Without fanfare or on-air farewell, Richard Sher has quietly slipped off-camera at WJZ-TV’s “Eyewitness News” after a remarkable run there as news anchor, reporter, host of the long-running political talk show “Square-Off” and co-host of the morning chat show “People Are Talking,” which introduced to the world a young woman named Oprah Winfrey.
His departure was officially announced on Monday. Unofficially, the news accidentally broke a few weeks ago when Sher took his wife, Annabelle, his son Greg and soon-to-be daughter-in-law, Dr. Truc Trinh, to Chicago to visit Oprah and sit in the studio to watch her show.
Winfrey introduced Sher on the air, told her national audience that she’d started out with him years earlier in Baltimore – and that he was about to retire. Sher shot her a look.
“People don’t know about this yet?” Oprah said.
“They do now,” Sher said.
In a TV news business marked by revolving-door personalities who arrive from somewhere out of town, stick around barely long enough to learn how to pronounce Auchentoroly Terrace and then depart, Sher’s mere longevity is noteworthy. He spent 33 years at WJZ.
When he started there in October of 1975, William Donald Schaefer was mayor of Baltimore, Brooks Robinson was still playing third base on 33rd Street, and Jerry Turner and Al Sanders were the pre-eminent force in local TV news.
The Baltimore-born Sher brought a hometown guy’s insights, a snap sense of humor, and breath-taking energy to his reporting. For roughly a decade, he co-hosted “People Are Talking” each morning, sprinted back to the newsroom to help write and co-anchor the noon news each day, and then raced out to cover stories for the evening news.
Those who worked with him at WJZ can picture him sitting at his desk on the distant side of the newsroom, where he’d hear snatches of a potential story through the static of a police scanner and incessant newsroom clatter.
Others might seem too weary, or oblivious, to check it out. Sher would leap to his feet in an instant, calling out specific neighborhoods and directions to get there. He wanted a piece of all action, whether it was a political interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting her old hometown, a street shooting in South Baltimore, or witnessing the execution of child-killer John Thanos.
Now, he says he’s pondering a few career possibilities: new broadcast endeavors, some teaching, some public relations work for his son Greg’s Citizens Lending Group, a Towson mortgage company. He’s got a new Web site: www.richardsher.tv. But he’s still coming to grips with the emotional effect of leaving familiar surroundings after so many years.
“I loved it, I really did,” Sher, 67, was saying this week. “But it’s time to move on and try other things. All good things must come to an end.”
A graduate of Baltimore’s St. Paul’s School and the University of Maryland in College Park, Sher started out as a radio disc jockey at WEAM in Arlington, Va. The ratings were so good, the station had him hosting three different shows under three different names.
He left disc jockeying to become news director at Baltimore’s WCBM, and later held that position at WBAL radio. One day, he took a phone call from Jerry Turner, who was just beginning his anchor days at WJZ. The two of them had met a couple of times.
“Come over here and talk to these people about a job,” Turner said.
Thus commenced some of the earliest years of WJZ’s utter dominance in local TV news, when the station’s ratings were higher than its competitors’ numbers put together.
Sher was a prominent piece of that success.
For years, whenever Turner or co-anchor Al Sanders missed an evening’s broadcast, Sher was their permanent pinch-hitter. When Sher anchored the station’s weekend news, its ratings dominated every other station in town. When he anchored its noon news, the story was the same.
His “Square-Off” public affairs show, which ran for nearly two decades, was one of the highest-rated programs of its kind. When he co-anchored “People Are Talking,” the show was so popular that its ratings topped Phil Donohue, who was then the model for all TV talk shows, and led to Winfrey’s discovery.
Sher kept the show going for four more years after she left. For the past decade, he’s stuck strictly to reporting.
“The business has changed significantly,” he said. “It’s more and more about budgets and bottom lines now. And there’s more time to fill and, in this economy, fewer people doing more and more work.”
What he left unsaid: WJZ is no longer the ratings powerhouse it once was. And, with Sher’s absence, one large step further from regaining it.
