Angela

Angela

Enter the riverfront condo of Angela Hill and your eyes are drawn to the all-encompassing objets d’art. You will notice various bronze busts sculpted by her husband, psychiatrist Irwin Marcus; a plethora of pigs in plush, plaster and paint (in honor of her former pet pig, Alice); and a canvas by Iranian artist Harouni entitled Oedipus on the entryway wall. It was a painting she and her mother discovered together, and loved. Hanging alongside that painting is an imposing canvas of Angela with two large Great Danes, painted by first husband Garland Robinette, and across the room two golden urns containing the ashes of her beloved cats, who passed away just in the last couple of years. Delve a bit further into these decorative pieces, and you’ll learn there’s meaning behind everything here. You’ll understand that Angela does indeed love her animals and especially cherishes the people who are and have been a part of her life.

As I sit down with Angela to ruminate on the past, get caught up on the present, and look ahead to her future, the black clouds are rolling in through the immense floor-to-ceiling windows in a slightly surreal evolution of a storm. It seems to be a metaphor for Hill’s arrival in the Big Easy in 1975, when she took the city by storm, then proceeded to stay a bold and relevant fixture on New Orleans’ airwaves for the next forty years.

At the time of this interview in September, she has been back in town for less than 48 hours from a 3-month sojourn to her house in Belfast, Maine, a respite from the intense heat and humidity of the New Orleans summer and a retreat from daily responsibilities.

“You know, I was born in Maine,” explained Angela. “We ended up in Texas after my parents’ divorce, but when my mother got remarried we moved back to Andover, Massachusetts. My mom and I were very similar in that we loved the four seasons, and New England in general. My news career took me down south, but when my mom was still living, Irwin and I started looking for a place up in Maine about 13 or 14 years ago. It was just fun—I found our place on the internet.”

Never one for pretense, the house she found was two hours north of Portland in a 6,000-person, working-class community. The place needed remodeling, and except for one room which she claims will probably never get finished, the task is over and provides a haven of serenity and tranquility. “This will sound silly and foolish, but I get such pleasure from a family of crows and 20 seagulls that live on the property,” said Hill. “We spend hours feeding them, and then we have time to catch up on our reading and go to movies. This summer, we had company in from out of town about every third week. We have a precious little guest house. It’s relaxing; there are no demands. I cook, and I’m at peace.”

Maine may be known for lobsters, but there is one food item that Angela misses up in the northeast. “There’s no fried chicken to speak of, so I wasn’t home 24 hours when I found myself in Popeyes, sitting in my car, stuffing my face.”

Popeyes isn’t the only thing that is indigenous to New Orleans, which makes it a unique and a compelling place from which to do the news. “I hadn’t been here but a few years and had finally absorbed the concept of Mardi Gras, when in 1979, it was totally cancelled over a police strike,” remembered Hill. “We did a broadcast Mardi Gras day out in Metairie, but the strike meant that the whole season was essentially cancelled in the city of New Orleans.” That contentious tête-á-tête between then-Mayor Dutch Morial and the Teamsters Union, which represented the New Orleans Police Department and was demanding wage increases, was just one of many political hullabaloos in the city throughout the years. “We’ve had our share of characters, but it’s what makes this town interesting from a news standpoint,” said Angela. Edwin Edwards, David Duke and Ray Nagin may have made national headlines in pejorative terms, but nothing about New Orleans has ever been boring—certainly not its weather. “The Pan Am crash, which you and I both covered, was just horrendous,” said Hill. “But I am reminded that because of that terrible crash, we have wind shear detectors in place at airports all around the world today.” For anyone who covered the news beginning in the ’70s, much about the manner of news gathering is different, for a variety of reasons. “It’s about change, and not all change is progress,” Hill said contemplatively. “With some change, you go with the flow. For instance, technologically. Look what’s happened. You and I remember what it took to do a live shot decades ago, and now they do it practically off their shoulders. But there are other elements now present in newsrooms which have imposed new requirements on the staff, like posting everything on social media, and that’s time-consuming. I argued all of the time I was at WWL-TV that eventually something would suffer, because to really do a good story, on top of all of this other work, you’re just stretched too thin.” It may be the nature of the beast, not just in New Orleans, but in many TV stations around the country. Social media has become a fact of life as many millennials to baby boomers now get their news off the internet. And the viewing audience generally has been splintered and fractured ten ways from Sunday with the advent of 300 channels and a variety of choices that previously didn’t exist. Compounded upon this equation, New Orleans went from the 34th market in the ’80s to the 51st market post-Katrina and is now #53 out of 210 Nielsen market areas. Since market-size is determined by the number of homes in any given viewing area, and the population after Katrina was diminished, fewer potential viewers means advertisers pay less money for the same 30- or 60-second spot. In this situation, economics becomes a major factor in terms of just how many employees any news station can afford to pay.

Angela and her unmistakeable hair had a prominent role in a scene from 1984’s Tightrope, starring Clint Eastwood.

“Look, starting in Corpus Christi ( now #128), we all shot our own stuff in 1972. We were literally one-man bands out there, so the concept is nothing new,” said Hill. “But those were small stations, and the idea was to learn everything so you could go to a bigger station where there was a professional photographer, you were the writer/reporter, and together you created wonderful things. Now, they are eliminating photographers, so we’ve gone back in time. And that’s why I say that not all change is progress.” With cable news exploding on the scene in the ’80s, the blurring of the lines between news and opinion has grown over the decades. Hill discussed her concerns about the implications for journalism in an era where our own president calls the press the “enemy of the people” and many stories “fake news.” “The networks do a pretty good job of being objective, but cable news is feeding the beast, so to speak. There are some stations I won’t watch. It just seems to be theater, and not legitimate. There is news, and there is opinion, and all real reporters need to reinforce every day that this is news, this is real, this is legitimate, this is fact.” Angela Hill has done it all, and she is well aware of crossing any lines. She spent 38 years at WWL-TV as a journalist, and while a news anchor there also hosted her own talk show, Angela. “It was walking a very fine line,” she remembered. “I grew up in the old school of Walter Cronkite news where you had no opinion. What a rare thing! So, whether the talk show on any given day was a fun show or a very serious topic, I still held the line, because that show was on at 4 p.m., and I was on the anchor desk at 6 p.m. In spite of the straddling I had to do, I loved that the show had real people in the audience, rather than my just staring at a camera reading the news. These people took time out of their day to come to the Superdome and be a part of the show. It ran for seven years, and at the end of its run, my husband, Irwin, gave me a trophy, since as a child I’d never gotten a trophy for anything. It said ‘Best of Show—1688 shows.’” In 2013, Angela Hill walked away from news as she had known it. “It was time. I’m so glad I did it when I did it. It was not an easy decision, but it was 38 years here and three in Corpus Christi. It’s changing now, and things were just telling me to move on. I was lucky in that when I left Channel 4, I felt like I could still walk back in there and love it and the people. I took six months off and then made the transition to talk radio.” If anything can be described as the antithesis of hard news journalism, it might just be talk radio—at least in some of its forms. We’ve all heard the ranting by callers, the preaching done by some hosts and the series of shouting matches that often ensue. “I was never going to be the screamer,” stated Hill. “Certainly there were people who called in who just wanted to hear the sound of their own voices, and I’d thank them for their thoughts. Those two years were very oriented towards issues on WWL Radio, and I would just have to tell some callers that we’d go to our graves disagreeing. But I liked the show, and I had Helen Centanni as my producer, who had worked with me previously on the Angela show, which made life much easier.”

The one taboo while doing news is being a spokesperson for anything commercial, which would pose a conflict of interest for a journalist. Talk radio has no such qualms about crossing between moderating news topics and being a professional pitch person. “I wasn’t sure I’d feel comfortable,” explained Hill, “but I did a Ray Brandt commercial. It was very thrilling, and I realized I could do this. I’m still with him now and do many other commercials both on television and radio. I like the freedom it gives me to be with my husband, letting us block out time to go to Maine. It’s the constant balancing of career and personal life.” These days, life consists of prioritizing her time, which she often gives to special projects. One in particular involves raising $1,000,000 for the J. Michael Early Studio within the multimedia center of Loyola University’s School of Communications. As the former President and General Manager of WWL-TV who built Channel 4 into a television powerhouse and was Hill’s long-time boss, Early, who died at the age of 99 just a few years ago, was a beloved figure around the city. The thrice-married Hill seems to have now found her soul mate. I asked her what she has learned from her marriages. “Hopefully, how to do it better each time,” she said, amusedly. “If I’m lucky in my life, it’s that I don’t look back. Irwin and I have just celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary, and we went steady for five years prior to that. Our first date was at Antoine’s. He proposed to me there years later, and after our elopement in a little church on the Westbank in 2000 after anchoring the 6 p.m. news, our wedding party of six, including the minister and his wife, all caravanned to Antoine’s, where we had the wedding celebration.” For Hill, life is easier and less stressful being with her kindred spirit. “I like everything about Irwin,” Hill explained. “He is easy going, kind and is always thinking about everyone else. He has three children who are great and a real reflection of him. You know, he had very little interest in finding a place in Maine, but when he saw that it made me happy, he was happy.” You can catch them around town enjoying crab salad and lemon icebox pie at Clancy’s, fried oysters at Galatoire’s, or the turtle soup and bread pudding soufflé at Commander’s. Angela is lately enamored with a new little French-inspired bistro in the warehouse district called Vyoone’s. But all of the newly found freedom aside, this lady still has her fingers in a lot of pots and doesn’t completely rule out new ventures. “I made a decision that once I started doing commercials, I would no longer do news,” she said. “But I would never close my mind or a door to something new—as long as it’s interesting.”