My hair caught fire...and other TV news tidbits.
On exploding lights, the word "anchorman," and more.
The one thing I had in common with Michael Jackson: our hair caught fire.
Jackson: 1984, while filming a commercial. Me: early ‘90s, during a commercial.
A studio light exploded while our newscast was in a commercial break (this is decades ago), and it sounded like a gunshot. My co-anchor Nancy and I were dazed for a second. What just happened? Then she said: “Your hair’s on fire!”
I wish I had a picture.
Sure enough, a little column was smoke was rising from the top of my head. It was up there, on top, and not coming from my face, because (thank God) I had been looking down at my script when the exploding light shot molten glass in my direction.
I walked off and let Nancy finish the show while everyone made sure I was alright. I was. I was left with a dime-sized spot where the hair was burned off. (Nowadays, I have a huge hair-less spot on top, toward the back – unrelated to explosions.)
The weird name of my job
“Anchorman.” Since I ended up doing this over parts of five decades, you’d think I would know what the word means. It’s goofy. Where’s the anchor? Where’s the ship? (In England, and other sensible countries, the name of the job is more straightforward: news presenter or news reader.) In many talks I’ve given over the years, I have appealed to the Webster’s 9th New Collegiate Dictionary.
Because it’s fun:
1. One who is last, as in the last member of a relay team.
2. One who has the lowest scholastic standing in his graduating class.
3. One who reads the news.
It never failed to get laughs. As for The Actual Story behind “anchorman”:
The term “anchor” as descriptor of a TV news reader is often attributed to CBS News legend (and 60 Minutes creator) Don Hewitt. But, per Ben Zimmer in Slate, it actually goes back to the late 1940s:
John Cameron Swayze, a popular news commentator, was a regular on NBC’s Who Said That?, a show in which panelists had to identify the authors of famous quotations. An article in the Washington Post on April 3, 1949, explained that Swayze was “anchor man in an otherwise changing team of experts.”
The name stuck and became applied to newscasters. And of course it really took off after becoming attached to Walter Cronkite on CBS News in the early ‘50s. He was the Platonic ideal of an anchorman. (Well, he, and the also-recently-retired Jim Gardner in my own TV market, Philadelphia.)
The Stabilizer?
From a BBC website on broadcast journalism:
In TV news, a studio news presenter is sometimes called an anchor: like a ship’s anchor, they have a stabilising role.
Oh.
Well, I hope that was true of my co-anchoring cohorts and me at WFMZ. When things were crashing and burning behind the scenes, or when news was breaking and we were told in our earpieces, “just keep talking,” well, I’m not sure how stable we kept things.
(We’ll forgive the otherwise-sensible Brits for their weird spellings – e.g., stabilising. In American English, i.e., real English, we know what to do with the letter “z.” I apologise for this interruption.)
Eyewitness news, Bible style
I also enjoyed telling groups – especially church groups – about the connection between journalism and the Bible.
At the beginning of Luke’s Gospel – one of the four New Testament biographies of Jesus – Luke refers to reports in circulation about Christ, based on the accounts of eyewitnesses:
With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you… (Luke 1:3 NIV)
Luke was a physician. And a journalist, too.
Can't help but read these in your voice, Poppy!
Great story. Anchorman also works great as nautical term. Maybe it’s time you got a boat.