Lisa Thomas-Laury tells about her life in new memoir ‘On Camera and Off’

HAVERFORD » Lisa ThomasLaury was on top of the world. She had a successful career as a Philadelphia TV news anchor and a husband and two sons who she adored.

She’d met presidents and covered the fairy tale wedding of Princess Diana in London. Action News viewers adored her.

But in 2001 she began to have weakness in her feet and ankles and weird tingling. At first she ignored it but then sought medical advice. Although she had gotten a correct diagnosis of POEMS syndrome, a very rare condition, from one physician, Dr. Edgar Kenton, a neurologist at Lankenau Medical Center, he was leaving the area. And the doctors who treated her next came to another conclusion, that she had an autoimmune disease so she was prescribed drugs for that disease.

For two years, ThomasLaury, 63, struggled with painful symptoms that worsened as she and her husband, Dr. William Laury, tried to get the correct diagnosis. Finally, after numerous tests and trips to the emergency room, she was barely able to walk and in a wheelchair. By that time, her vocal chords were partially paralyzed and she suffered from digestive problems as the disease attacked her stomach. Dr. Gary Newman, a gastroenterologist, suggested that she be treated at the Mayo Clinic and it was there that Dr. Angela Dispenzieri diagnosed Thomas-Laury with POEMS syndrome in 2004 after a week of tests.

Dispenzieri told ThomasLaury and her husband that the POEMS was “shutting me down,” Thomas-Laury said. “I was very close to death. I don’t think that I ever let myself think it back then. My husband did not tell me until later how devastated he was, how much he worried.”

Now two bone marrow transplants later, ThomasLaury is doing much better but during the course of her treatment she also had a struggle with opioid addiction, after a doctor prescribed her OxyContin to treat her pain and she became dependant on it.

She did not originally plan to talk about her addiction and recovery in her recently published memoir, “On Camera and Off,” but after the third friend of one her sons succumbed to an overdose, she decided to include that experience, as well. She felt that if she really wanted to help people she would have to bare her soul. When her younger son, Leeland, missed an overseas flight from Philadelphia in March 2006, she was able to book him on another flight from Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C. She didn’t have her OxyContin pills with her and began to experience withdrawal symptoms as hours passed without her next scheduled dose.

“It had become obvious that I was no longer aware of my threshold for pain,” she said. “I wasn’t taking the OxyContin for pain. I was taking it because I needed it. I was dependent on it. I was addicted!” she wrote. However, she got into a prescription drug dependency program through the Mayo Clinic and recovered. Thomas-Laury said that it shows that anyone, in any socio-economic group can become addicted.

She returned to her career at WPVI-TV (channel 6) in 2007, after more than two years on medical leave, although she’d accepted a few assignments in the interim, including covering Oprah Winfrey’s Legends Ball.

No longer an anchor, Thomas-Laury covered mostly features at her request. She’d lost her taste for hard news, the if it bleeds, it leads TV news mainstay.

She also came to believe in the power of prayer.

“After I came back from that first bone marrow transplant, I was reporting full time and filling in as an anchor, when I would go out, there wasn’t a day that passed that I didn’t meet someone who told me that they had prayed for me,” she said. “That’s one thing I regret. I wanted to do a story on the power of prayer.”

In 2009, Thomas-Laury got some bad news at a return check-up at the Mayo Clinic where the doctor found signs that her POEMS syndrome was returning. Although this time some medications were available, the side effects were unpleasant and Thomas-Laury again underwent a bone marrow transplant. She officially retired from WPVI in 2016, after a 38-year career that included an Emmy, the Liberty Bell Award, and three honorary degrees.

During a recent interview, Thomas-Laury fondly recounted her rough beginnings at WPVI-TV, where her fellow newscaster Jim O’Brien coached her, smoothing the way.

“There were lots of things they wanted to change about me,” she said. “I think they saw strong potential but they wanted to fix my West Virginia twang, and I had big hair...They hired a lady from Temple (University) to work with me on my accent.”

New to the Philadelphia area, Thomas-Laury mispronounced words like “Conshohocken” and “Schuylkill” on air. One day she brought in a list of problematic words and O’Brien helped her practice them. He told her that she needed to stop listening to the criticisms, to focus on reading the news and that she was a

wonderful news reader who spoke in a “casual but authoritative manner.”

She took O’Brien’s death from a skydiving accident hard and also the later loss of another Chanel 6 friend, Gary Papa, who died from prostate cancer. Papa had inspired her with his courage as she fought POEMS.

Thomas-Laury had landed a weather girl gig at a television station in West Virginia when she was a journalism student at Marshall University. After graduation she worked for the NBC affiliate in Oklahoma City, and then she went on to Nashville. It was in Nashville that she crossed paths with Oprah Winfrey, who was at that station. She saw Winfrey anchoring the news solo and was very impressed.

“We hit it off,” said Thomas-Laury. Before Thomas-Laury started in Nashville, Winfrey left for a co-anchor job in Baltimore. But they stayed in touch. Much later she learned that Winfrey had applied around the same time for the job in Philadelphia that Thomas-Laury was hired for.

“She was turned down for that role and I ended up getting that role,” said Thomas-Laury. “We talked about it. I knew and she knew why I got that job and it had to do with the race relations in Philadelphia. The general manager at that time and the powers that be were worried about putting a black woman in a prime position like that in Philadelphia. They were worried they wouldn’t be accepted by the predominately white audience.”

“And so I was lightskinned and I think they thought,‘She wouldn’t offend our white audience,’” Thomas-Laury said. Some viewers did question her ethnicity, including one who wanted her to settle a bet over whether she was Italian or Native American. Even her superiors at the station, who were under FCC pressure to hire minorities, wondered she actually was black when, shortly after she was hired, they met her late mother, Blossom Howard, who many people mistook for a Caucasian. They solved that without broaching the question by showing her an Inquirer story about WPVI-TV hiring its first African American anchorwoman and asking her what she thought, Thomas-Laury said.

Another Action News journalist, Vernon Odom, set her up on a date with Laury, who became her husband. She was an hour late for their first date because of a news shoot.

“He almost didn’t wait but I’m glad he did,” she said. Thomas-Laury was pleased that he did not know who she was since he didn’t have time to watch TV news.

Her most memorable story was covering the wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, she said.

“It was so exciting,” Thomas-Laury said. Thomas-Laury and the Action News staff in London with her “had the time of our lives.” Another major broadcast was President Clinton’s second inauguration. They had passes to the White House grounds and went into the wrong gate and found themselves among celebrities including Michael Douglas, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Whoopi Goldberg.

LISA THOMAS-LAURY