Books: Soundbites From Tom Brokaw
In His Own Words
The last thing you want to do is hire Tom Brokaw…
The NBC newsman (The Today Show, 1976-81; NBC Nightly News, 1982-2004) – in town to promote his new book, The Time of Our Lives (Random House) – recounted for his audience at Miami-Dade College last Friday night how his career almost included a permanent assignment in Miami:
“I just want to tell you how fond I am of the Greater Miami area. I have been coming here for many, many years.
“The first time I came was in 1968 for the Republican [national] convention and we came back of course in ’72 for George McGovern. And then I was a White House correspondent and Richard Nixon, at the height of Watergate, tried to get away by going to Key Biscayne.
“The White House press corp had this kind of massive ruse going in Washington in which we’d say to our colleagues and friends, ‘Wow, we’ve got to go back down to Key Biscayne this weekend, it’ll be 24-7 of work. We’ll be staking out the president, you’ll be having the weekend off, and we’ll be down there slaving away.’
“Well, we were slaving away on the tennis court, the beach, and then one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life was that I got to know Joe’s Stone Crabs. (Audience laughter.) So in our family we think our annual or several-times-a-year trips to Joe’s is kind of a spiritual pilgrimage that we make from time to time.
“The story I really want to tell you is that 1962, in South Dakota, I was engaged, getting married. I had been offered a job by someone that many of you in this audience would remember. He was the godfather of anchormen in Miami, Ralph Renick. And Ralph and I had met the summer before. I was working out of the western part of South Dakota in the Black Hills. I was on the air and he’d seen me. He came over and talked to me and then we stayed in touch and he offered me a job. I was getting married on that basis.
“We were being married in August. In about June he withdrew the job offer. I made all my plans, [had] told Meredith’s parents I had a job in Miami. People at my university, the University of South Dakota, were very excited. [I was] going off to the big exotic city of Miami.
“So I had to scramble and find other work and managed to get a job in Omaha. Meredith and I went there with all our belongings in the back seat of a new Chevy II, which was the most inexpensive car that her father could find on Main Street to buy as a wedding present.
“Got to Omaha, things worked out pretty well. Quickly I get hired by the biggest station in the southeast – WSB in Atlanta – and I was the 11:00 anchorman, and in Atlanta at the age of 25 and covering a lot of the civil rights movement for the Huntley-Brinkley Report for NBC Radio, when one night I pick up the phone in the newsroom and this very familiar voice on the other end starts clearing his throat.
“‘Tom? It’s Ralph Renick.’
“‘Well, Mr. Renick, nice to hear from you again.’ (Audience laughter.)
“And he said, [making a throat-clearing sound] ‘Uh, the owner of Metco Broadcasting was in Atlanta last night, kind of liked a lot of what he saw when you were on the air last night – well, let me cut to the chase: He’s asked me to hire you.’
“‘Gosh Ralph, we’ve been through that before, we’re not going to go through that again.’ (More laughter.)
“Later I was White House correspondent and we ran into each other. It was all patched up by then and we had kind of a high-five moment, but it was always mysterious to me. When Ralph died, Ike Seamans – who a lot of you know – got all of his correspondence. In that correspondence was a letter from a man that I had been working for the summer that Ralph and I had met and I knew he had disapproved of me because I was a young college student – I was working hard by day but I was really playing hard by night.
“It turns out he pulled the plug on me and Ralph kept the letter, which gave my colleagues in New York no end of joy because this guy said, ‘Dear Mr. Renick, the last thing you want to do is to hire Tom Brokaw, he is going nowhere in life, you can’t count on him.’ And it actually, probably turned out for the better.
“It worked out okay for me and I was able to have an attachment to Miami and in an entirely different way. So I never fail to come to this city that I don’t think about those days, and I know what an important figure Ralph Renick was in this community. When it came to the news, he was one of the very first people to do editorials on the air.”
