around with a pen. Journalists scribbled names, numbers and e-mails the points of contact that help keep groups together. For this group the bond remains even when apart, they comprise the last ones to work at the first television station in the City of Syracuse.

You can always read the blog on CNYcentral.com.

Thanks for another masterpiece Matt. And if anyone has other photos to share, please let me know.  Would you like to start a blog of your own?   Contact Dick at richhill58@gmail.com. And I see the New York Daily News online picked up Matt’s article.  Way to go Matt!

I’m a sucker for charm, which for the purposes of this article I will define as “anything sounding completely ridiculous that someone else thought was fine”.

This week I caught an infection,  spread to me through my computer by highly contagious individuals all over the country who found my blog and commented on the tribute I wrote about WTVH-TV.   Most of these people worked at the once mighty channel 5, others simply watched it, but everyone was infected with the nostalgia bug and now they’ve infected me.

I’ve sat at my computer for hours this week, delighted to see this blog unfold as a safe and happy place for people with connections to TV5.   And when I say happy, I mean we are all laughing at the memories.   Aloud.  The gossip and back-stabbing?  The infuriating expectations by management?  The morons who called to complain about our news when they didn’t know we were down two photogs and three cameras that day?  We’re not going there.

We’re laughing, even at stuff we weren’t supposed to laugh at, like one of our promotion campaigns that made no sense and yet worked well.   “We put more news….in the news”.  Yes,  we really said that, and for awhile the audience believed that we were putting more news in the news, as opposed to chickens and auto transmissions and floral arrangements.  I chuckle every single time I hear it.  It’s ridiculous.  And it’s charming because someone believed it sounded fine.

All this took me to one of my favorite websites called syracusethenandnow.org.  If there is a better online source for historic photographs, postcards and stories about Syracuse, I would love to know about it.  I can get lost a long time in there.

One of my favorite features is a list of some of the neighborhoods in our city.  The beauty in the old postcards and photographs of the architecture and the municipal landscaping and the elm trees that lined our streets before Dutch Elm Disease killed them all in the 1960s, is breathtaking.  Did James Street truly ever look like that?   Was there really a cast iron fountain with water flowing through the pipes where West Onondaga Street meets Bellevue Avenue?  How on earth did we get from those photographs to where we are today?

From there I click on the real estate developer’s marketing brochures of two of this city’s most wonderful neighborhoods, Strathmore on the west side, and the neighborhood where I live, Berkeley Park near Syracuse University.  Thankfully, these neighborhoods are holding steady, though we’re all increasingly challenged by cinder block drug stores sitting a little too close to the homes.

Strathmore’s development began in 1919, and the sales pitch was enlightening and oh, so charming.  Featuring black and white photographs of the brand new streets and of some of the houses sprouting up, the brochure encouraged potential homeowners to invest in a “high class home” of $5,000.00 that would appreciate along with the population and fortunes of Syracuse.  “The growth of Syracuse will make money for you”.  I love it.

“Beautiful winding drives”.  “A high, dry, healthy location”.  The wording shows you what people feared back then and a new home in Strathmore would fix it.  Penicillin wouldn’t be invented for 9 more years, not widely used for another 15, so disease was difficult to check.  Developers in both neighborhoods promised a lifestyle with “no smoke”, the by-product of manufacturing in inner cities without any pollution control.

And developers knew people were already averse to urban decay, as difficult as that may sound way back in 1919.   “There can be no cheap homes in Strathmore by the Park”.  “A restricted district”.   “No factory, stable, barn, public garage, store, business place, apartment house…..” .   No stables?  No barns?  Even in the city?  That does it for me.  Honey pack up.  We’re moving to Strathmore.  Don’t worry that we can’t get there to check out the $700.00 lots. “A car will call for you anywhere, any time”.  Call for you.  How adorable is that?

“The fondest dream of every normal, patriotic American man and woman is to possess a home”.  Normal.  So utterly charming.   Normal as opposed to what?  Someone who can only afford to rent an apartment?   Charming in capital letters.  Here’s what you dial for an appointment.  Warren 606.

We’ve evolved from those days because we needed to.  When those neighborhoods were built and water flowed from municipal fountains and there was a big budget for flowers for the parks, blacks and women could not vote.  So I wouldn’t go back there if it meant trading human rights for elm trees on all the streets again.  But it would be fun to visit for awhile and walk the neighborhoods as they used to be.

I wonder if 90 years from now, will people find us charming?  Will they look back at the lyrics of 50-Cent and say “Now that was music!”    Pierced tongues?  Aw.     And that television station that put more news in the news.   SO cute, that place.

Relationships keep us going, even when the relationship is between a person and a television station.    For some people, particularly the old or the infirm, a television is the only link to the outside world, the only human voice in a small apartment where no one comes to visit anymore.  I learned that lesson early in my career in TV news, and I’m re-learning it this week with the demise of my old station, WTVH.

Many years ago, perhaps around 1985, I received a fan letter from a very young viewer who it appeared had just learned how to write.  The little girl’s name was Michelle.  She said she enjoyed watching me on the news and I wrote back to thank her, ending the letter with a question.  “How old are you?” I wrote, intending to show praise for good penmanship in a child so young.  Michelle wrote back quickly.  I will never forget the words.  “Dear Maureen.  I am 24.  I was hit by a car when I was 4.”

From that day on, Michelle and I were friends.   She came to watch me do the news at the New York State Fair.  I once brought her swimming at Nottingham high school and took her out for her favorite fast food, a Burger King hamburger.

Michelle called me every single week.  Only when I was on vacation or maternity leave did I not hear from her on a Tuesday.  Her brain injury made her speech breathy and halted and difficult to understand, so the conversations on the phone at my desk in the newsroom sometimes lasted longer than a person on deadline should have allowed, but I knew this relationship was important to Michelle and therefore it was a priority to me.  Michelle taught me a lot about loyalty, patience and longevity. She was as reliable in calling me at Channel 5 as Channel 5 was in broadcasting the news to her and many like her in this region.

It’s what makes this week’s gutting of Channel 5 all the more sad.    As we spoke to a seemingly solitary camera lens the audience looked back and saw a friend, and now there are fewer friends to deliver the news in Syracuse as this town effectively dwindled from three news gathering stations to two.

I’ve heard from so many wonderful old friends who have found this blog and left comments.   And I’ve heard from others too, for whom the relationship was invisible to me until they introduced themselves as someone who watched Channel 5.

There are thousands of people in every city across the country, who in spite of the addictive qualities of the internet, are still turning on the television and making a daily investment in the friend they see there.   As television stations return dividends to investors in order to survive,  let’s hope they remember to invest in the relationships that are often ignored for their invisibility.  Invisible, but profoundly important.

For years people in the Syracuse media labeled WTVH-TV a sinking ship, but  it never fully slipped beneath the surface until yesterday.   Syracuse’s first television station, the once untouchable powerhouse that captured half of the audience watching television at noon and nearly as much at 6 o’clock,  kept plodding along, listless and often lifeless, but still defying common sense to stay afloat.  “How are they still in business?” people would ask.

WTVH 1988

The sad ending came in the form of a station meeting for all employees.  Forty of them reported for a normal day of work, and left an hour later, walking past hired security personnel at the doors, belongings in cardboard boxes.  Like the old luxury liners, life was perfectly normal one moment and then finished the next, thus the common analogy of ships at sea to illustrate life’s other journeys.

Why Channel 5?  Why not Channels 3 and 9 which faced the same competition from the internet, the same market forces in a region of declining population and the same economic recession?    One could argue the other stations have a better talent pool, only some of those staffers used to work at Channel 5 and vice versa.  It’s common in this city for workers to go from one station to another in search of better appreciation and salary.  Some people would say the difference is management.

It’s no coincidence that the longest tenured executives in television generally run the most successful stations.  Channel 9 in Syracuse has the most stability in the front office, on the front lines, and in the many vital jobs behind the camera.   That is followed by Channel 3, with corresponding ratings.  WTVH on the other hand had five general managers in ten years, none of whom grew up here.  The ratings?  Well, let’s just say every new G. M. had a deeper hole from which to dig out.

But before he picked up a shovel, he had a very steep learning curve.  The new boss had no idea who Jean Daugherty or Ron Curtis were,  never heard of “The Magic Toy Shop”, didn’t know televised election night coverage was essentially invented by a shy, unassuming man named Lou Gulino, had no clue of the value of broadcasting the news from the New York State Fair, and when long-time employees suggested the Fair was no place to cut back on the news production budget, they were met with the same old refrain; the reason no one watched anymore was because of TV-5′s hokey old formula,  like featuring Ron Curtis and his family and everyday Central New Yorkers at Christmastime.  By the time these out of town managers realized the importance of connecting with the audience on “Time of Wonder, Time of Joy”, as well as face to face in those final hot days of August, it was too late.  Channel 5 had less of the audience than it had just one year earlier.  WTVH seemed oddly and increasingly out of touch.

In the fifteen months since I was dismissed by a General Manager who left for a new job out of town two months later, people in the business asked me if I took satisfaction that the ratings were in a free fall.  I did not.  I knew enough about the business of running a television station to know March 2, 2009 was coming.  Forty people are now out of a job, forty people with families and mortgages and summer vacations in the planning stages who knew they were plugging their fingers in the dikes, and who plugged them with pride.   Some of the managers who brought this television station down are scattered throughout the country.  I wonder if they even follow the Syracuse University Orangemen anymore.

In encouraging me to go to college, my dad told me a degree is something no one can ever take away from you.   Experience works the same way. For all the people who worked at Channel 5, and the hundreds of thousands more who watched Newscenter 5 through the years;  the TV5 Live Eye, the singular name of Ron-and-Mo, and the silly campaigns “Stand Up And Tell Them You’re From Syracuse” and “Gimme 5″,  will always be on in the living room.

What do you miss most about TV 5?  My pals of 27 years have discovered this site as a place to share their  memories.  For those who watched WTVH from home you’ll see some familiar names in the comments below, but many more that aren’t familiar,  and I hope along with the humor you’ll see how hard everyone worked to get it right for you each day and night; the paycheck only part of what drove this bunch to excellence.

So enjoy the comments, “feel the love” as we say, and don’t be dissuaded from participating in what seems like an insider TV thing.   Viewer Fred Adsit asked if he’d come to the right place to share a story or two and the answer is YES!   Do come in.  As we used to say in every broadcast, “Thank you for joining us”.

Sometimes the news is darn depressing.  And it doesn’t have to be a gigantic event like the World Trade Center attack or the Christmas Tsunami to bring on despair.  It can be the report about the family pet who died outside the burning home even after firefighters fashioned some sort of mouth-to-snout resuscitation.  Or the elderly man who wandered away from his home and was found frozen to death in the woods just beyond his back yard.   Sad tale upon sad tale, every night on the TV news.

You’d think it would drive the news staff crazy to be subjected to this as a line of work, but it’s really the opposite.  I’m living proof that news anchors and reporters really are crazy, but in this way, they’re the sanest people around and we can all learn something by their example.

As anchor of the evening news on WTVH-TV in Syracuse, New York for nearly three decades, audience members  often asked me if I got depressed reporting so much sadness and crime every night.  The answer was no.  I had therapists all around me in the form of other anchors.

Once the commercial hit, we started started talking about everything that wasn’t the news.  Sometimes it was our plan for the dinner hour, but many times, it was about what we had just watched on the program.  We talked and we shared.  Sometimes we got momentarily weepy, often we were outraged, but we always got it out.

We did the weather segment, and then the sports segment, but as those commercials kept coming  so did our feelings.  By the time we got home to our families we were all talked out.  No more anger and grief.  Our feelings were in their rightful place, the guy next to us.

Seriously, you can’t get stuck with something if people take it from you, and in that way my news colleagues were my therapists, and I like to believe I was theirs.  We took the stress away from each other. I used to be surprised my non-news industry friends so often felt blue about the news and now I know why.  Without the benefit of the other anchor and the meteorologist and the sports guy, the news can really get to you.

So if you feel down about what’s happening in the world, and you can’t find a news anchor, or a weatherman or a sports guy, pick up the phone and call a friend.  Tell them what you just saw and heard.  They’ll take it from you.  And if you do it quickly, you’ll still have time to catch the last story of the newscast, the one about the water-skiing squirrel in Iowa.