Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [43]
In 1975, Oprah, who was coanchoring the weeknight news, was recruited by WSB in Atlanta. “It was time for a black anchor on weekday TV,” said former news director Kenneth Tiven. “She came down and was terrific. I remember having her home to dinner.… She had even then an extraordinary sense of self-confidence, an eerie comprehension of what was expected of her as an upwardly mobile black woman and budding television star. However, I suddenly bolted Atlanta for Philadelphia KYW as news director, and she said, ‘Without you I am not coming.’ ”
Chris Clark recalled Oprah coming to him with the WSB job offer. “I talked her out of it because she wasn’t ready and we didn’t want to lose her. We were just starting field anchoring and I thought she’d be great. So I gave her a five-thousand-dollar raise, and she stayed with us—for a while. Then, a year or so later, she got an offer from Baltimore’s WJZ-TV. Again, management told me to talk her out of leaving. So I called her in. ‘Oprah, management has told me to talk you out of leaving. Have I tried to talk you out of it? Good. Now I think you should take the job. You’re ready.’ ”
Baltimore was a much larger television market, and the job paid $40,000 a year, but Oprah did not leap at the opportunity to coanchor the news on WJZ. “I hated Baltimore when I first went there,” she told WDCN’s Gail Choice in her “Farewell to Nashville” interview. “But I took the free trip they offered and looked at the Westinghouse-owned station, which I loved. They own[ed] five other stations, and they said, ‘We have big plans for you.’ They wanted me to sign a five-year contract but I said no. ‘I’ll be too old in five years to do what I want to do.’ So I negotiated it down to three years.” Oprah, then twenty-one, said she envisioned herself going from coanchoring the news in Baltimore to transferring to the more glamorous ABC affiliate in San Francisco and finally to becoming “the black Barbara Walters.… If she can make $1 million a year, I figure we can make $500,000,” Oprah told her black interviewer.
“I hate to leave but it’s just about necessary for me to do what I want to do later, and that’s to anchor in one of the top 10 markets.” Oprah said she would not have considered moving to Baltimore if WJZ had not been the number one station in its market.
Gail Choice appeared wide-eyed with wonder at her colleague’s strategic vision, and, dripping with admiration, she commended Oprah on her good fortune. “I was lucky, lucky, lucky … in the right place at the right time,” said Oprah. Years later she would say it was all a part of God’s plan for her.
When she signed her three-year contract with WJZ and prepared to move to Baltimore, she asked her father for a loan until she started getting paid in her new job. “Vernon Winfrey was a good customer of mine at the Third National Bank in East Nashville,” said Janet Wassom. “He took out papers and cosigned with Oprah for a loan to pay her expenses for relocating.… He was known in the black community as someone people went to for help, and he helped those who helped themselves. Didn’t believe in handouts. Made everyone pay him back, and I’m sure he did the same with Oprah.”
Oprah repaid her father many times over in the years to come, with luxury cars, fine clothes, gold watches, immense houses, and exotic vacations. She even offered to retire him for life. “She calls this place a crummy old dump,” he said in 2008 of his dilapidated barbershop on Vernon Winfrey Avenue. Yet, even at the age of seventy-five and following a stroke, the man who believed in a hand up ignored his daughter’s offer of a handout.
“I hated to see Oprah leave Nashville, but I wanted to give her a great send-off,” said Luvenia Harrison Butler, “so I threw a big going-away party—made all