MY WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL FRIEND, SYLVIA CHASE

Sylvia Chase,
Pioneering Television Newswoman, Dead at 80

Credit: Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times Image

The broadcast journalist Sylvia Chase in 1974, when she was with CBS. Over her career she also worked at ABC, PBS and KRON-TV in San Francisco. 

The New York Times 

By  Sam Roberts Jan. 7, 2019 

Sylvia Chase, an Emmy Award-winning correspondent whose professionalism and perseverance in the 1970s helped a generation of women infiltrate the boys club of television news, died on Thursday in Marin County, Calif. She was 80. Her death was confirmed by Shelly Ross, a former network news colleague, who said Ms. Chase had undergone surgery for brain cancer several weeks ago. 

Ms. Chase was one of a number of correspondents hired by network and local television news departments — along with Connie Chung,  Cassie Mackin ,  Marya McLaughlin , Virginia Sherwood, Lesley Stahl and others — at a time when women were striving to be taken seriously and to defy being typecast as eye candy for male viewers. 

While they had been preceded a decade earlier by pioneers like Marlene Sanders, Ms. Chase and her contemporaries were members of a freshman class still more concerned with getting into broadcast news on the ground floor than worried about being passed over for promotion later on because of a glass ceiling. 

Bill Moyers, who worked with her on the PBS series “Now With Bill Moyers,” said in an email that Ms. Chase “would quit before giving in to a less-than-honorable higher-up who insisted on compromising a story, and she was a breakthrough pioneer for woman in journalism and in coverage of kids in need.” He added, “In the internecine conflicts at either CBS or ABC — between journalists trying to get it right and brass playing it safe — she had your back because she knew you would have hers.” 

Credit: Steve Fenn/ABC Image 

Ms. Chase was an original member of the reporting team for the weekly ABC News magazine “20/20”; a correspondent for another ABC News series, “Primetime”; and the producer and host of a daytime program for CBS, “Magazine.” She also anchored the nightly news on KRON-TV in San Francisco. 

She broke ground on topics like sex abuse in the workplace and in prison. She also reported on a diet pill that was linked to lung disease; a treatment program for drug-addicted musicians; an epidemic of diabetes (a disease that she endured herself) among Native Americans in New Mexico; racism in law enforcement; and publicly funded programs that provided horrific care for disabled children. 

She won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University and George Foster Peabody awards and shared an Emmy in 1978 with her producer, Stanhope Gould, for a report on exploding automobile gas tanks. TV Guide once called her “the most trusted woman on TV.” Sylvia Chase, center, in 1983, was a 20/20 correspondent along with, from left, Bob Brown, Tom Jarriel, Geraldo Rivera and John Stossel. Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters anchored the team

Sylvia Belle Chase was born on Feb. 23, 1938, in Northfield, Minn., to Kelsey David Chase and Sylvia (Bennett) Chase. After her parents divorced, she was raised by her grandmother in Minneapolis. The grandmother was listed in census records as the custodian of an apartment house whose tenants included Sylvia’s aunt, a radio announcer. 

Sylvia’s first broadcasting job was reporting on junior high school doings for a show that she and her older sister produced for local radio. “People said Sylvia was ‘tough,’ but in fact it was principle that prompted her to stand her ground,” Mr. Moyers said. She was, he said, shaped by the New England liberalism of Northfield’s founders and by its good Samaritan heritage. (The town’s local hero was a banker who in 1876 refused the James-Younger gang’s demand to open the vault because he would not betray the trust of his fellow citizens.) 

Ms. Chase earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1961 from the University of California, Los Angeles, taking two extra years to graduate because she was working her way through college as a receptionist. Her brief marriage to Robert Rosenstone, a history professor at the California Institute of Technology, ended in divorce. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. 

She lived in Belvedere, Calif. Ms. Chase worked for Democratic legislators and candidates in California in the 1960s until she was hired by the Los Angeles radio station KNX. In 1971 she joined CBS News in New York, where she wrote and narrated a new radio series, “The American Woman,” which replaced the on-air advice column “Dear Abby.” 

She was later a correspondent on the “CBS Evening News With  Walter Cronkite .” Ms. Chase was hired by ABC News in 1977 and was a correspondent for “20/20” from 1978 to 1985. KRON promoted her return to California in 1985 with billboards proclaiming, “The Chase Is On.” “I resolve to raise public awareness about two issues,” she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1988: “the perils facing California’s children and the growing crisis in caring for AIDS patients.” 

Chase left San Francisco in 1990 and returned to ABC in New York. When her contract was not renewed after the network retrenched in 2001, she moved to PBS, where she narrated a documentary series titled “Exposé” and joined “Now With Bill Moyers” as a correspondent. 

In 1973, during the Watergate scandal, Ms. Chase was determined to get an interview with President Richard M. Nixon’s younger daughter, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who was emerging as one of Nixon’s foremost public defenders. She revealed her successful strategy to Savvy magazine. “The basic rule is not to take ‘No,’ ever,” Ms. Chase said. “Call again and again, every day.”

SISTERS

My friend & colleague

 Annie

The Yin & Yang of a weekend trip to Washington, DC

Carol and I traveled to Washington, DC ostensibly to attend a wedding. We had some free time & there were a few sites we both wanted to visit between our social obligations.

On Friday afternoon, in the blazing sun, we walked to the Vietnam Memorial wall. On the way there we ran into a friendly squirrel.

Calling it a wall is sort of a misconception, at least to us. While it is a wall, it is set into the side of a berm, i.e. it was not a free standing wall which we had always imagined it to be. This did not take away from its simple beauty or tragic symbolism. 

As we walked along it in respect of those who were sacrificed, I told Carol that what saddened me most was knowing that 35,000 of those 'names' became eligible for their etching only after the start of peace talks between the United States & the Republic of North Vietnam. 

The two sides first had to first decide on the location for the negotiation, then the shape of the table the negotiators were to sit at & other such important items before getting into the protracted peace talks which where punctuated by extra U.S. bombing runs to make a negotiation point, the suspension of the talks & the return to talks, a dance that went on  for years so everyone could save 'face'.

Saturday morning started with a cholesterol filled breakfast (eggs benedict) & a cooler walk to the National Holocaust Museum. It was crowded, many of the vistors where young. I guess that's a good thing but I couldn't imagine how these kids were going to absorb what they were to read & what they would see.

In the museum lobby, you take an ID card which contains the photo and the story of a person who died in the holocaust. My person was a Polish Jew named Chaim Engel. When the Germans invaded Poland, they sent him to Germany as a slave laborer. In 1940 he was shipped back to Poland but immediately deported to the Sobibor death camp. There a small prisoner revolt took place; Chaim stabbed his overseer (to death) while screaming the name of his father & his mother & others murdered with each thrust of the knife. Chaim escaped into the dense forest where he hid out until the war ended. After living in Europe & Israel, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1957.

At the start, the museum is dark and foreboding. No natural light filters through the steel covered windows.

The tour beings on the forth floor and wends its way down an irregular ramp which takes you through different spaces of exhibits, photos, videos, news reels, clothes, hair, films, objects (large & small) in a time line from the rise of the Nazi Party to the present.

But to give you an inkling of the intensity is to describe traveling to the fourth floor in a crowded industrial-like stainless steel elevator; to me a reflection of the gas chambers that were used to poison groups of un-suspecting prisoners. At some level I felt some relief when the doors opened on the fourth floor.

The story of the Jew's descent into hell begins with Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass) and continues as the race laws were enacted, destroying Jewish life & dignity bit by bit before destroying bodies and minds. Then came the camp experience told by survivors via film & audio recordings. Next the liberation as seen by the troops and here I have to pause for a moment to describe one video that impacted me deeply but I didn't know it until later when it hit me like what I imagine PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) episode must be like. 

When the allies reached Auschwitz & Bergen-Belsen & other camps, the Nazis had not had enough time to destroy all the 'evidence' of their atrocities so the allied soldiers found piles of dead bodes which had not yet been burned along with mountains of shoes & hair, and brushes & spoons. Oh yes, there were the odd skeletal survivors & one can only marvel at the strength of the body to survive such horrors. 

To avoid disease, the allied army was tasked with buring the piled dead bodies in mass graves. This was accomplished using bulldozers so there I stood watching a video of these bulldozers pushing piles of emaciated corpses into a mass grave & covering them with dirt. 

Then came the story of how no one would accept the refugees from these camps who had nothing, some left without their dignity nor a shred of clothing to hide their bodies. Not the United States, no country really, so Jewish organizations set up camps for these people to heal & to get organized before moving on.

We walked through narrow hallways with photos from ceiling to floor on both sides of people who had lived in the shtetls (villages) before the war, the names of these shtetls engraved in glass to be glanced at as we moved along. Then the names of the inhabitants of the shtetls also etched in glass. Some light could now be seen as we approached the end of this tragic journey. 

But just before we reached the first floor, there was a vast bright and almost empty room save some simple stone benches & an eternal flame. There were only a very few people in there. 

It was the remembrance room where people could sit and meditate, to think about what they had just seen & heard, to think about relatives or friends, or friends of friends, or relatives of friends, or period stories read & to consider some of the more recent ethnic cleansing in Europe and Africa. 

It reminded me of the a room in the Jersalem Halacoust Museum -- a room of eternal flames -- a number of them placed on the floor below a low, wooden, viewing balcony, each flame representing a remembrance of the thousands of Jews lost in each country conquered by the Nazi war machine. 

I started to enter the Washington Holocaust remembrance room & felt a sudden need to stop as though a strong hand was in front of me, preventing me from entering. Mind you, this was all in nano seconds. But I turned away overwhelmed by an enormous emotion, a sorrow, so huge that it left me with the greatest urge to burst into tears but I managed to keep myself together. Carol must have seen something on my face & asked if I was all right. I couldn't talk. I could only shake my head. 

Outside we sat on a stone bench, watched children lined up waiting for their tour to begin, and talked about other things: the weather, what we would do next, the back timing necessary to get to the chuch on time. After a few minutes we walked back to the hotel. 

Four thirty in the afternoon found us at the little yellow church near the White House for a lovely wedding ceremony followed by cocktails, dinner, speeches & dancing. 

The date was May 22rd & it wasn't until many hours later that I flashed on my 97 year old father being buried about six weeks before, his coffin in the hole in the ground; everyone throwing shovels full of earth into the hole to cover the coffin which contained his body, emaciated by old age. He would have been 98 on May 23rd.

Either this will make your mouth water or you are a garden gnome.

Yesterday, starting at noon, I had a delicious lunch: a selection of soft cheeses, prosciutto, olivatta, olive oil soaked baby artichokes, grated parmigiana, a fresh baguette & bottle of cold white wine (I drank the WHOLE thing), rounded out by hot coffee & chocolate covered biscotti (pronounced bishcot).

Is your mouth watering? Mine is.

But the most delicious ingredient of all was that I had this lunch in a spotless, sun filled room in a homey triplex on the lower west side, with two sweethearts whom I hadn't seen in much too long. Our hostess: Mary Ellen Silver - nay Schaefer & my date, Ms. Shirley Weiss. Just the three of us (and a King Charles Spaniel named Toby).

I was lucky to have both these ladies (and I use that word advisdely) in my professional & personal life at a time when working in a network news department was fun, honorable, rewarding & extremely satisfying. We were part of a larger team who labored together at ABC News, on a variety of programs, over a number of years. 

It was patient work. It took many hours. It was detail oriented. And never in my career while working with them did I ever doubt that these women weren't doing their absolute best at all times, no matter the circumstances, to complete whatever task was before them. And they knew they could count on me for the same. Because of that faith in each other we were a very close knit group. Yes, there were a few others in the group but, honestly, there were really only a very few. 

Together we worked on hundreds of hours of television, programs like Good Morning America, 20/20, a host of pilots & specials & probably our least favorite project, the ill conceived 'The Last Word'. 

Like many teams in life, this one broke up for selfish reasons. One of the members just had to move on -- me.  And afraid to face the 'music', I did it suddenly & surgically: I just didn't show up, didn't communicate, didn't attend a group party. 

I hid out, an emotional thief in the night. And it has been that way for the better part of 30 years.

Oh yes, I would run into someone from the 'old days' every once in a while but not in the same context as this lunch where we could sit and talk exhaustively.

Rather than focus on how our form of work had changed for the worse over the years, we focused on the good times, discussing what was important then & now & how you can never go back. And we were a bit saddened that newcomers in the business couldn't enjoy what we had enjoyed because the news business model had changed. No longer was it a public responsibility; it became a profit center. 

I'm sure some of our collective memories were romanticized, as all such memories are, but I can say with absolutely certainty that those were very special days, a magical time, a rarified atmosphere of excellence & mutual respect. And I was able to share that with these two ladies. 

About four o'clock we hugged & kissed so long. 

I was and am one lucky guy.

Sam comes for a visit

Sam (left) & her driver, Lee Murrer, stopped by for a visit on their way to Pennsylvania -- and ultimately Alabama.

Sam's antics got me smiling on this cold winter's day. And she even got Stella Bella (right) moving around a bit. I kept Truman, not pictured, on a lead as he is 14 & still horny & I didn't want to chance that he might strain himself.

Anyway, the three Bouvs enjoyed themselves for a while before we went in for a sit down in front of a warming fire & some appetizers: green olives, thinly sliced, toasted French bread with humus. As the fire burned down & the Bouvs calmed down, lunch was announced & we moved into the dining room.

Soup, sandwich (mozzarella, red peppers, basil w special sauce) on flat bread w a nice red Chiraz (sp?), sparking water.

A non-confrontational conversation ensued about President Obama's first State of the Union speech & other matters like Lee's work & our very old commercial Garland gas range which Lee admired & Carol loves to cook on but hates to clean. Can't say that I blame her but, really, the maid does it.

After a rest, dessert arrived: fresh strawberries dipped in dark chocolate along w some amaretto cookies (also dipped) w coffee. Poor Truman was sent to sleep behind some French doors where he could see what was going on but couldn't join in, Stella sneaked off to her position near the fireplace & Sam learned to lie quietly by our chairs as we finished up.

To ward off pending fullness & possible nap time, Lee & I, plus the Bouvs, went outside for a walk around the property & while I was explaining our next construction project, the Bouvs romped in the snow . This time Truman joined in -- sort of -- but he seems to know & respect his own limits which some older adult humans could learn from.

As Sam scampered around full speed, I tried to convince Lee that sometime around the age of 2-2.5yrs, a light bulb would probably go off in her head & she would become a more 'responsible' Bouvier (they don't mature until 3-5 yrs). She's got such wonderful exuberance, she runs with such abandon, it's exhilarating to watch. This is not to say she's a wild child. No. Lee is terrific with her & she pays strict attention to him, looking him right in the eye for instruction. She reminded me a bit of Ruben.

Finally both Sam's & Stella Bella's feet were decorated by so many frozen balls of ice that we got a bowl of warm water to melt them off.  Stella went into the house, Sam went into the car & about 4:00 pm Lee set off for his next stop with Carol, John & Zoe in Philadelphia.

It was a very nice afternoon which we look forward to doing again when the pool is open, the gardens are blooming & we can sit on the terrace, eat, drink & reminisce about this day.