Anchorboy Read Online Free
Author: Jay Onrait
news host on Manhattan’s NY 1 news station. “My suggestion would be to get in contact with Pat,” he said.
Pat agreed to meet me at Earls on Calgary Trail Southbound in Edmonton, the original Earls restaurant in fact. It happened to be right by the ITV headquarters on Allard Way, the same studio that had been home to SCTV in its third and fourth seasons. Pat was not only the producer of ITV’s
News at Ten
but also the host of the
Your Money
financial segment. He was not even thirty years old. For whatever reason, Pat appreciated my initiative and told me I was welcome to come by the station any time I wanted while he was working. He said he would be able to teach me “how to write news” and that I could help out around the newsroom, but that obviously I wouldn’t get paid. He had me at “how to write news,” and that summer I was driving into Edmonton three nights a week, often nodding off at the wheel of my 1970 Buick Skylark on the hour-and-a-half drive back to Athabasca.
Early on during my brief tenure at ITV I was speaking to a veteran camera operator, and he was telling me about his job, the hours, and the fact that he would be working that weekend while his wife and kids were at home. He wasn’t complaining becausethat is what he signed up for. He said, “Remember one thing about broadcasting: You will always be working when everyone else you know is off.” Having someone explain the bizarre hours and lifestyle of this business before I even fully committed to it really helped me make the decision. Plus, I liked working nights; if anything, that was a bonus for me.
I spent my afternoons and evenings at the station combing the CNN television news feeds and watching
CNN Headline News
, searching for any funny and light, yet universally appealing, stories that might be good to finish off the nightly news, aka “the Kicker.” I was also in charge of watching Jeannie Moos’s daily report from New York, which was always quirky and hilarious. She had a unique reporting style that made her popular, covering misfits and strange characters and situations from the Big Apple. Once in a while Pat would allow me to write the copy for the Kicker. Every day that I worked, Pat and I would grab lunch with his actual NAIT broadcast intern, David Ewasuk, now a reporter at CTV Edmonton. We’d chow down on Wendy’s drive-through and talk about the business. Slowly, over the course of the summer, I understood what it was like to work in the TV news biz.
All the while I was writing and learning about news, I was getting a chance to meet my heroes Dutchyshen and Solkowski in person. They were both friendly but ultimately didn’t have much time for me, which was completely understandable. It was great watching Dutchy saunter around the newsroom joking happily with the news anchors and seeing Perry’s casual demeanor and friendly attitude. They seemed to be having more fun than the news people.
That fall I was accepted into Ryerson, and I flew down a couple of days before my first class with a suitcase in each hand like Balki Bartokomous arriving in America from the tiny island nation of Mypos on
Perfect Strangers
. Ryerson was right in the heart of downtown Toronto, and while I didn’t expect to see so many hookerson the boundaries of a university campus, I immediately felt like I belonged. I’m pretty sure all those hookers were happy for me. Welcome to Toronto, prairie boy.
CHAPTER 4
Pooping in Front of My Parents
W HEN THE HOLIDAY SEASON ARRIVES I make the cross-country flight to Kelowna, B.C., where my parents have lived since 1997. I like the joke that my mom made the decision to move to the sunny Okanagan approximately four seconds after my younger sister graduated from high school in northern Alberta. Unshackled from the brats, my folks were free to head straight to their favourite part of this great country, where they could spend their days drinking wine on the beach illegally in plastic cups. (They don’t
Pat agreed to meet me at Earls on Calgary Trail Southbound in Edmonton, the original Earls restaurant in fact. It happened to be right by the ITV headquarters on Allard Way, the same studio that had been home to SCTV in its third and fourth seasons. Pat was not only the producer of ITV’s
News at Ten
but also the host of the
Your Money
financial segment. He was not even thirty years old. For whatever reason, Pat appreciated my initiative and told me I was welcome to come by the station any time I wanted while he was working. He said he would be able to teach me “how to write news” and that I could help out around the newsroom, but that obviously I wouldn’t get paid. He had me at “how to write news,” and that summer I was driving into Edmonton three nights a week, often nodding off at the wheel of my 1970 Buick Skylark on the hour-and-a-half drive back to Athabasca.
Early on during my brief tenure at ITV I was speaking to a veteran camera operator, and he was telling me about his job, the hours, and the fact that he would be working that weekend while his wife and kids were at home. He wasn’t complaining becausethat is what he signed up for. He said, “Remember one thing about broadcasting: You will always be working when everyone else you know is off.” Having someone explain the bizarre hours and lifestyle of this business before I even fully committed to it really helped me make the decision. Plus, I liked working nights; if anything, that was a bonus for me.
I spent my afternoons and evenings at the station combing the CNN television news feeds and watching
CNN Headline News
, searching for any funny and light, yet universally appealing, stories that might be good to finish off the nightly news, aka “the Kicker.” I was also in charge of watching Jeannie Moos’s daily report from New York, which was always quirky and hilarious. She had a unique reporting style that made her popular, covering misfits and strange characters and situations from the Big Apple. Once in a while Pat would allow me to write the copy for the Kicker. Every day that I worked, Pat and I would grab lunch with his actual NAIT broadcast intern, David Ewasuk, now a reporter at CTV Edmonton. We’d chow down on Wendy’s drive-through and talk about the business. Slowly, over the course of the summer, I understood what it was like to work in the TV news biz.
All the while I was writing and learning about news, I was getting a chance to meet my heroes Dutchyshen and Solkowski in person. They were both friendly but ultimately didn’t have much time for me, which was completely understandable. It was great watching Dutchy saunter around the newsroom joking happily with the news anchors and seeing Perry’s casual demeanor and friendly attitude. They seemed to be having more fun than the news people.
That fall I was accepted into Ryerson, and I flew down a couple of days before my first class with a suitcase in each hand like Balki Bartokomous arriving in America from the tiny island nation of Mypos on
Perfect Strangers
. Ryerson was right in the heart of downtown Toronto, and while I didn’t expect to see so many hookerson the boundaries of a university campus, I immediately felt like I belonged. I’m pretty sure all those hookers were happy for me. Welcome to Toronto, prairie boy.
CHAPTER 4
Pooping in Front of My Parents
W HEN THE HOLIDAY SEASON ARRIVES I make the cross-country flight to Kelowna, B.C., where my parents have lived since 1997. I like the joke that my mom made the decision to move to the sunny Okanagan approximately four seconds after my younger sister graduated from high school in northern Alberta. Unshackled from the brats, my folks were free to head straight to their favourite part of this great country, where they could spend their days drinking wine on the beach illegally in plastic cups. (They don’t
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