ATWT: Small tidbit

By NEAL ZOREN

Times Television Columnist

A couple of weeks after inaugurating Channel 3’s “Philly Talk” format at noon on weekdays, anchors Pat Ciarrocchi and Ukee Washington have a different kind of gig. They play news reporters, not out in the field for “Eyewitness News” but as a one-off for a segment of “As The World Turns,” the CBS soap that airs today at 2 p.m. on Channel 3.

“As the World Turns” might be the grand survivor of the soaps that began in the 1950s when Penny was newly minted, so to speak. Its companions at its inception, “A Brighter Day,” “The Guiding Light” and “The Edge of Night,” have all been extinguished. Other CBS daytime dramas, “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful,” made their debuts about 20 years after “World,” and ABC’s “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” are from the ’60s as is “General Hospital.”

So it looks as if Pat and Ukee have found themselves on the grandmother of soaps (with NBC’s “Days of Our Lives” as grandpapa).

A fixture at NBC10 retires

Television doesn’t happen by magic, and people you might never see or hear about work amazingly hard to make sure that television stations are more than their on-air product.

One of those people is Jo Anne Wilder, who has worked in community affairs and communications at Channel 10 for 44 years. Her tenure spans the CBS and NBC eras and has made a marked difference in how WCAU-TV, no matter its owner, programming or news operation, affected many in the viewing area.

Wilder is retiring from Channel 10, and it will be difficult to imagine that station without her. She’s been that much of a fixture and for so long.

Wilder was not thinking of a career when she walked through Channel 10’s doors as a teenager after being graduated from high school. She only wanted a job. Competent and friendly from the get-go, she was given a job. Eventually she worked her way from clerical ranks to positions of responsibility. Wilder’s good nature permeated the station. You could hear her laugh or see her diffuse a difficult situation with equal aplomb. Everything she did was thorough and orderly.

Community Affairs was the department in which Wilder landed for keeps. As happened during her entire time at Channel 10, she began as an assistant and rose through the ranks within the department until she became in the head of it in the early ’80s.

One of her great tutors and champions was her predecessor in the Community Affairs job, Edie Huggins. Edie had come to Channel 10 as a reporter and program host in 1966, but as television goes, one general manager along the way took her off the air briefly and moved her into the executive suite.

When Steve Cohen, a native Philadelphian who grew up watching Edie on the air, was named Channel 10’s general manager for CBS in 1983, he restored Huggins to the front of the camera. Wilder, Huggins’s assistant, was promoted by Cohen to the directorship.

What an excellent job she did! Wilder was accustomed to being behind the scenes. At myriad luncheons, award ceremonies, meetings, dedications, receptions and special events, Wilder represented Channel 10. She was Channel 10, its primary ambassador, sitting in for whatever general manager happened to reign at the time.

Wilder, like her counterparts at other stations, was the one groups went to if they wanted to find out about air time or corporate sponsorship from Channel 10. Wilder was the person to see to build a coalition that might address a problem or bring a beneficial project into fruition. She also had to do mind-numbing things like keeping the public file, a never-ending collection of on-air logs, analyses, interviews with the community, and letters to and from the station that has to be available, by federal law, to anyone who drops in even casually and wants to see it.

Thank Jo Anne for countless good deeds, for health fairs and various ethnic and cultural pride events. Thank her for running Channel 10’s intern program and helping an incalculable number of young people learn both the workaday routine and craft of television and whether they would like it as a life’s work. Credit her with putting Channel 10’s seal of approval on projects that never have gotten off the ground without it or for making Channel 10 resources available to helpful nonprofits with a limited budget by shooting a public service announcement with a Channel 10 crew in a Channel 10 studio.

In the late ’90s, after a slew of people, including me, served as Channel 10’s director of press relations, NBC did away with that CBS post, and Jo Anne took on the job of being the main spokesperson for Channel 10 to the local and trade media. She handled the job with her typical dignity, humor and common sense.

Community Affairs is not what it once was. Wilder now joins pioneers like Dorie Lenz and Edie Huggins who built the community role at stations and now are absent from their posts. Linda Munich at Channel 6 and Joanne Calabria at Channel 3 continue the great effort of those pioneers, both being quite innovative and remarkable in their own right, Munich producing multiple programs and, for a time, appearing on air as she managed Channel 6’s position in the community, Calabria creating events for organizations like the Susan G. Komen Center for Breast Cancer Research, of which she is currently the board chair, but one worries about the legacy of Community Affairs as these giants, Jo Anne Wilder first, approach retirement.

Wilder’s personal story should be a great inspiration to all who believe that hard work, learning by experience, and the practice of unfailing graciousness will breed success.

Her career is a shining example of what one person can do to harness the forces of the big corporations for which she worked and use them for the benefit of a community at large, a community that includes many in Delaware County, which Wilder has called home for several decades. On levels people have probably not considered, she will be missed, and sorely.

Enjoy your retirement, Jo Anne.

Link: http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2009/11/09/entertainment/doc4af78646c8e4f279224014.txt