Austin360 blogs > TV Blog > Archives > 2004 > August > 16 > Entry
Charley in person, not on TV
Funny thing about working for a newspaper … No matter what your job title is, you’re always a reporter on call.
Which is why my quickie Florida vacation last week turned into a date with Hurricane Charley.
I flew to Sarasota last Thursday for the tail-end of a weeklong 50th birthday celebration with my friend Anne Rodgers, a former American-Statesman editor and current features editor at the Palm Beach Post.
Both papers are owned by Cox, so technically we’re on the same payroll. We’ve pretty much always been on the same wave-length.
The beach house Anne had rented for a gaggle of her gal pals had to be abandoned three days early because Anna Maria Island, where it was perched overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, had to be evacuated.
That was a tad disappointing, but we figured we still had a few days of friendship time together. We decided to drive across state to Palm Beach and have some fun at her house. Over dinner in Sarasota, we talked about what we would do on the Atlantic side of Florida instead of the Gulf.
As we merrily sipped our drinks, her cell phone rang. The editor of the Palm Beach Post wanted to know where we were and what we were doing, because Charley was heading toward Sarasota. And, of course, there we were.
Next thing we knew we were trolling Wal-Mart for rain slickers and notebooks. Then we were searching for a room for the night. That turned out to be the toughest challenge of the entire adventure.
Beach-front communities and the barrier islands had evacuated, and rooms were scarce as a dry seagull. Anne and I momentarily considered camping in the one hotel we were fairly certain did have a room — the Ritz Carlton — but then we thought how that would look on an expense account and drove on.
So we wound up squeezed into a tiny room at the Days Inn — along with about 75 workers for Florida Power and Light who were prepared to wipe up the mess after Charley departed.
Friday morning, after a fitful night in a cramped motel full of anxious, evacuated home-owners, we hit the Red Cross shelters to interview the huddled masses. Be glad we live in Austin, where hurricanes aren’t a major threat. These poor evacuees were sad and terrified, with no idea what if anything they would go home to in Charley’s wake.
Neither Anne nor I had a computer, so we scratched out our vignettes longhand and dictated them over the phone. We reported for the Palm Beach Post’s online editions, contributed to Saturday’s main stories in the paper and even managed to get a story of our own with a joint byline. If that doesn’t seal a friendship between two reporters in a hurricane, nothing will.
The whole adventure was oddly exhilarating. Not exactly a relaxing vacation, but a fine addition to my résumé and a blood-pumping adventure. TV critics don’t often cover major weather disasters — and certainly not for a paper a thousand miles from home.
Now I’m looking foward to calmly watching the Olympics for a couple of weeks. No matter how many gold medals Michael Phelps win, it won’t be as thrilling as getting up-close-and-personal with mighty Charley.
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