For all you misguided souls who ever imagined the glamour of a career in local television news, Tony Pagnotti’s brand new memoir, “My Scripted & Unscripted Life: A Memoir of a TV Newsman,” arrives to disabuse you of all such naiveté.
The book is charming, it’s funny and it’s got all the good nature that Baltimoreans have associated with Pagnotti since he arrived here more than three decades ago and worked at WMAR and, later, Fox 45.
But it’s a cautionary tale, for sure.
Here’s Pagnotti, on his first evening as a weekend anchor in Asheville, North Carolina. It’s his first job out of college, and the Scranton native’s only been employed for a few weeks. This being the weekend and small-market TV, he’s practically a one-man newsroom operation.
“With five minutes to go before my anchor debut,” he writes, “I started feeling a few butterflies fluttering in my gut. Just as I was about to hand the film to the projectionist, the tray with twenty chroma slides, placed in chronological order, tumbled from my hand and fell all over the floor.”
There go all his visuals.
“I tried frantically to put them back in order, but the projectionist said, ‘Son, you better get downstairs. Two minutes until air time.’ With that, I went flying down the staircase and simultaneously my scripts went flying from my hands.”
With that, he hears a voice shout, “Thirty seconds to air. Get in your chair and put your mike on.”
Is that enough glamour for you?
He works his way up to a station in New Haven, Connecticut. Not bad, higher pay, higher community profile. But, it turns out, the general manager’s wife doesn’t like his style or his looks. And on such flimsiness, he’s canned.
He hooks on at another station in nearby Waterbury. But it’s 1981, and the new job’s only 20 hours a week and pays $6 an hour.
Is that enough glamour for you?
How’s this? He works his way up through a handful of markets, each one a little bigger, each with more pay, and he gets a call to the big-time: WNBC in New York, the biggest and most prestigious local market in the country.
One evening, he’s doing a live shot from a crowded subway stop somewhere in Manhattan. Ten seconds into his narration, he experiences an “only in New York” moment — “a hand from behind me in the crowd reached into my back pants pocket where my wallet was.”
He’s getting his pocket picked on live TV, and the guy disappears into the subway crowd.
You want more glamour?
Things seem to be going swimmingly when Pagnotti gets bounced out of his job, with its New York pay, to be replaced by a new up-and-comer named Al Roker.
That brings him to Baltimore, where he spent a lot of years at WMAR-TV before moving over to Fox 45. These days, he teaches communications at the University of Maryland.
“My Scripted & Unscripted Life” is published by Apprentice House Press, the book publishing arm of Loyola University Maryland. The book will be out later this month.
It’s a genuinely nice read. It’s Tony’s voice, all right, good-natured, self-effacing, with the big, open heart that Pagnotti always showed with his various community contributions on the air and off.
The book’s got his heart, and it’s an honest description of a medium — local TV news — that people once mistakenly assumed was full of glamour.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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