Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out what the longtime NY1 anchor Lewis Dodley plans to do when he retires at the end of the month.
The question for Lewis Dodley, the longtime Spectrum News NY1 anchor, was, Why now?
The word that went unsaid was “retire.” Dodley, 64, had announced on the air on Monday that he would do that at the end of the month.
“Now, because I want to do something while I still have tread on the tires, man,” he said. “I want to lose some weight. I have this crazy dental work. This is crazy because for years I’ve had this problem with these back teeth. Sometimes it affected even my speaking, but I’m one of these nose-to-the-grindstone guys — I keep going no matter what. I changed the way I spoke rather than getting dental work.”
He mentioned his daughter, Jaewon Dodley, 20, a film major at New York University, saying he wanted to help nurture her career “and not be an old man doing it.” He also talked about tackling some projects connected to Asia and particularly Korea, where his wife, Sooyeon Yoon Dodley, was born and grew up.
But there was a but.
“I don’t think I could ever get NY1 out of my system,” he said. “They offered me another contract. They said, Take six months off, come back, do some work reporting. That’s my actual strength. That’s underutilized here because the way we have things set up, I’m the anchor. There’s a lot of work from the ground up that I have to do every day. There’s no time for the stuff I really love.”
Dodley, who grew up in Ohio and started in radio there when he was 17, was working on a program called “Bulldog Edition” on WNET-TV in 1992 when he heard from NY1, which was not yet on the air.
The “Bulldog Edition” slot “was not really the kind of news job that I had prepared myself to do,” he said. “With NY1, I had a chance to be a full-fledged newsman and develop the culture of a newsroom from the ground up. How many times can you do that?” There were offers from other stations — “at the beginning,” he said. “I think the impression as time went on was, ‘This guy is ingrained in this place.’ Agents have called me. I have not called them back.”
I had never spoken with Dodley until now, even though, for 25 years, I wrote 175 words for him every night — a quick summary of stories from the next day’s New York Times that he delivered in a minute’s worth of airtime. “That’s this business,” he said. “You feel like you know somebody even if they’re a ghost. Barron the friendly ghost.”
We both laughed — until he got to the friendly-ghost part, I had thought he had been talking about how viewers think they know the television personalities they see regularly.
I said that humor is not something that we out here in television land expect from him, because he has always come across as a down-the-middle newscaster.
“That’s the whole thing,” he said. “This city is so diverse — so many different opinions — that I decided I’m going to keep mine to myself. That would draw more people than taking one side or another. That’s not the way I was brought up — you turn on the TV and you decide based on getting both sides of the story.”
Retirement in Rochester
So I asked the same question I asked Dodley: Why now?
“I’m going to be 80 in another week,” he said. (That makes him six months younger than Chuck Scarborough, who in March marked 50 years as an anchor at WNBC-TV in New York.)
“I had said for years, the day I pull into the parking lot and look at the building and don’t want to go in — that day hasn’t come yet, but there are changes,” Alhart said. “Most of the people I worked with are gone. The young people who come stay briefly. The last decade went pretty fast. Take some time and do some things.”
Weather
Cloudy day with a chance of showers and thunderstorms through midmorning and again in the evening. Temperatures will reach 80 and will drop to around 60 at night.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect today. Suspended tomorrow (Solemnity of the Ascension).
He was a 60-year-old married mogul at the height of reality television fame. The actress, Stormy Daniels, was 27 and headed to porn-movie stardom.
On Tuesday they came face to face when she took the witness stand at Trump’s trial. Daniels has told her story widely — to prosecutors, reporters, her friends and others — but never to jurors, and not with Trump in the room. He is accused of falsifying business records to cover up all traces of the tryst and his reimbursements to Michael Cohen, his lawyer and former fixer, for a $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels.
Daniels, a rapid-fire talker on the stand, described a sexual encounter with Trump that he has long denied. Some of the testimony was explicit, and outside the jury’s presence, Justice Juan Merchan said that “there were some things better left unsaid.” But he rejected a bid for a mistrial from Trump’s lawyers, instead telling them that their time would come.
“The more times this story has changed, the more fodder for cross-examination,” Merchan said.
Daniels said that on the day she met Trump, she was aware that he was a golfer and the host of the reality television show “The Apprentice.” She said that she also knew that Trump was “as old or older than my father.”
Later that day, she said, a Trump aide approached and invited her to dinner. She said that he had taken her number but that her initial reaction had been “eff no,” abbreviating an expletive.
But her publicist encouraged her, saying, “What could possibly go wrong?”
There were these other developments:
METROPOLITAN diary
Extra program, please
Dear Diary:
I was at a performance of “Days of Wine and Roses” on Broadway and seated in the mezzanine in front of a small group of charming but quintessentially talkative New Yorkers.
Shortly before the show began, they became anxious to get an extra program. They waved and called for help, but could not seem to summon the word “usher.”
“Excuse me!” one shouted. “Theater worker!”
“Program person!” another said. “Stage hand? Stage hand!”
