Twenty-five years ago this week –- May 5, 1995 — we lost Al Sanders. He was a news anchor for WJZ-TV’s Eyewitness News when anchors were seen as cultural icons and local TV was changing the way people got their news.
Sanders was also, for a remarkable decade in Baltimore television, Jerry Turner’s partner. Studies showed they were the top-rated anchor duo in America. They had far more viewers than their competitors had — combined.
But it was more than ratings.
That pairing of a white man and a black man seemed an act of community healing. It transcended mere journalism, as it came in a post-riots era when Baltimore, like so many American cities, was dealing with race relations in ways previously untouched.
Turner was the coolest guy in town, but Sanders seemed among the kindest. Al had a journalist’s feel for a story, and a lyricist’s sensitivity in telling it.
It’s hard, in the current era, to explain to young people just what local TV news — and WJZ especially, and the Turner-Sanders partnership in particular — once meant to a community.
When these two co-anchored at WJZ, the station drew as many as half a million viewers each night for its news programs. Now, there’s not a station in town getting more than a tiny fraction of that. When the station was hooked up with ABC News, it was that network’s top-rated news affiliate in America.
You know the key to Al Sanders? He was, off the air, the same guy he seemed on the air. He was kind and courtly. He had a wife and three children at home. He was a TV star but still saw himself as the rotund kid out of St. Louis he had been. He was quick to make strangers comfortable and quick to poke fun at himself in order to raise everyone else’s self-confidence.
He specialized in stories that showed a common humanity. He could invoke James Earl Jones tones when the story called for it, or Oliver Hardy’s comic timing. He could dance a light fandango across the WJZ newsroom when the spirit moved him.
It’s the nature of TV news that it wins points not only for its coverage of crime and politics, but for viewers’ instinctive response. This is very personal stuff, asking to be invited into people’s homes every night.
Sanders was a calming, protective soul. When female reporters sat next to him in the studio to deliver live reports, he knew which ones were nervous and leaned over to whisper reassuringly before the camera went on.
The night that lingers in memory is New Year’s Eve of 1987. Seconds before they went on the air for the 11 o’clock broadcast, Al reached over and gently touched his new co-anchor’s arm. It was Denise Koch. They were about to announce that Jerry Turner had just died.
It was a remarkable broadcast, done with skill and emotional restraint when people’s emotions were terribly frayed. When it was finally over, Al struggled to his feet, walked several steps off the news set, and broke down sobbing.
He’d kept his dignity as long as he could, and now in his privacy, his defenses were all down.
But I remember him in his anger as well. He and Turner were both serious newsmen — and serious smokers. During the weather and sports coverage, Al and Jerry would slip just off-camera, light up, and vent their anger over the station’s typical TV news flaws: a nightly series of violent stories punctuated by cheerful banter.
“Every night, there’s nobody left by the end of the show,” one of them would say, meaning one homicide story after another.
It was the kind of depressing, one-dimensional coverage — designed by some faceless outside “consultant” — that eventually caught up with local TV news, which now struggles to find viewers.
Al Sanders was 54 when he died. Lung cancer, it was. He was there when local television news was a legitimate force. He tried to make it better than it was.
A kind and gentle man, he was a genuine healing figure in Baltimore.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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