In June of 1971, when Jessica Savitch inserted herself into television news, she became a small component in an immense electronic system whose rapid expansion was driven by extraordinarily brutal competition.
KHOU, the Houston station that hired her, was one of approximately 600 television stations then broadcasting in the United States. KHOU`s shows could be seen by more than 2 million people in three-quarters of a million homes. Although KHOU was in second place among the four stations in Houston, it was immensely profitable, a circumstance that played a considerable role in Jessica Savitch`s future.
In May, 1971, news director Dick John received a big brown envelope. When he opened it, out fell a striking black-and-white glossy of Savitch and an artfully composed resume that suggested, but did not actually say, that she`d had broadcast news experience.
John asked her to come for an interview. Within an hour of Jessica Savitch`s arrival at the station, John said later, he knew he wanted to hire her. ”She was the most ambitious, career-oriented person I ever saw,” he said. ”You`d have to tie her down to keep her from making it.”
Savitch`s first weeks at KHOU were not promising. She despised the small- town atmosphere of Houston and the deep-fried Southern cuisine. ”I hate the humidity and the puppy-dog open friendliness of the people,” she wrote in a letter. ”Maybe I am just getting old.” Nor was the station itself all that comfortable for a Yankee with a pro-civil rights, pro-women`s movement outlook.
Although a few female reporters already had passed through, KHOU remained a resolutely male enclave; when Savitch arrived, the only other woman in the newsroom was Dick John`s secretary, Roseanne Colletti.
A more immediate problem was that Savitch did not have the right background for her job. ”We couldn`t figure out why John hired her,” said John Shaw, a cameraman who shot many of Jessica`s stories.
Shaw taught Savitch the basics, from how to write, produce, film and edit stories to the use of ”cutaways,” shots in which the camera ”cuts away”
from the subject of an interview to the reporter. Although cutaways do serve to showcase a reporter, their basic function is to provide a transitional picture to cover spots where the film has been edited.
Another important technique he taught her, used for appearing in front of the camera outside the studio (and thus away from the Teleprompter), involved pre-taping a script, placing a tape recorder behind her back and an earphone in her ear, and repeating what she heard. This method freed her to look straight into the camera with the firm, unwavering gaze-what Dick John called Savitch`s ”pleasant aggressiveness”-that was to become her trademark. One day when Savitch and camera operator Don Benskin were driving downtown to do a story, they heard on the radio that a tank car filled with oil had derailed and caught on fire several miles to the south.
Benskin and Savitch stopped about 75 yards from the scene so that she could give a report with smoke rising dramatically in the background. Resting his silent camera between his legs, Benskin started to rig up a sound camera. Savitch stood in front of him, her back to the fire and a microphone in her hand, waiting for him to start rolling film.
”There was a funny sound,” Benskin said. ”A hissing sound, like something was sucking air.” It was a vacuum forming inside the tank car. A few seconds later, the car imploded with terrific violence. Benskin found himself lying in a ditch with his sound camera smashed on the ground and the grass around him afire. Savitch lay near him, her pants leg torn and her microphone thrown to one side.
Back at the studio, John and anchor Ron Stone were in a state of panic because they were unable to raise Benskin or Savitch on the radio. Finally they heard Savitch, panting and sobbing and barely able to get the words out. ”By God, I`ve got the lead story tonight!,” she shouted into the two-way radio. ”You guys get out of the way!”
Savitch`s report on the fire appeared that night on the ”CBS Evening News,” a coup that only strengthened her resolve to get herself to the network level as soon as possible.
Three months after Savitch arrived in Houston, John announced that he was holding auditions for a Saturday night anchor. For her tryout, Savitch did her best to look as unfeminine as possible. She pulled back her hair, wore a tailored blue suit, and spoke in as deep a voice as she could muster. Although she wrote afterward that she ”tried to look authoritative but instead looked silly,” there was never any question that the job was hers.
The audience loved her. In the space of only a few months, Jessica Savitch had become the first woman television anchor in the South. Less than a year after she had arrived in Houston, Savitch was receiving admiring phone calls and letters from broadcast executives elsewhere.
Jim Topping, the news director at KDKA, a Pittsburgh station that was part of Westinghouse`s Group W chain, had recently embarked on a major talent search. He discovered Savitch on a trip to Houston and told his boss, program manager David Salzman. Salzman, meantime, was transferred to KYW, the Group W station in Philadelphia, then the fourth-largest market in the country.
Salzman asked Savitch to come to Philadelphia.
Savitch thought the move to Philadelphia would be like coming home. She had grown up only a short distance away (in Kennett Square) and already was familiar with KYW, the NBC station. Vince Leonard, the senior anchor, and Bill Kuster, the weatherman, were figures from her childhood. For the first few months, she would be moving into an apartment on School House Lane with Judy Girard, a college friend.
Then, after her fiance, Ron Kershaw, transferred (from KTRK, the ABC affiliate in Houston) to the local ABC station, WPVI, he and Savitch would get their own place. She had a rock for her finger and was thinking about setting the day for the wedding. She told friends she was looking forward to having
”a nice, secure, plush job” and ”a nice, secure husband.” For once, she said, Jessica Savitch had her act together.
Savitch`s dream faded quickly. Kershaw, who had left his job in Houston, was unexpectedly turned down by WPVI, which cut off negotiations when management discovered that it would be hiring the boyfriend of a reporter at a rival station.
Kershaw was angry, depressed and broke. He had put his career on the line and was enraged that Savitch, absorbed by her own new job, devoted little time to him in return. When he visited her in Philadelphia, he did not feel comfortable staying at Girard`s small apartment; instead, he and Savitch slept in hotels and fought. When he was away from her, in Houston, they fought over the phone.
The tears, arguments, fights and bruises went on and on. When Savitch discovered she was pregnant, she went to New York for an abortion and Kershaw did not accompany her. She was upset for some time afterward. (Although their romance was doomed, Savitch and Kershaw remained friends. Kershaw would later move to Chicago`s WBBM-Ch. 2. He died July 3 of pancreatic cancer.)
Her debut on the Philadelphia air was a brief feature about recycling garbage at an outlying pig farm. Although Savitch did not encounter the same hostility toward women she had faced in Houston, her co-workers dismissed her as ”the new girl from Houston.” As a reporter and weekend anchor, she was rattled, nervous and, by big-city standards, unprofessional.
Fortunately, help was nearby, in the unlikely form of an assignment editor named Dave Neal. On Neal`s recommendation, Savitch went to a voice coach in New York City.
