Good Night Binghamton

What a week!

Learning your way around a new city is so exciting, go around any corner and you see something new. You meet people without any preconceptions, and since you don't have your circle of friends set yet, you are open to everyone.

I remember my first month in Maine, I met a group of women who went out to a bar every Wednesday night. There were cocktails with pretty colorful names. I'm not a big drinker, so it never became my regular routine, but it was fun to be included.

Well here in Binghamton, the people I seem to have the most in common with at the moment are railroad workers, or "Railroaders" as they are called. They too live in hotels and look for places to eat dinner after 11 P.M.  I'm not sure I will spend every night hanging with railroad crews at Applebee's, (though they do have Weight Watchers entrees,) but when you are new in town it's fun to be open to everything.

The biggest adjustment at work, is that my new TV station does not use tape. Instead they use cameras with memory sticks and a server. This may sound like a minor change, but when you have spent your career logging tape, dubbing tape, changing tapes, and doing tape things, it's a shift. In some ways the medium is the message, and this is a subtly different medium. My brain just needs to catch up.

Finally, the first story I did was one of the most spiritually profound moments of my career. It was a profile of a Binghamton native who spent his career crisscrossing America and working as a news director at small market TV stations. Mark Carros was the sort of person every reporter needs in their first job. Part boss, part teacher, part wise uncle. Sadly he died at the age of 55 due to testicular cancer. He never got to be on TV in his home town, so I felt honored to give him the chance for a few minutes, albeit after his death.

Some families will tolerate media at an emotional event like this, but I have never had a family so happy to see a news crew at a memorial service. Some of his relatives were a little startled to see us there, but when they thought about it they smiled and said, "Mark would have  loved this." It turned out his son is also a newsie who works in Iowa. We shared a few minutes talking about common colleagues, and his new wife who is....an anchor.

I think I was drawn to Mark's story because it really was the tale of so many of the best people my husband and I have worked with. Managers, producers, and reporters who worked hard and loved their communities, passing up the glitz of major markets, to give their all to a smaller town.

The lessons they teach propel many of their proteges to places in the spotlight. I know that I often think about the principles my mentors taught me when I was starting out, and I am glad they were able to see potential in my wobbly first steps as a reporter.

Not too long after I met my husband he said to me, "The good people in news have to stick together."

Last night at a funeral home in upstate New York that's just what happened.