What’s next for Sally Wiggin?
Slowing down just isn’t in the picture as she retires from WTAE
Sally Wiggin, TV news personality, is being erased. It’s been happening for some time now, and she is accepting of that. But there is one frustration for what will be lost: “What bothers me is what a public persona is able to accomplish.”
Her long professional career — as a WTAE-TV news anchor, reporter, host of Steelers “Black & Gold Primetime” specials and, lately, the Peabody Award-winning program “Chronicle” — was scheduled to end in retirement Friday.
But she will still be in the picture, so to speak. Her final “Chronicle,” titled “Pittsburgh’s Holiday Traditions,” doesn’t have a broadcast date yet.
So once the new installment airs, most likely in mid-December, it’s a wrap for Ms. Wiggin, 66.
Yet she is hardly leaving a Pittsburgh landscape she helped shape. Beyond her work as a newswoman — she joined Channel 4 Action News in 1980, first as a reporter, then anchoring — she has been deeply involved in charitable work as well as adventure travel.
“One of the people who taught me the importance of this was Joe DeNardo [the late, iconic WTAE meteorologist],” she said. “He told me you have to give back to the community, and Billy Hillgrove [former sports director] reinforced that.”
The Fox Chapel resident serves on numerous boards, including Humane Animal Rescue and Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium, and is a member emeritus for the Mentoring Partnership. Over the years, she has averaged between three and five hosting gigs per month for various causes.
Going forward, Ms. Wiggin said she wants to help with programs benefiting the city’s immigrant programs, and she is a founding local member of what’s now Highmark Caring Place, a nonprofit center for grieving children. Now that she will no longer be a journalist, she can help with fundraising.
Campaigns for social justice are close to her heart. She has an early memory of visiting her father’s office with her mother, Peggy, when she was about 6 years old. The family had just moved to Florence, Ala. The child wanted a drink. There were two water fountains, each with a label.
Young Sally drank from the one marked “Colored.”
“This man comes over and yells at my mother: ‘She can’t drink out of that fountain!’
“My mother turned around, and she was a force to be reckoned with. I always said she probably descended from abolitionist stock in New England.
“She told the man, ‘Water is water, and she will drink out of any fountain she chooses.’”
Years later, when her high school was finally integrated, her new African-American
friends came over to the house, much to the dismay of the neighbors.
“The phone rang off the hook,” she said, adding that her mother didn’t care.
“I always had this sense that I need to use this job to help nonprofits and other causes,” she said after telling the stories about her mother. “Now that I think about it, it came from her.”
Ms. Wiggin is still coming to emotional grips with the fact that when 11 people were killed in the Tree of Life synagogue Oct. 27, she was on a ship, far out at sea with no way to return to Pittsburgh.
The National Geographic Explorer was on a threeweek conservation adventure trip to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. Ms. Wiggin was told there was no way the ship could evacuate a passenger who wasn’t seriously ill or injured.
To be so far away, feeling helpless, threw her. She was desperate to contribute. “[WTAE’s news team] were fine, they have their anchors. But I would have been happy to just hold someone’s mic, to make phone calls.
“It’s not rational, but whoever said life is rational? What is rational about taking the lives of 11 amazing people?”
She was sitting in the ship’s lounge the following day when naturalist Michael Nolan approached her.
“I told him I was upset, that I didn’t want to be here right now, and he understood. For the first time I admitted — I said it out loud, to a stranger, and this is a horrible thing to say — but ‘I am realizing now that I don’t know how to handle not being a public persona.’
“I said this to a complete stranger, which probably made it easier, but it also made me look like a jerk.”
“And what I meant was, I [could not] be a part of helping people comprehend this story. That’s what I mean by ‘public persona.’ It’s not being on TV; it’s being able to use community capital for good.”
And she has more personal goals as well. A recovering alcoholic, Ms. Wiggin also deals with long-term health issues. Both of her parents died from heart ailments, and she also has been diagnosed with a cardiac condition.
Changes in diet and exercise helped: “I want to see if I can live another 10 years. I say I’d like 15 but I just hope God gives me 10.”
The daily stress of the job, she said, will simply be replaced by stressing over other things. It’s how she is. It’s just “being” Sally.
But there are indulgences to anticipate. Asked to name one, she burst out laughing and said, “Being able to go to a movie any time I want and not worry about a deadline. Because it calms me down.”
She keeps a list of shows she wants to binge on TV and streaming services, including “Atlanta,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Killing Eve” and “Mindhunter.” There’s even a notation, on that list, that calculates if she watches X number of hours per day, this can be accomplished in so many months.
Then there is travel, of course. Over the next few years she is going back to Africa for a sixth time, to Uganda to see gorillas, Kenya for elephants. Also, to Baja, Mexico, for gray whales and dolphins, and possibly to China, again, for pandas and, surprise, her first non-nature cruise, to the Mediterranean.
There is also a planned trip north aboard Lindblad Expedition’s new ice breaker, Endurance.
Ms. Wiggin was an Asian studies major at the University of Alabama and has a master’s degree from the University of Michigan. She came this close to becoming a zoologist, but the technical science element was discouraging.
Instead, she turned to journalism.
“I had never considered being on television. Oh, when you’re a little girl, you want to be an actor. But I realized news was easy to get into, and then I realized anchors make more money.”
She had a husband, a divorce, other serious relationships. No children, however, something she said she regrets. But she is grateful for her sister, Marcia Hersey, friends, surrogate children, the chance to raise awareness for good causes.
“And I realized, when all this [the shootings] happened, and I was at the bottom of the world, how much Pittsburgh meant to me. And what it means to all of us who were not born here.”
Changes are afoot. Ms. Wiggin speaks to some of them with a clinical eye, analyzing what people know of her through various platforms.
“I have a large Twitter following. These are millennials who did watch me on TV but don’t watch TV anymore.
“But now they’re on other devices. So it was interesting to see how I existed in one realm but no longer existed in another.
“Eventually, those realms will come together, and people will no longer know who I am.”
For now, she is still a brand: Sally Wiggin.
“What does that really mean? What is a brand? That will go, too.”
This being Pittsburgh, where television news and the people who bring it into their homes are not easily forgotten, it might yet be a long time.