Life happens, and then in the blink of an eye it is over. People near and dear get old and move on. Celebrating meaningful anniversaries allows snatches of memory to be retrieved.
This week I have been remembering 55 years in the news business. Five and a half decades, starting as a cub reporter on Eyewitness News in New York, Labor Day week, September 1970.
A recent graduate of Brooklyn Law School, I was 27 at the time, adrift and living on Avenue C. on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I paid my rent with the stipend from a fellowship in Poverty Law sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania.
My gritty clientele included a Puerto Rican activist group called the Young Lords. From 1969 to 1970, they dominated local New York news through various direct actions, like sit-ins to protest conditions at local hospitals.
Their masterstroke was seizing a nearly defunct church in Spanish Harlem. The congregation had largely moved out to the suburbs. The building was empty during the week, and the Lord’s did what many similar radical groups of that era did: They seized the building and reopened it as an ad hoc community service center, dispensing free breakfasts to neighborhood children and offering free testing for lead paint poisoning, a big problem back in the day.
As one of the negotiators, I appeared as a guest on the Today Show and got spotted by Al Primo, creator of Eyewitness News. Primo was in the process of racially integrating local television news in New York in 1970, still almost all-white, with near-zero people of color, an extraordinary fact given there were over a million Blacks and a million or more Latinos in the Five Boroughs at the time.
Primo sponsored me for a summer program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The program was run by Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow’s legendary producer at CBS News, who taught me and a class of young minorities the basics of how to be television reporters.
Thinking back to how I was discovered and then ended up in an affirmative action program, I wonder if the Trump Administration, with its restrictions on DEI, would even allow a similar opportunity.
That spring and summer of 1970 were tumultuous. The old civil rights movement was slowing down, as energy shifted to anti-war protests around the country.
Colleges were tentatively reopening after being rocked by campus violence, most grievously at Kent State University about 45 miles from where I am writing this, where in May 1970 four kids were killed, nine others injured when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on campus protestors.
President Richard Nixon was deploying 1,000 FBI agents around the country to crack down on agitators. Campus chaos and the fierce debate over federalizing policing did not start with President Trump.
There aren’t many still spry who were there when the endless Vietnam War was tearing the nation apart.
I have been on television for ten thousand or more hours. Regis may be the only talent with a similar tenure. My entire adult life has played out in plain view.
Audiences have watched my high and low drama over the decades, marriages, children born, divorces, triumphs; the decades-long campaign to humanize the care and treatment of the developmentally disabled. There were also the not-so-triumphant experiences of getting my nose broken in the brawls with the skinheads and opening Al Capone’s empty vault.
The signposts are dramatic. Goodnight America, Good Morning America, ABC News 20/20, Latin America correspondent, war correspondent, talk show host, Simpson, Arafat, Manson, Castro, Jagger, Lennon, McCartney, Carter, Clinton, Bush, Trump, Ali, Celebrity Apprentice, Emmys, Kennedys, Peabody, group homes, FARC, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel.
To those who have taken the ride over the years, thank you. Happy 55th
