By Joe Ward
It was 10:33 p.m. on a Friday at WHAS-TV, and co-anchor Jean West was looking for an early exit. She often gets one on a Friday night because of “Friday Night Flights,” a late sports feature that focuses on high school ball games around the region and doesn’t require her presence. She had just finished with the new 10 o’clock portion of her evening anchor duties — “WHAS11 News @ 10 p.m. on the WB” — and was settling in at her off-studio desk, secure in the knowledge that everything was ready for her regular 11 p.m. broadcast. It had been a long week — the first in WHAS’s foray into the 10 p.m. time slot, with a news program produced for the WB Network’s WBKI.
“We have an eight-car pileup on I-264!” night assignment editor Sherleen Shanklin called out.
West groaned. “This always happens on Friday night,” she said, getting up from her seat and heading for the police and fire radio monitors to try to get a handle on what was going on. People were moving all around the station. “What about Sky 11?” West asked. Someone called and learned the station’s helicopter was undergoing maintenance and wouldn’t be available. Veteran reporter Tony Hyatt was dispatched to the accident scene.
“I-264 is shut down,” Shanklin said from a phone. News gatherers were talking on phones and radios. “There’s no reason for an eight-car pileup,” West said plaintively. “There’s no ice. There’s no snow. What’s the matter with these people?”
She told sports anchor Kyle Draper that it might be necessary to cut into his Friday Night Flights for a report from Hyatt. With co-anchor Doug Proffitt off on a special project, West said she would stay until after the sports program to handle the wreck story if necessary. Her apparent reluctance was mostly for humorous effect, but it was also partly real. She is new to the prime-time pressures of local newscasting.
West has been an anchor at WHAS for 20 years, and she’s mostly avoided late nights. The Louisville station wooed her away from a co-anchor position in her native Baton Rouge, La., in 1985 to be a noon anchor and medical reporter. She’d do the noon news, then work on medical stories to be aired later in the day. She eventually moved to 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. co-anchor spots, and made a name for herself on the health beat. “She’s one of the most respected health reporters in the market,” WHAS news director (and her current boss) Aaron Ramey says.
She was able to do all of that on a mostly daytime work schedule, which permitted her and her husband — attorney Michael Losavio — to rear three boys, all Louisville-born, in moderate comfort. West says she never aspired to the high-profile anchor positions at 6 and 11 p.m. “I’m just a family girl,” she says.
But Ramey says that, in effect, the station aspired for her. He has been in his job a year or so, about the length of time WHAS has been looking at the 10 p.m. news slot as a way to ext/files/storyimages/its brand and attract a wider variety of viewers. WHAS produces the program in its own studios and shoots it over the wires to WBKI. The newscast challenges Fox station WDRB’s “News @ 10,” which has had a monopoly on the 10 p.m. local-news franchise for 15 years.
“We wanted to launch it right, with the right people,” Ramey says. “She’s a terrific anchor. A lot of it’s the way she interprets the news she’s reading.” He says West’s expression shows an understanding of the stories and empathy for those involved in them, and that she has what the station will need to attract a new audience.
For West, though, it’s been a bit wrenching. Personally, she says, it’s a difficult change. Her new hours don’t mesh with her family very well, and it was her previous family-friendly schedule that kept her in Louisville all these years. “I’ve turned down other jobs,” she says.
But professionally, she says, “It’s delightful” — a challenge that puts skills she’s proud of on the line to build something new. Still, West resisted the move at first. She and the station did some talking. “We worked it out,” she says, noting that her boys are nearly grown now. Antonio is 19 and a freshman at the University of Louisville; Joseph, 17, is a junior at St. Xavier High School; and Mark is 13, an eighth-grader at St. Agnes School.
Like West, her husband, Michael Losavio, says the new schedule has sometimes been a strain. “Change is always disruptive,” he says. But “to the extent that it is happening now, it is something we can accommodate. The kids are older and becoming self-reliant.” The older boys can take on picking up and dropping off chores their mother previously handled.
Ramey declined to say whether there was a big raise in it for West. “That’s between us,” he says.
West always has had a way of adapting. She was born in 1954, an African-American in a then-segregated Southern town. Her parents were university teachers and schooling for her and her siblings was mostly sheltered, in a university school. But she spent the seventh grade in a predominantly white public school, and it was an eye-opener. “It was the first time I felt ostracized,” she says. “We (black pupils) were always together in a little group at recess. We made friends in class, but they didn’t recognize us in the cafeteria. It was kind of hurtful.”
West’s mother was a drama teacher, and little Jean began performing onstage at age four. She attended Louisiana State University as a theater major, transferred across town to Southern University and then moved on to graduate school at the University of California at Davis. Along the way she worked some at radio stations.
“The plan was not to be an actress,” she says. “I wanted to write and direct.” In the late ’70s, she says, there were few roles for young black women “except as slaves and hookers.” It was natural to segue into broadcasting because “plays were the first newscasts,” she says. In ancient Greece, the players would present the news of the day from the stage in interesting and entertaining ways. “To me that’s the most effective way of teaching.”
She did teach theater for a while at a junior college in northern California before making a decisive leap to broadcasting by taking a job as a newscaster in Japan with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. She lived in Ishikawa, on Okinawa, for three years and had many adventures, including a shouting match over the first amendment with a Marine gunnery sergeant. West was trying to confirm whether some sailors from a Soviet submarine were treated at a nearby American base after they sustained burns in an on-board accident. What she learned, she recalls, was that the first amendment doesn’t count for much when the people who don’t want you to get the story are also the people you work for. The sergeant — Dale Dye, who later became an advisor on military films and played some roles in Hollywood — was in charge of the station where she worked, and she was his only civilian subordinate. “It kind of irritated him that he couldn’t make me do
pushups,” she says.
She stayed three years, living in a Japanese house, next door to a Japanese neighbor who taught English. They would practice on each other. “We destroyed both languages,” West says. She also traveled extensively in Asia.
By the time she was nearing the finish of the tour she had signed on for, her parents were aging and wanted her to come back to Baton Rouge. She says her father took some of her tapes into a television station, and she landed a job as Louisiana’s first black prime-time co-anchor. It was 1982, and strange in some ways. The walls in the station still showed where signs designating “white” and “colored” restrooms once had been posted. A Ku Klux Klan headquarters was 20 miles down the road. “It was a learning experience,” she says. She got some mean phone calls. She reported on politics and delivered the news, and came to like working there a lot, she says. She is pleased when she goes back and finds that people still know her there.
Now even more viewers in Louisville are likely to recognize West as she and Proffitt appear at both 10 and 11. On that first Friday night of double newscasts, it turned out no one was hurt in the eight-car pileup, and Hyatt got his report back in time to be inserted into the 11 o’clock broadcast. West went home at about midnight after all.
Her new life after two decades in Louisville, says her husband, “has begun to work itself out.”
