As someone who’s been anchoring television in one city for more than three decades, I’d begun to feel like I’d lived through all the challenges the news business in Baltimore could provide: the death of two beloved anchormen, the rather public gestation and birth of my twin daughters, the long fight to win a football team, the Joseph Palzynski (remember him?) hostage stand-off, the D.C. snipers, 9/11, and, most recently, Freddie Gray.

But nobody could’ve anticipated the Coronavirus pandemic. Or, at least, nobody I knew.

The thing I love about newsrooms is when something big happens, we almost instantaneously become like a small army. Everyone gets a supernatural burst of adrenaline. That’s what happened two weeks ago when General Manager Audra Swain described to the staff what CBS believed was coming and how we would adapt.

Photographers and reporters would no longer come into the building, but report remotely. Everyone who could work at home would. The on-air staff behind and in front of the camera would be pared down, dramatically. And we would rotate so if someone did become ill and quarantines were needed, we’d have a back-up. Clear? You bet. Ready, boss.

On Monday, March 16th, I head to work. Less traffic? Expected. The station gate closed in the afternoon? Unexpected. The quiet inside the newsroom: startling. Newsrooms aren’t quiet places, they’re noisy, chattering, screeching playgrounds for words and ideas. On Monday, ours was eerily quiet.

There were less than a dozen people in sight and no light banter to be heard. I go to the green room to slather my face and “wrastle” my hair and meteorologist Meg McNamara and I realize it’s too small to accommodate both of us while observing “social distancing.” Someone has to find another slathering station.

The producers format the newscasts so neither I nor co-anchor Rick Ritter will ever come closer than six feet. We learn what we begin to call the “dance.” You go to camera one, I go to camera three, camera two will never face us both . . . too close.

When walking past the floor manager, make a wide circle. When walking between the prompter and the weather desk…go sideways or you’ll violate social distancing. Every time you think of it, use wipes on your wireless mic, the keyboard and mouse, and anchor desk. When you get the chance, run to the nearest sink and wash your hands.

And, get used to total immersion in coronavirus information: 4, 5, 6, 7 and 11 p.m. you will be thinking, speaking, reading, communicating, and absorbing pandemic. And you’ll do it on your feet, and it will eventually take an emotional toll and have you looking for any excuse for levity. Because, that’s a lot of hours of pandemic.

By Tuesday, I was making up pandemic songs in the commercial breaks and the few of us working in the studio began taking playful, sarcastic verbal jabs at each other. Then we’d laugh, maybe a little too hard. We’d tell stories. We’d take every opportunity to move around the studio until, at times, Rick and I even broke out into dancing. Six feet apart, of course. But, once the camera light came on, we’d immediately shift our focus back to a national emergency that’s affecting you, me, everyone we love and all the families on whom we’re reporting.

Each evening around 10 p.m., Rick and I would Facetime live the WJZ audience, which gave us the opportunity to say all the things we weren’t formatted to say on air: We will get through this, it will end, there are things you can do to feel better such as keeping a routine, setting small goals, and heading outside.

Which brings me to, well, me. Fresh air has saved my sanity. Because by Friday I was going just a teeny, tiny bit insane. I was obsessively swallowing to see if my throat was sore, feeling my forehead, checking for every sign I was infected. Then, I’d walk outside.

The sky is still there, the air still fills my lungs, I notice signs of spring, the world has not come to an end. In fact, the people walking and jogging past me were actually smiling, and appeared even friendlier than usual.

“Go to work Denise, do your job,” I exhorted myself. And I did. And I was grateful. I was grateful to feel like I could serve in some small way, and I was grateful for the company of those wonderful people I was dancing around.

When Friday night midnight finally came and it was time for another anchor rotation, I had only one moment of deep angst. And it had nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic. It was because I really, really wanted to hug everyone who’d lived through that week with me. I wanted to hold them and tell them how much I appreciated their hard work, their good spirit and fortitude. Of course, I couldn’t do it.

But, I will get another chance. Maybe not next week or the next several weeks but when all this ends, and it will end. Because, I have a new appreciation for my co-workers, my job, my station and my community. And when there is no more social distancing, I plan to do a lot of hugging. …and I mean a lot of body to body, close contact, lingering, squeezing hugging. Certainly to those I work with. Maybe with everyone I meet.

Consider yourself warned!

Karsonya “Kaye” Whitehead has been a historian for more than 20 years. In addition to being a professor at Loyola University of Maryland, she hosts a daily radio show on WEAA, “Today with Dr. Kaye,” where she examines the intersections between race, class, and gender on a local and national scale. It made sense for her to appear as a guest on WJZ late last week to answer questions from anchor Mary Bubala about the fallout from Mayor Catherine Pugh’s resignation.

But when Bubala, who had been with the TV station for 16 years, asked a question tinged with racism and sexism that drew widespread criticism, the narrative unfortunately shifted. Bubala has since been dismissed from WJZ, and Whitehead has found herself in a unique position as the co-star of a viral video.

This presents an interesting conundrum: Given the nature of Bubala’s comments, there is an opportunity for someone like Whitehead, who has positioned herself as a leading voice on issues related to race and gender, to raise attention to the things she is passionate about. But how do you do so without being seen as trying to capitalize on an unfortunate situation? It’s something Whitehead makes very clear she doesn’t want to do.

“People didn’t know it was me [on WJZ] until somebody who knew me saw [the video] and asked the question, ‘Is that you?’” Whitehead says. “I was not linked to it because I was like, ‘I’m not going to help feed this. That’s not how I want to be known. I do not want to be known as the person who took down this anchor.’”

Whitehead’s career and body of work prepared her for a live TV situation that offers little time to react. “I’ve been studying this work intensely and writing about it,” she says. “I am never caught off-guard, because it is the space that I exist in. If someone else had been sitting in that chair, it would’ve been a moment where they were caught off-guard.”

Whitehead has chosen not to focus on whether Bubala’s firing is justified or not, and instead hopes that this can be a teachable moment. “You can remove a person from their position, but if we don’t deal with how we got here, then we’re not really benefiting from what happened,” she says. “At this moment, people are being held accountable for what they’re saying. I think we’re in a moment now, like the anchor, where a number of people that are being called out for their racial biases are having to deal with consequences.”

She adds that, given her studies of incidents around the country—she cited last year’s racial discrimination at Starbucks as a specific example—very little surprises her. What’s important, she says, is to ensure that the attention being given to the incident is not fleeting, that it opens up conversation about the subject matter. This way, something good can come out of a bad situation.

“A moment’s arrived, and I can use it to talk to people that I haven’t physically talked to,” Whitehead says. “I am not surprised by any of the things that happened. What concerns me is that when we get to the end of this, do we reflect on what we’ve learned? Do we really do the hard work to be better? Do we really engage with what it means in this country right now to deal with race, class, and gender in a serious and reflective way? . . . One of the wonderful things about Baltimore City is that this work is happening all over the city if you just look for it.”

Siobhan Hagan digs Elvis and Polaroid photos. She has a metal Scooby-Doo lunch box. She wears 1950s dresses and vintage sweaters, and when the 33-year-old’s grandmother passed away, “I moved everything from her house into mine,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. The confessed “old stuff nerd” was born in the city and earned a graduate degree in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her thesis there was built around the archives of WJZ-TV, which proved a fortuitous decision. The station hit the airwaves in 1948, and 70 years is a long time, enough for film to deteriorate and oxide particles to fall off magnetic television tape.

Hagan had grown up watching WJZ—“My mom turned on Rise and Shine every morning, it was my alarm clock as a kid”—and founded the nonprofit Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA) two years ago. In the process, she acquired WJZ’s archives, then being stored, but without a plan to preserve the collection, at the University of Baltimore. Hagan is in the process of digitizing as much of the 25,000-piece acquisition as she can before the early footage and videotapes disintegrate.

On a recent night in Hampden, Hagan screened some WJZ throwback tapes as part of a fundraising effort. Highlights included Eyewitness News coverage of Hurricane Agnes in 1972, Richard Sher and Oprah Winfrey hosting People Are Talking, Chuck Thompson recapping the O’s stunning World Series sweep in 1966, irrepressible weatherman Marty Bass ditching his hairpiece, behind-the-scenes clips of The Buddy Deane Show—the inspiration for John Waters’ Hairspray—and Romper Room with Nancy Rogers Claster. Plus, Jerry Turner burying his head into the anchor desk in uncontrollable laughter after a rabbi’s son made funny faces, unbeknownst to his father, to the camera throughout an entire Hanukkah segment.

Beside the time-capsule clips of life in Charm City, which also include WJZ’s disco-era Evening Magazine, is footage from the ’68 riots, investigative pieces on racial issues and public housing, and, of course, coverage of the colorful 44th mayor of Baltimore, one William Donald Schaefer.

“People’s memories are sensitive to time, and these [tapes and films] are, too. They don’t last forever. They’re endangered,” says Rob Schoeberlein, who oversees the cavernous Baltimore City Archives in Better Waverly, which houses MARMIA’s office and the WJZ collection. “Normally, when we think of archiving material, it’s manuscripts, letters, legal documents, and photographs. This is now important material, too.”

Beyond MARMIA’s WJZ-TV collection, the nonprofit gathers other local films, found VHS tapes, recorded sound and mixtapes, and home movies in an effort to document the arts, history, and culture of the Mid-Atlantic region. Hagan will even digitize old wedding films—as long as MARMIA gets to keep a copy.

One couple, in their 80s, Hagan recalls, had never seen their wedding film—shot by the bride’s father and essentially lost for six decades—until their daughter rediscovered it and asked Hagan to digitize it. They all watched it for the first time last fall on a pop-up screen at the City Archives building.

“My parents had been bickering during the ride down. Over what, who knows? Just the way old couples do,” Susan Hebble says. “They were married in 1956, and the reception had been at the Casablanca, a jazz club in Liberty Heights that later became the Sportsman’s Lounge when former Colt Lenny Moore bought it. Zim Zemarel’s swing band played—you could see the name on the drum kit.”

Hebble says her family watched the film again over Christmas, and then again during her mother’s funeral this spring. “My mother had begun having some memory issues by the time we went [to the City Archives], but she had none while looking at their wedding. Everything came back, and she became her normal, bubbly self again. The whole way home, my parents were very romantic toward each other. My dad told my mother he had forgotten how beautiful she was.”

As an only child whose mother was allergic to seafood, WJZ-TV meteorologist and weekend morning anchor Tim Williams ate mostly meat. “My mom didn’t cook seafood very much, because she couldn’t eat it,” says Williams. “We were a meat-and-potatoes household—the one exception is that I had relatives who taught me how to eat crabs.” These days, the Owings Mills-based journalist has expanded his culinary horizons, though he tends to favor Southern cuisine. “I love jambalayas and gumbos and things like that,” he says. “I think it stems from being indecisive when I look at a menu. If I get jambalaya or paella that has shrimp and chicken and pork and beef, I don’t have to decide.”

Through the years, Williams has taken an equally eclectic approach to his professional life. Although he has worked at WJZ for 20 years now, he never set his sights on going into the broadcast business. Williams once considered a career in fashion (even getting accepted to New York’s venerable Fashion Institute of Technology), but instead graduated from Towson University with a degree in communications. “I worked as a telemarketer for MCI, because they were across the street from Towson and recruiting,” he says.

While Williams worked his way up the corporate ladder, the refrain from his customers was always the same. “Based on my voice, people would always ask, ‘Have you ever done radio or television?'” By 1991, Williams went back to school to pursue journalism at the Broadcasting Institute of Maryland (while supporting himself and his high-school-sweetheart wife, Sandra, selling cars). His first big break came as a nightside reporter for Hagerstown’s WHAG-TV. “At the time, they had hired this guy with Robert Redford good looks, and they put him on the air and took him off the air in the same week,” says Williams, laughing at the memory. “He couldn’t read a teleprompter, and he broke into a sweat on the air. He would be reading and, with a shaky hand, he’d stop for a drink of coffee. A week-and-a-half later, he was fired—and they made me the 11 o’clock anchor.”

“Here, you get hurricanes, but also tornadoes, and blizzards—it’s like boot camp for weather people.”

From Hagerstown, Williams made his way to Jacksonville, FL, (where he was nominated for a regional Emmy for his coverage of the hunt for a giant monitor lizard). Then, in 1995, he found his way back to Baltimore as a general-assignment nightside reporter, occasionally filling in for veteran weathermen Bob Turk and Marty Bass. “I was one of the first black weathermen in Baltimore,” says Williams proudly. “And when I got my meteorology degree in 2006, I was one of the first black meteorologists in the city.”

As a native Marylander, Williams points out that forecasting in the Old Line State is not for novices. “If you’re in the South, it’s always hot,” he says. “If you’re in the northern part of the U.S., it’s always cold; if you’re in the west, it never changes, but in Maryland, you have mountains, and it can be 70 degrees here, but 40 degrees on the other side—and the ocean and bay complicate everything. Here, you get tropical storms, but also hurricanes, and tornadoes, and blizzards, and every doggone thing—it’s like a boot camp for weather people!”

While Williams weathers the storms at work, at home with his wife, Sandra, and son, T.J., one of his favorite pasttimes is settling down to a hot, stick-to-the-ribs meal. “My favorite meal of the year is Thanksgiving,” he says. “I can eat stuffing, turkey, gravy, and, yes, butternut squash soup, year-round.”

Butternut Squash Soup with Granny Smith Apples

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
• 1 carrot, chopped
• 1 butternut squash; peeled, seeded, and chopped
• 1 Granny Smith apple; peeled, cored, and chopped
• 3 cups chicken broth
• 1 cup water
• ½ teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon maple syrup
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Fresh parsley, chopped, for garnish

Directions

In a large pot, melt butter on medium heat. Add onions and carrot and sauté for five minutes. Add the squash, apple, broth, and water to pot. Bring to a boil.

Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes, until squash and carrots have softened. Using a blender, purée the soup, in batches. Add cinnamon, syrup, and salt and pepper. Garnish with parsley. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Although their introduction was inauspicious—they met at a murder trial they were each covering for rival networks in Huntsville, AL—Adam May and Derek Valcourt are perfectly paired both in and out of the kitchen. “Adam does most of the cooking, and I bake,” explains WJZ-TV reporter Valcourt. “I’m sweet—and he’s salty.” May, a national correspondent for Al Jazeera’s America Tonight, smiles and laughs at Valcourt’s clarification. “Sweet and salty—that totally sums us up,” he agrees. For example, “If there’s a problem with something, like, let’s say the pool guy screws up, I’ll deal with it because I’m the salty one.” Chimes in Valcourt, “And if it’s a friend in need, who has to deal with it? Me—because I’m the sweet one.”

Despite their different temperaments, the couple bonded 14 years ago over the B-52’s and a lifelong love of journalism. A gifted writer in high school, Valcourt had planned on pursuing print, but after interning in Boston at an NBC affiliate, he was bitten by the broadcasting bug and headed to Montana for his first reporting gig. “It was total culture shock,” he says, laughing at the memory. “I was in the state for one hour, and my father’s car slid into a deer as soon as we crossed the state line.”

For his part, May attributes his love of journalism to his Minneapolis days in his mother’s kitchen. “As we were prepping the food, we had a little TV that was up in the corner and was always on with the five and six o’clock news in the background,” he says. “I remember the people who were on the station and the kinds of stories they told. There was one where the reporter was doing a feature on Native Americans and how they harvest rice in northern Minnesota, and I remember watching that and thinking, ‘I want to do what [the reporter] does—that looks cool.’”

Off camera, May has been equally passionate about renovating the couple’s mid-century modern home, which sits on 1 1/2 bucolic acres in Pikesville. “We looked at this property, and it was in dire need of renovation,” he explains. But May, who is the Mr. Fix-It type, was undaunted by the idea of gutting the space as well as taking on the bulk of tile work, flooring, painting, and electrical work himself. “We were on a fairly limited budget, so I did most of the work,” explains May. Valcourt was equally unflappable. “It didn’t scare me, because I knew how handy he was,” says Valcourt. “I knew that as long as the outside worked for us, he’d be able to do anything I wanted with the inside.”

May’s proudest DIY moment? Installing a sleek, modern kitchen for less than $5,000. “I found a good deal on granite. The kitchen is all IKEA cabinets, which we spent three days assembling, and I got a coupon from Lowe’s for all the appliances,” he says. Even the stainless-steel refrigerator was a “scratch and dent.”

With the home renovation long complete, the couple enjoys family meals with their four-year-old son Jett and pet Weimaraner, Athena. While Valcourt is responsible for prep work and clean-up duty, May does most of the heavy lifting. “You make me the martini before I cook,” says May, smiling at Valcourt. “And Derek also keeps me on task—he once bought me a meat thermometer with a timer and a pager on it.”

Although May cooks with precision, he also displays an inventive streak. “I very rarely use a recipe,” he says. “Because we’re both so busy, we try to do things that are quick and easy and don’t take a lot of prep time—it’s usually a broiled piece of fish or a lean piece of meat on the grill with vegetables.” This recipe, however, is an homage to May’s mom’s so-called “hot dishes” as well as a nod to Valcourt’s love of New England seafood. “A hot dish is a Minnesota thing. It’s like a casserole,” says May. “My mom makes this egg hot dish. One day I had this leftover lobster, so I twisted my mom’s recipe, and I made it my own.”

Lobster Hot Dish

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

• 2 slices sourdough bread, toasted and cubed
• 2 steamed lobsters, shelled and torninto bite-sized pieces
• 1 1/2 cups cheddar cheese, shredded, divided
• 1/2 cup dicedscallions, divided
• 1 cup fresh spinach
• 8 eggs, beaten
• 1/4 cup light cream
• Dash of Old Bay
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

• Preheat oven  to 350 degrees. 
• Arrange bread, lobster, half of cheese, half of scallions, and spinach in large baking dish coated with cooking spray. 
• In a small mixing bowl, combine eggs and cream, and pour over mixture. 
• Sprinkle with Old Bay and salt and pepper. 
• Top with remainder of cheese and scallions. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until eggs are cooked through and cheese is bubbly.