It's been a couple of years since my book came out, but one of the wonderful things about it is that people write in regularly to say nice things about the book and my mother. This recent note I found particularly wonderful:
John,
I have just started reading your book. Born in 1964, I obviously got
into the game far too late to have truly appreciated Nancy's impact on
the media. But, judging from chapter 1, it would appear I saw her more
often than you did.
A peculiar sentence, you might think, but I was a peculiar kid. At the
age of four, I could read "Green Eggs and Ham" cover-to-cover on my
own. I could count as high as anybody wanted, due to watching the tape
counter on my dad's reel-to-reel. and my favourite toy was the World
Book Encyclopaedia (Rand McNally's Pictorial Atlas ran it a close second).
And my daily routine, since I was not in school at that point, was
NBC's morning game show lineup. Concentration with Hugh Downs. Eye
Guess with Bill Cullen. Hollywood Squares with Peter Marshall.
Jeopardy! with Art Fleming. And at 11.20a central time, Nancy Dickerson.
Now a 4- or 5-year old can hardly be expected to understand anything
about Vietnam (tho' at least *I* knew where it *was*!), nor the
Teamsters, nor Milk Funds, Civil Unrest, riots, Kent State, Oh!
Calcutta, &c. &c. but at least I was *aware*. And there she was, day
in and day out, her face to one side of the screen, dark hair flipped
up at the ends, reading her piece (a little later I would be treated to
the news with Edwin Newman). Her face and voice became ingrained in my
consciousness, pretty much forever. From 1968 until 1970 when they
dragged me off to school (what a mundane place!), as far as I was
concerned, nothing was important until Nancy Dickerson read it to me
from the east coast.
Knowing full well the high cost of videotape in the 1960s encouraged the
wide-spread practice of video wiping for tape reuse, I sincerely doubt
much video of Nancy from that era still exists. My childhood has long
since passed as well.
Middle-aged now, a fairly well-off networking engineer, and completely
estranged from my own parents for decades, I look back and realize what
a positive influence something as simple as 5 minutes worth of news each
day can be. I am very interested in reading this book.
I miss her.
Regards,
S. R. Wright
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