Max Factor and me

Anchoring the late news was -- for me -- more about show biz than journalism.

Starting in late 1971, I anchored the late news at WTVR TV for about a year. The previous anchorman had quit, and I was tapped to fill in. It took management a long time to find a permanent replacement.

I enjoyed the experience, because I was developing another skill, but I never liked the folderol that went with it. Makeup, for example. I found I looked almost normal if I wore Max Factor Tan #2 pancake. The closest place to buy it was at the old People's Drug Store at Boulevard and Broad. There was a crotchety old lady who worked at the cosmetics counter. She always gave me the evil eye when I told her what I needed. I think she probably thought I was leading a secret life in drag because I was so specific about what I wanted. I never bothered to tell her I used it for television: Imagining her fantasy about my private life was much more fun.

My hair has never been particularly tame, so the last thing I'd do before I left the newsroom to head to the studio was to comb my hair. Invariably, it needed combing again by the time I got behind the anchor desk. One of the more interesting things I learned was to comb my hair using the studio's preview monitor while the engineers were making last-minute adjustments to the cameras.

It's not at all like combing your hair in a mirror. If you stand in front of a mirror, your right hand is on your right in the reflection. But if you're looking into a TV monitor, your right hand is on your left as you look at the screen. It took a l-o-n-g time before I could make that mental adjustment while trying to do something as simple as running a comb through my hair.

I enjoyed being an anchorman not because I liked having the on-air face time. What I really liked was putting the broadcast together -- deciding what stories would run in which order and timing the newscast to the exact second so that all of the commercials ran in the right places and we finished in time for the next program to start at exactly 11:30:00 p.m. I also enjoyed it when a story broke late in the evening and we had to tear the lineup apart and, sometimes, wing it. That was journalism, not show biz.

But when a new anchorman was hired, I was glad to get back to being a reporter.