By Bruce Klauber
Though hardly remembered today, the late, ground-breaking news anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, who spent her formative years in Margate, was among the most influential individuals in the history of television news.
At the height of her career in 1977, Savitch was only the second woman in the NBC network’s history to anchor a national weekend newscast. Not long after, she was the first woman to anchor a weekday newscast.
Born in Wilmington, she moved to Kennett Square, Pa., where she lived until the age of 12, when her father passed away. The family then moved to Margate.
“The year I turned 12, my father turned gravely ill with a kidney disease, and his death at the age of 34 shattered my life,” Savitch wrote in her autobiography, “Anchorwoman.” “My mother was forced to sell the house and move us to Margate, to be near her parents, who lived on the seashore. I felt like Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ swept away by a tornado to a strange land. Everything familiar to me was gone; my father, my home, my school, my community, my friends, and even, in a way, my mother, who resumed the nursing career she had abandoned when she married.”
Things didn’t get any better emotionally for the young Savitch when she entered Atlantic City High School, then located on Albany and Atlantic avenues.
“It was a monstrous, noisy, inner-city school with an ethnic and socio-economic mix that confounded me,” she said. “I was used to the tidy homogeneity of my provincial school in Pennsylvania. Here in Atlantic City, my classmates were the sons and daughters of wealthy merchants, blacks from the ghetto, street-wise urbanites who must have surely recognized that I, with my hopeless knee socks that didn’t always match my sweaters, was as out of place as I felt.”
She began to find her way in her second year of high school when she met a student named Steve Berger, who was working for a WOND radio show called “Teenville.” Berger invited Savitch to visit the station, then located in Pleasantville.
“On a Saturday morning,” Savitch wrote, “I drove with Steve across the bridge to the WOND station, a faded saltbox on stilts known affectionately as ‘The Jukebox in the Swamp.’ Steve introduced me to the program director, Mike Elliott, who asked if I would like to record an introduction to the afternoon show. When I got home, my mother and I listened to the program at the kitchen table. As soon as I heard my voice on the airwaves, my destiny was fixed.”
She was hooked on broadcasting, and not long after her first visit to the station, she was hired by WOND as an on-air host. Though she developed quite the local following as a WOND disc jockey, her formal introduction to big-time television news happened when the Democratic National Convention came to Atlantic City in the summer of 1964.
“My dream of being a reporter took on an aura of reality in the summer of 1964,” Savitch said. “Atlantic City was the site of the 1964 Democratic Convention, and because WOND was an ABC affiliate, I managed to get a perimeter pass to Bader Field, the airstrip where Lyndon Johnson would be landing. That press card was like a ticket to paradise.”
By this juncture, there was no doubt in her mind that she would go to one of the few colleges at the time that offered a major in broadcast journalism. Her mother was more than concerned because, as Savitch explained, “There was no frame of reference in my family for a journalistic career of any sort.”
The rest of her story could have been the stuff of a Hollywood movie (it was, in fact, by way of a botched motion picture called “Up Close and Personal”). After graduation from Ithaca College, she spent a short time as a production assistant at WCBS Radio in New York.
She got her first on-air TV experience as a reporter and anchor in Houston, and in 1972, she moved to one of television’s top markets, Philadelphia’s KYW Television, then an NBC affiliate.
The city loved her, and for the first time, KYW seriously challenged WPVI’s “Action News,” the most widely-viewed telecast in the city for years. She loved Philadelphia and Philadelphia loved her. The camera absolutely loved her. After almost five years in Philadelphia, her dream of joining a national network news organization came true when she joined NBC as weekend anchor.
Things moved along quickly for the always-ambitious anchorwoman. She was a panelist on “Meet the Press,” hosted a public affairs series on PBS, and appeared regularly on primetime with the short and punchy NBC News Digest updates.
Things began to sour around 1983 when she was no longer the only female anchor on the scene. Connie Chung, just to name one, was a competitor who ended up replacing Savitch as Saturday evening anchor. At the same time, talk about Savitch’s drug use and emotional instability, rumored for years, increased.
Everything came to a head on Oct. 3, 1983 during a brief News Digest segment. Savitch was clearly impaired on national television. She later blamed a teleprompter malfunction, and then said she had taken pain medication she needed following surgery for a boating accident injury. That was pretty much the end of her career.
On Oct. 23, 1983, she was having dinner at Chez Odette’s in New Hope, Pa., with New York Post Vice President Martin Fischbein. After their dinner together, Fischbein drove the wrong way out of Odette’s and the car and went off the road, falling 15 feet into a canal. Both died. Though rumors of drug use persisted, an autopsy revealed that there were no drugs and only a tiny amount of alcohol in their systems.
“The funeral was held on Tuesday, Oct. 25, at Roth Memorial Chapel near the Inlet, then the only Jewish funeral home in the area. Fellow KYW television anchor Mort Crim gave the eulogy. Afterward he said, “I just did the best I could to try and express what everybody felt, and that is the tremendous loss of a very beautiful person.”
Jessica Savitch was 36 years old.
Bruce Klauber is the author of four books, an award-winning music journalist, concert and record producer and publicist, producer of the Warner Brothers and Hudson Music “Jazz Legends” film series, and performs both as a drummer and vocalist.
