The aftermath

The staff of the WTVR news department sent me a card after I was fired. It was signed by each photographer, reporter and anchor. It meant a great deal to me to know that the people most intimately knowledgeable about the details of my leaving the station were supportive.

I did exactly what I said I would do: In the two weeks after I was fired from WTVR, I celebrated the holidays with my family while also assessing my future.

Now that 33 years have passed, I can say those two weeks were probably the scariest times of my life. In fact, it's safe to say I was terrified -- primarily by the unknown. I was 35 years old, and I had to decide what to do with the rest of my professional life. I don't know that I could have come through it without support from my family, friends and even my former staff. Everybody offered advice. But nobody -- myself included -- held out much hope that I'd soon find another job in journalism in Richmond.

So what did I have going for me? Well, I was a writer, and I knew how to work in television. But I couldn't figure out how I'd be able to make either or both of those things work for me.

What I briefly lost sight of was the professional connections I had made during the course of my 15 years at WTVR. The term "networking" had not yet come into common use in the late 1970s, but that's what worked for me. It didn't hurt one bit that everybody in Richmond who watched TV or read a newspaper knew that I was unemployed.

My mind was still in a turmoil when the phone rang in early January. The call was from the United Way of Greater Richmond. The organization wanted to use television to recruit volunteers -- not with public service announcements but with a telethon. Their plan was to produce a three-hour live program to originate at the studios of WCVE TV, Richmond's public broadcasting station, and to be simulcast on WWBT TV, the local NBC affiliate. They offered me a three-month job producing the show. Two personal connections had led them to center on me. The woman in charge of the project for the United Way was a friend of my sister's, and the United Way board member who was overseeing the project had been my freshman English professor at the University of Richmond. They offered to pay me $5,000 for 90 days' work. I accepted without reservation.

We did some interesting work on that telethon. We centered on a handful of Richmonders who believed that volunteerism had enriched their lives. They ranged in age from young people to seniors, and their volunteer jobs encompassed a wealth of activities. A teenager was a member of a volunteer rescue squad. A young professional helped veterans at McGuire VA Hospital. A senior was a driver for Meals on Wheels. A young woman was a clown who entertained children with life-threatening diseases.

I developed the program as a series of in-depth videotaped feature stories to be interspersed with live interviews with local celebrities, dignitaries and United Way officials about the values of volunteering. I persuaded local TV anchors and personalities to serve as on-camera hosts.

The program, the theme of which was Making a Difference, turned out to be successful, and the telethon's phone bank took more than 1,000 calls from people who wanted to volunteer. (The United Way was so pleased by the results that they called me back a year later to produce another telethon.)

While I was producing the live program, I was also scrambling to find a permanent job. I had been to seek advice from the chief of the Associated Press Virginia bureau one afternoon in early March. As I left the building, I ran into a colleague and friend who worked for the city's radio-news powerhouse. We chatted on the street for a few minutes, and she told me that she had heard that the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was looking for a writer for its public affairs department. The chief PR person for the museum was a man who had worked for me when I was editor of the University of Richmond student newspaper in the early 1960s.

After a series of interviews with him, his boss and the museum's director, I was hired. I started work at VMFA the week after the United Way telethon aired in 1978. I stayed at VMFA until last month. That job opened my eyes to a field I had never even given a thought to: the fine arts. As I told a museum colleague on the day I left work for the last time, it was a great ride, a great education and one of the most satisfying times of my life.