Oprah_ A Biography Part 5

"She had a following in Nashville at the time, from all the publicity she got being the first black girl to be Miss Fire Prevention, plus she had her own radio show. It's my opinion that if Oprah hadn't been declared the winner of Miss Black Nashville, Gordon wouldn't have been able to sell tickets to the Miss Black Tennessee pageant. So he made her the winner....

"After the pageant coordinator quit, Gordon gave me the job and we traveled all over Tennessee just trying to get girls to partic.i.p.ate. Even then we only got a few. A few days before the pageant, Gordon moved out of his house in Nashville and we moved in so I could get everyone ready to make the rounds of radio stations and churches and department stores. Oprah drove some of us in her father's pickup truck....I still remember how determined she was to get into shape for compet.i.tion. She wanted to be a certain size, so she had started dieting....She was the first black person I ever saw to eat yogurt.

We just didn't eat yogurt in those days. But she did and she lost a bunch of weight."

Oprah said she was as surprised as anyone to be crowned Miss Black Tennessee.

"I didn't expect to win, nor did anybody else expect me to, because there were all these vanillas and here I was a fudge child. And Lord, were they upset, and I was upset for them, really, I was. I said, 'Beats me, girls. I'm as shocked as you are. I don't know how I won, either.' "

As Miss Black Tennessee, Oprah flew to California in August 1972 to compete for the crown of Miss Black America. For the talent portion of the pageant, she sang "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," a spiritual dating back to slavery. Her chaperone, Dr. Janet Burch, a Nashville psychologist, recalled for the writer Robert Waldron how focused Oprah was on becoming successful. "I have never seen anybody who wanted to do well as much as Oprah did. She used to talk about things, like how one day she was going to be very, very, very wealthy. The thought always precedes the happening. If you really think you're going to be very wealthy, and very popular, and prominent, and you sincerely believe it, it's going to happen. You see, some people say it, but they don't really believe it. She believed it. People say, 'I'd like to be wealthy.' Oprah said, 'I'm going going to be wealthy.' " to be wealthy.' "

Oprah did not win, place, or show in the race for Miss Black America. "As district pageant organizer I had access to those final tallies and ascertained that she came in number 34 out of 36 contestants--almost flat bottom," recalled El Greco Brown. Oprah dismissed her loss by blaming the winner. "The girl from California won because she stripped," she said. Yet the New York Times New York Times coverage makes no mention of the beautiful coverage makes no mention of the beautiful California singer who won as having performed a striptease.

During the week, Oprah, who had been sponsored by her radio station, told Dr.

Burch that she was going "to be a big TV personality." After the pageant, she returned to Nashville ready to raise her game.

"Our general manager got a call from WVOL that they had a girl who wanted to get into broadcasting," said Chris Clark, the former anchor, producer, and news director of WLAC, later WTVF-TV. "So I was told that I had to interview her."

The station had already hired Bill Perkins, the first black face on Nashville television, now deceased, and Ruth Ann Leach, the first woman, who said, "I was the first female f.a.n.n.y to sit on the news desk next to the anchor during a newscast. This was back when NewsChannel 5 was trying desperately to meet its FCC obligation to diversify the on-air talent. So there was Bill Perkins and me. Everyone else on the air was white and male."

Oprah said she had been pursued by the CBS affiliate for the on-air position, but Clark remembers that WVOL pushed for her hiring, and Joseph Davis, a cameraman, formerly with WDCN-TV, the public education channel, concurred. "There was a small group of young black people in Nashville that the NAACP got behind to place in positions above entry level--in middle management and on-camera," Davis said. "Oprah was part of that group to come out of WVOL." In 2008 he produced a photograph of the group taken on the set at WDCN, when they appeared to discuss "Blacks and Their Role in the Media." "Out of the ten people in this picture, Oprah is the only one who did not get sidetracked by marriage or children. She never let life interfere with her ambition to get to the top."

Chris Clark was sensitive to the demands for diversity at that time. "I felt we needed to look like the face of Nashville, which was then 80 percent white and 20 percent black. We had a brave mayor [Clifton Beverly Briley] who said that segregation was over and we had to move toward integration....I was responsive to this because when I was coming up in television in the 1960s, it was a white-bread world--no room for blacks, women, Jews, or Greeks like me. My real name is Christopher Botsaris, but I had to change it to get a job on the air. By the time I got to WLAC, Nashville had been through the really rough civil rights battles, but we still needed to show that we were committed to integration.

"As far as I'm concerned, Oprah was not a token. Yeah, she was black and we needed a black face, and she was a woman, so I guess that helped. But she was a n.o.brainer for me," he said. "She was drop-dead gorgeous, very well spoken, and known in town from being Miss Black Nashville and Little Miss Spark Plug or whatever she was [Miss Fire Prevention]. So I made her a reporter--we didn't have correspondents in those days. I sent her out with a Bell and Howell camera to cover city hall. I didn't find out until later that she didn't know what the h.e.l.l she was doing."

Years later Oprah admitted she had lied on her job application and during her job interview about her experience, but she walked into her first a.s.signment with great determination. "I announced to everybody there, 'This is my first day on the job, and I don't know anything. Please help me because I have told the news director at Channel 5 that I know what I'm doing. Pleeeeze help me.' And they did. And from that point on all those councilmen became my friends."

Chris Clark, who retired in 2007, does not claim a medal for hiring Oprah, but he does acknowledge "getting the fisheye from management....You have to remember it was a very racially tense time in Nashville, and she was the first black woman on television."

He admitted that the front office was not enthusiastic. "I could make the decision because, as anchor, I was also director and producer of news, but they made it quite clear that if Oprah didn't work out--if the audience did not accept her--it would be on me."

Others recall the hire as very courageous. "No question," said Patty Outlaw, who did traffic ads for the station. "It was a big risk for Chris."

"He went out on a limb when he brought Oprah in," said Jimmy Norton, who worked in production, "especially when he promoted her to coanchor....There was grumbling in the back of the newsroom....It bothered some to see Oprah on the air doing news, but you have to remember what Nashville was like in those days....The N N word was word was still being used freely."

Ruth Ann Leach recalled her first encounter with the word when Oprah started doing the news. "I accompanied a family member to a pleasant suburban home....I sat with the...wife. She greeted me warmly and told me she used to enjoy watching me on television.

"What do you mean 'used to?' I asked.

" 'Well, I cain't watch your station anymore, now that you have a n.i.g.g.e.r reading the news.' "

Oprah herself got walloped with the hateful word when she went on a.s.signment in a segregated area of Nashville. She introduced herself to a shop owner and extended her hand.

"We don't shake hands with n.i.g.g.e.rs down here," he said.

She shot back, "I'll bet the n.i.g.g.e.rs are glad."

At TSU her cla.s.smates considered her television job nothing but a big wet kiss from the affirmative action fairy. They dismissed her as a "two-fer," a mere token, and she agreed. "No way did I deserve the job," she said later. "I was a cla.s.sic token, but I sure was one happy token."

"She was so excited to be on television," recalled the makeup artist Joyce Daniel Hill. "I was with the Joe Colter Agency and had been hired by the station to teach the news team to do makeup and get supplies for them every month. We were just getting used to color cameras in those days and had only a few shades of pancake makeup available....I blended a special shade for Oprah....She's considerably lighter now than she was thirty-four years ago. I have no idea why. Maybe it's just better makeup artists or some kind of skin bleaching....She took me with her to cover the Ebony Ebony fashion fair fashion fair because we both loved clothes....She was a joy to work with."

Hired at $150 a week, Oprah made her television debut in Nashville in January 1974. By the following year she had received several awards as the city's first black female on television. She was named National Executive Woman of the Year by the National a.s.sociation of Women Executives. The Middle Tennessee Business a.s.sociation named her Outstanding Businesswoman of the Year, and she won the Negro Business and Professional Women's Club award as Woman of the Year in 1975. "She was terrific,"

said Chris Clark, "although she wasn't a great reporter. Couldn't write. Never could." In fact, she had so much trouble writing she caused the station to go black for two minutes of a five-minute cut-in one morning because she had not finished typing. "Chris should have fired me that day," Oprah said.

Instead, Clark concentrated on her other gifts. "She was wonderful with people,"

he recalled. "And that was her downfall as a journalist, because she could not be detached. She'd be sent to cover a fire, come back to the station, and work the phones trying to get help for the burnt-out family instead of writing the story for the evening news."

Easy and casual at work, Oprah kicked off her shoes and padded around the newsroom in bare feet. "She was as country as cornbread in those days," said one former coworker.

"I think people expected her to be a 'yes, sir, no, sir' type, you know--very grateful--but she wasn't that way at all," said Jimmy Norton. "She was driven. I saw it shortly after she started, when we were doing a public service spot for Black History Week. The producer was not very good, so Oprah stepped in and completely took over.

She shoved the producer aside, told the cameraman what to do, and directed the segment herself. That was an eye-opener for me. This girl knew what she wanted and was willing to do whatever she had to do to accomplish her goals."

Patty Outlaw agreed. "She was real confident for her young self--ambitious, yes, but not a backstabber. I liked her a lot....I saw her every day in those years, because I worked on the floor above the newsroom. It was just nuts working at that station. Drugs, drugs, drugs all the time--drugs all over the place. They were even selling 'windowpanes'

[LSD] in the hall." Drugs were so prevalent that the news staff gave Vic Mason, Oprah's coanchor, a c.o.ke spoon as a gift. "Chris and I looked the other way," said Jimmy Norton, who confirmed that station management removed a vending machine once they discovered it had been rigged to dispense marijuana. Years later Oprah indicated that her own drug use started in Nashville, with cocaine, and continued during her years in Baltimore and later in Chicago.

"I remember raving on the elevator about a guy I was dating, and Oprah listened to me carry on for two floors. As she got off, she said, 'Ooooh, girl. He sounds like Jesus'

brother,' " said Patty Outlaw. "In those days Oprah and I talked about boys, diets, and makeup. That's all we cared about then....Funny, isn't it, but she's still talking about the same things on her show three decades later."

"She was a little heavy then, but nothing like now," Patty said in 2008. "I had started taking ballet and mentioned my lessons to Jimmy Norton. 'Ballet must be big,' he said. 'Oprah did a little story during the newscast last night. She did it in her tutu or, in her case, her four-four....' Oprah lived on junk food then, and n.o.body got between her and her Ding Dongs."

Harry Chapman, who coanch.o.r.ed the weekend news with Oprah, recalled her fondness for Chicken Shack chicken. "They used cayenne pepper and Tabasco sauce-hottest chicken I ever put in my mouth. We'd have that on weekends, in between newscasts."

As the thirtieth largest television market, Nashville was a training ground for many young broadcasters. "It was a very exciting time to be in TV," said Elaine Ganick, former news anchor for the NBC affiliate, WSMV, and later a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight. "I started out about the same time as Oprah; Pat Sajak was a "I started out about the same time as Oprah; Pat Sajak was a weatherman; and John Tesh, our news anchor, hit the big time in New York before his ten years with Entertainment Tonight. Entertainment Tonight. " "

Tesh, the tall (six foot six), handsome, blond anchorman for WSMV, once described his Nashville days and nights with Pat Sajak, Dan Miller, and Oprah: "We were all single, ran in a pack, and got into a lot of trouble acting like jerks." Sometime after he became the news anchor for WCBS-TV in New York City, Tesh told a woman he dated seriously that when he was in Nashville he had lived with Oprah for a short time, at her apartment in Hickory Hollow. "He said one night he looked down and saw his white body next to her black body and couldn't take it anymore. He walked out in the middle of the night....He told me he later felt very guilty about it." The social pressure then, in Nashville, Tennessee, concerning an interracial couple was extreme.

Toasting her talk show's tenth anniversary in 1996, Oprah invited John Tesh to appear with his ET ET cohost Mary Hart, and reminded him of what she called their "one cohost Mary Hart, and reminded him of what she called their "one date--strictly two friends having dinner." More than three decades later some people who worked with them in Nashville found their intimate relationship hard to believe. "[I would've thought] Oprah would've been leery about dating a white person...interracial dating was not acceptable then," said Jimmy Norton. "After all, we were just ninety miles south of Pulaski, home of the Ku Klux Klan."

Patty Outlaw acknowledged that the coupling of a black woman and a white man was considered "pretty scandalous" at the time, but she remembered a snowy evening when the station put a lot of people up for the night at a Ramada Inn. "I think if you asked Oprah and Vic Mason about that night they might have some fond recollections of each other."

In 1975, Oprah, who was coanchoring the weeknight news, was recruited by WSB in Atlanta. "It was time for a black anchor on weekday TV," said former news director Kenneth Tiven. "She came down and was terrific. I remember having her home to dinner....She had even then an extraordinary sense of self-confidence, an eerie comprehension of what was expected of her as an upwardly mobile black woman and budding television star. However, I suddenly bolted Atlanta for Philadelphia KYW as news director, and she said, 'Without you I am not coming.' "

Chris Clark recalled Oprah coming to him with the WSB job offer. "I talked her out of it because she wasn't ready and we didn't want to lose her. We were just starting field anchoring and I thought she'd be great. So I gave her a five-thousand-dollar raise, and she stayed with us--for a while. Then, a year or so later, she got an offer from Baltimore's WJZ-TV. Again, management told me to talk her out of leaving. So I called her in. 'Oprah, management has told me to talk you out of leaving. Have I tried to talk you out of it? Good. Now I think you should take the job. You're ready.' "

Baltimore was a much larger television market, and the job paid $40,000 a year, but Oprah did not leap at the opportunity to coanchor the news on WJZ. "I hated Baltimore when I first went there," she told WDCN's Gail Choice in her "Farewell to Nashville" interview. "But I took the free trip they offered and looked at the Westinghouse-owned station, which I loved. They own[ed] five other stations, and they said, 'We have big plans for you.' They wanted me to sign a five-year contract but I said no. 'I'll be too old in five years to do what I want to do.' So I negotiated it down to three years." Oprah, then twenty-one, said she envisioned herself going from coanchoring the news in Baltimore to transferring to the more glamorous ABC affiliate in San Francisco and finally to becoming "the black Barbara Walters....If she can make $1 million a year, I figure we can make $500,000," Oprah told her black interviewer.

"I hate to leave but it's just about necessary for me to do what I want to do later, and that's to anchor in one of the top 10 markets." Oprah said she would not have considered moving to Baltimore if WJZ had not been the number one station in its market.

Gail Choice appeared wide-eyed with wonder at her colleague's strategic vision, and, dripping with admiration, she commended Oprah on her good fortune. "I was lucky, lucky, lucky...in the right place at the right time," said Oprah. Years later she would say it was all a part of G.o.d's plan for her.

When she signed her three-year contract with WJZ and prepared to move to Baltimore, she asked her father for a loan until she started getting paid in her new job.

"Vernon Winfrey was a good customer of mine at the Third National Bank in East Nashville," said Janet Wa.s.som. "He took out papers and cosigned with Oprah for a loan to pay her expenses for relocating....He was known in the black community as someone people went to for help, and he helped those who helped themselves. Didn't believe in handouts. Made everyone pay him back, and I'm sure he did the same with Oprah."

Oprah repaid her father many times over in the years to come, with luxury cars, fine clothes, gold watches, immense houses, and exotic vacations. She even offered to retire him for life. "She calls this place a crummy old dump," he said in 2008 of his dilapidated barbershop on Vernon Winfrey Avenue. Yet, even at the age of seventy-five and following a stroke, the man who believed in a hand up ignored his daughter's offer of a handout.

"I hated to see Oprah leave Nashville, but I wanted to give her a great send-off,"

said Luvenia Harrison Butler, "so I threw a big going-away party--made all the arrangements for invitations, food, drinks, and music. I had it at the Gazebo apartments off Thompson Lane, and strange as this may sound, she never even thanked me for it. She left town and basically never came back, except when she returned to promote The Color The Color Purple. ...That was the last I saw of Oprah before all those Arnold Schwarzenegger types ...That was the last I saw of Oprah before all those Arnold Schwarzenegger types took over her life and she got all Maria Shrivered up. She divorced herself from Nashville. Probably because it was too painful for her to come back because we knew her when, or else because we're just too down-country for her now."

Oprah's friend, who became president of the League of Women Voters in Nashville, did not try to conceal her disappointment over the lost friendship. "I don't think Oprah knows how much we admire her for all she's done, especially for the little girls in South Africa."

Perhaps for Oprah the price of surviving was to forget, and the down payment on dreams as big as hers meant dropping a guillotine on the past. She did return to Nashville in 2004, for the fiftieth anniversary of WTVF-TV, and appeared on television to congratulate NewsChannel 5, but she did not come back three years later for Chris Clark's retirement party. "We were all there," said one former coworker. "Jimmy Norton cut short a church mission in New Orleans to be on hand, and Ruth Ann Leach flew in from New York City. Even the governor was there, but Oprah didn't show."

Her absence surprised many. "We have always been a family at the station, and Chris was on the air there for forty years, probably a record for any anchorman in the country, which is why his retirement party was a big deal," said Jimmy Norton. "So I think everyone expected Oprah would be there. After all, Chris had given her her big break....But thirty years had pa.s.sed and...well...Oprah has changed....She's not the same sweet nineteen-year-old kid we used to know....She did invite Chris to her big splashy fiftieth birthday party earlier that same year, and sent a plane for him and all, so maybe she felt she had done enough for him, I don't know....I won't say she wouldn't wouldn't come to his come to his retirement party. I'll just say she didn't didn't come." come."

Five.

COUNTEE CULLEN, a leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote "Incident," his most famous poem, about what happened to him as a child: Once riding in old Baltimore Heart-filled, head-filled with glee.

I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue and called me "n.i.g.g.e.r."

I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December; Of all the things that happened there That's all that I remember.

Baltimore had changed since that poem was published in 1925, but even with a 55 percent black population, its attempts at integration were often hesitant and halting.

Situated north of the Confederacy, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and in the shadow of Washington, D.C., the city produced world-renowned figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Post, Upton Sinclair, H. L. Mencken, Babe Ruth, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, and Thurgood Marshall. By the time Oprah Winfrey arrived in the Bicentennial summer of 1976, Baltimore was known as "Charm City," after a gimmick to lure tourists with charm bracelets. The ad campaign was launched ten days into a garbage strike that was exacerbated by a 110-degree heat wave that baked the city in a gagging stench and triggered riots requiring the deployment of state troopers in gas masks.

"It took me a year to become charmed by Baltimore," Oprah said, unimpressed by the city's historic row houses. "I didn't understand why they were all stuck together....[And] the first time I saw the downtown area I got so depressed that I called my daddy in Nashville and burst into tears. In Nashville you had a yard, even if you didn't have a porch. But the houses on Pennsylvania Avenue [in Baltimore] had neither. I picked Columbia for the gra.s.s and trees."

A lovely verdant suburb, Columbia, Maryland, was designed in 1967 to look like a village spread across fourteen thousand acres and to eliminate subdivisions as well as segregation by race, religion, and income. The neighborhoods contained single-family homes, town houses, condominiums, and apartments like the one Oprah rented. The street names came from famous works of art and literature: Hobbit's Glen, from J.R.R. Tolkien; Running Brook, from the poetry of Robert Frost; and Clemens Crossing, from Mark Twain. Oprah lived on Windstream Drive near Bryant Woods, where the street names came from the poetry of William Cullen Bryant.

After driving her to Baltimore and helping her unpack, her Nashville boyfriend, William "Bubba" Taylor, was ready to return home. "We agreed she had to make the move and I had to stay," he said many years later. "It was too small a TV market for her in Nashville, and I had many things to keep me here, such as my family's funeral home."

The couple had been dating semi-seriously since Oprah had gotten Taylor a job at WVOL radio. "I hired Billy just to keep Oprah's sanity," recalled Clarence Kilcrease, the station manager. "She kept pushing me to do it. She was gaga over him." They had met at the Progressive Baptist Church when Taylor, a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnam vet, was attending John A. Gupton Mortuary College.

"She was just nineteen but she was driven even back then," Taylor said. "She'd tell me: 'Someday, I'm going to be famous!' You could see that she meant it." So he was not surprised to see Oprah on 60 Minutes 60 Minutes a decade later, but he was floored by her a decade later, but he was floored by her melodramatic recollection of their parting in Baltimore.

"Lord, I wanted him," Oprah told Mike Wallace. "I threw his keys down the toilet, stood in front of the door and threatened to jump off the balcony if he didn't stay. I was on my knees begging him, 'Please don't go, please don't go.' "

Bubba Taylor chuckled, knowing he had not been the man who had sparked those theatrics. "When she took me to the airport for my flight back to Nashville, her eyes glistened and she squeezed my hand before kissing me goodbye. We promised to stay in touch, of course, but I guess we both knew it was over." Oprah later fell in love with a married disc jockey in Baltimore who would bring her to her knees, and it was her desperation over losing him that she recounted on 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes, to ill.u.s.trate how far she to ill.u.s.trate how far she had traveled from her doormat days. Some might consider that recollection an example of what Oprah's "aunt" Katharine Esters called another one of "Oprah's lies," while others would accept her tendency to rearrange the truth as her way of telling a good, if inconsistent, story. Or perhaps the only way Oprah can deal with a painful truth is by attributing it to a situation that doesn't hurt (Bubba) rather than to one that still pains (the Baltimore disc jockey).

In the 1970s, local news became a real moneymaker for television, especially in Baltimore, where Jerry Turner anch.o.r.ed on WJZ-TV every night, and consistently outdrew Walter Cronkite, then the Brahmin of broadcasting.

"You cannot overstate the stature of Jerry Turner in this town at that time," said WJZ's weatherman, Bob Turk. "He simply had no peers."

The former general manager of WJZ concurred. "Jerry Turner was as superb an anchor as you could find anywhere in the business," said William F. Baker. "He was appealing, authoritative, and, most importantly, he was adored by the Baltimore community. Absolutely worshipped. He was the reason WJZ ranked number one in the market for years, and as you know, news is the jewel of the crown in television, and determines how a station fares in terms of money and prestige."

In 1976 the station decided to go to an hour news format, which was too much for one person to anchor. So they announced they were launching an "intensive search" for a coanchor to share Turner's throne. This was tantamount to a trumpet throughout the kingdom: the forty-six-year-old prince is looking for a princess to wear the gla.s.s slipper.

(The a.s.sumption then was that since Turner was a white male, his coanchor had to be a black female.) Seven months later the so-called search team announced they had found their princess. They paid her $40,000 a year ($150,816.87 in 2009 dollars).

"I was news director at WJZ and I hired Oprah after seeing a demo tape that she had sent," Gary Elion said in 2007. "It was very impressive; she had a compelling delivery, and we hired her on the basis of that tape."

The newsroom was aghast. "It did not matter that Oprah Winfrey from Nashville, Tennessee, knew nothing about Baltimore, or that she was twenty-two years old, or that she had almost no reporting experience," recalled Michael Olesker, a former print journalist who became WJZ's on-air essayist. "For television news Oprah was perfect....Why? Because in television news, journalism has always been considered optional."

At the time there were only two black women on television in Baltimore, despite the city's large black population. Maria Broom, a dancer with little experience in journalism, had been hired by WJZ to be the consumer reporter before Oprah arrived. "I was black, and I had a nice bush," said Broom, who achieved national recognition in the (2000-2008) HBO hit series The Wire. The Wire. "It was a time of big Afros. I was a picture of the "It was a time of big Afros. I was a picture of the modern black woman. So it was like a movie. They said, 'We're going to make you a star,' and then they did....I was what they gave the black people."

Sue Simmons had arrived in 1974 to work at WBAL. She stayed two years before moving to Washington, D.C., and then to New York City, where she has anch.o.r.ed the news at WNBC for more than two decades. Upon leaving Baltimore, a reporter asked what her strengths were. Simmons replied, "I'm pretty and I can read."

In 1976, for any woman--black, white, yellow, or brown--to share the throne of Jerry Turner was to receive a crown never before bestowed.

"Getting that...news coanchor job at twenty-two was such a big deal," Oprah said many years later. "It felt like the biggest deal in the world at the time."

When it was announced that a young black woman from Nashville had been anointed, even Baltimore's major television critic was taken aback. "That they have this much confidence in a new face for Baltimore is interesting," Bill Carter wrote in The The Baltimore Sun. "It must be considered a risk anytime the news is handled by anyone other "It must be considered a risk anytime the news is handled by anyone other than Turner at Channel 13.

"But if Winfrey can be established as a popular news person, the station will have a big leg up when it finally does get its act together and puts the full hour news on the air."

WJZ immediately began working with Mayor William D. Shaefer's office to develop a series of feature stories about Baltimore neighborhoods that Oprah could present each night during the forty-five-day City Fair between July and September.

"It's good P.R. for me," she told reporters, admitting she did no research or reporting for the series. She simply showed up at a different neighborhood each day with a camera crew to interview whomever had been selected by the community a.s.sociation.

"It was a great way of introducing me to the city. I probably know more about the neighborhoods now than anybody else at the station."

Her comment irked some in the newsroom, particularly Al Sanders, a black reporter who had effectively anch.o.r.ed the news in Turner's absence and expected to be considered as his coanchor. "For up to three years before we went to the hour format, there had been talk that if a coanchor situation were to come along I would be considered," he said. "When it did come along, no one at the station was considered.

Someone was brought in from the outside."

Still, the deck was stacked against Oprah. "Even before she hit town, WJZ ran a childish series of promotional spots, asking, 'Do you know what an Oprah is?' " recalled Michael Olesker.

" 'Ofrey?' the people in the commercial would answer.

" 'Oprah? What's an Oprah?'

"In hindsight no one could imagine CBS introducing its anchor years earlier by asking, 'Do you know what a Cronkite is?' The spots demeaned Oprah and the entire notion of news anchors as serious figures."

Oprah saw the promotion as anticlimactic. "The whole thing backfired," she said.

"People were expecting The Second Coming and all they got was me."

Oprah made her debut on August 16, 1976, but all the hoorahs went to Jerry Turner. "He has managed to become a co-anchor without losing any of his impressive prestige and cla.s.s," wrote television critic Bill Carter. "More and more he drives home the point that he is head and shoulders above anyone else as a local newsman, maybe above most of the local newsmen in any market in the country. Which brings up the question of why he was ever given any anchor help at all."

Oprah was saluted for "flawless" news reading and accorded "some style," but not much. "It is a subdued kind of style that might be easily forgettable....This is not to demean her on-camera abilities, which are considerable. But...Oprah's personality is not as strong as some of the other Channel 13 people or else it has not really come through yet....[S]he is not in any way arresting--at least not yet."