2008 flashback: my interview with Wes Sarginson upon his retirement
This story was written by Rodney Ho and ran on what was then called the AJC Radio & TV blog back on April 8, 2008.
The workaholic has finally called it a day.
Wes Sarginson, an anchor/reporter at 11Alive (WXIA-TV) for 10 years with a previous stint at WSB-TV, retired for good a couple of weeks ago. He had stepped down as regular anchor a year ago, ceding the spot to Ted Hall but rode out his contract by doing more reporting for his signature “Wes Side Stories” and doing fill-in anchoring.
I caught him by phone yesterday and he seemed quite at ease with his life after 46 years in broadcast TV and long, long hours.
“People always wondered if I could stay away from this business, but I enjoy getting up on my time and my schedule,” he said. (Of course, it’s been less than a month, so we’ll see...)
Sarginson was the type of anchor who also liked to report so he’d do both on most days, even when he anchored both 6 and 11 p.m. “I always felt like if you don’t, how can you stay in contact with your audience?”
Ironically, during the year he was not anchoring full time, he said he worked just as much, if not more hours, because he’d go and do many stories he couldn’t do when he was an anchor because of deadlines, driving further and going to more locales, usually with his regular photographer Richard Crabbe.
WXIA gave him a lovely going away party. He didn’t want cake or gifts but they gave him cake and a $250 gift card to Bass Pro Shop anyway. “I don’t like to be put in situations like that because I’d end up a blubbering idiot,” he said. The result? He became a blubbering idiot. A group of charities he had helped over the years also feted him.
His first job as a teenager was reporting at an NBC affiliate in 1962 in Montgomery, Ala. and interviewing Martin Luther King Jr. before the Selma-Montgomery march. “I was so stupid. I didn’t know what to ask. He began asking questions and answering them. He was genuinely concerned that I was a very young journalist and he wanted to help me. He must have felt sorry for me.”
Sarginson said he has kept diaries over the years, carefully tracking every story he’s ever done with contact phone numbers. He’ll put a star next to stories he liked.
In Tampa in the 1980s, he started “Wes Side stories,” inspirational tidbits aiming to help a person or an organization. He did them almost daily for 10 years totaling about 2,000 stories. He continued the tradition in Atlanta, though not as prolifically.
He’d publicize a person’s plight, then get viewers to help out. He did one recently about a kid who lost both his arms and legs to bacterial meningitis. In Tampa, he reported on a kid who had a disease that ate his own organs, helping raise $76,000 for the child to get an organ transplant and live an extra two years.
He said his kinder, gentler approach to news was never a top priority at WXIA. “I’d have to fight for time every night,” he said. “I’d go 1 minute 46 seconds and they’ve have me take out 16. I’d fight for those 16 seconds.”
His favorite storytellers at WXIA? Jaye Watson and Keith Whitney. He said they’d often pass him stories they felt they couldn’t do but he could.
Sarginson notes that there is certainly time to do these stories given that WXIA has expanded hours of actual news on air in recent months, including weekends. But he said it’s more repetition of the same news, not as much new news, per se.
He said he didn’t spend enough time with his kids while they were growing up, but he had a very patient wife and a son and daughter who ended up being workaholics like him. “I will get to spend more time with the grandkids,” he said. He recalls spending a day recently by himself with a three year old and an eight-month old and was exhausted. “I needed a full night’s sleep!” he said.
For now, he’s working on a mystery novel with author Diana Love Snell, based in Philadelphia. He even traveled there to get inspiration. He had written a book in 1982 about a bank robber but said in retrospect, it was an “awful” book although it was a surprise bestseller. “When I look back, I told too much. I didn’t show enough.” With fiction, “it’s more fun to create dialogue.”
About the Author
Rodney Ho writes about entertainment for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution including TV, radio, film, comedy and all things in between. A native New Yorker, he has covered education at The Virginian-Pilot, small business for The Wall Street Journal and a host of beats at the AJC over 20-plus years. He loves tennis, pop culture & seeing live events.
