IN FOCUS 40 YEARS
Anastos looks back on his biggest stories
Veteran TV newsman Ernie Anastos reported a lot of stories in 2018, but the Fox 5 anchor is living a tale of his own as he winds down his 40th year of broadcasting over New York City’s airwaves.
“You know, it’s amazing,” the multiple Emmy-winner told the Daily News. “It’s a positive affirmation of my purpose in life. I meet people on the street who watched me and now their kids are growing up watching me.”
Anastos, 75, started his career bouncing around Boston, Chicago and Providence in the 1970s before landing at WABC’s “Eyewitness News” in 1978 next to his “good friend” Rose Ann Scamardella, who inspired Gilda Radner’s famed “Roseanne Roseannadanna” character on “Saturday Night Live.”
Just a few weeks into the job, Anastos got his first big scoop — a courthouse interview with Vogue model Melanie Cain, who was at the center of a love triangle that ended in the murder of her pub owner fiancé at the hands of a horse trainer to whom she’d also been romantically linked.
“They put me on it and said, ‘Hey can you do something with this?” he recalled. “I’d only been in New York maybe a month — to cut a long story short, I got an exclusive interview. That story put me on the map.”
In January 1979, Anastos struck gold again with another huge scoop.
“I was the only reporter (around) when (former U.S. Vice President) Nelson Rockefeller died — that particular night he had a heart attack and they brought him to Lenox Hill hospital,” he recalled. “I ran to the hospital and got an exclusive.”
Reporting on the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks stands out as the most poignant series of stories Anastos has done, which profoundly affected the good-natured anchor.
“Over the years there have been papal visits, World Series, Super Bowls, New Year’s Eves, but the story that really changed me the most, and was the most painful and significant in my career, was 9/11 and how we responded as a city and as a family and a country,” he said.
Anastos held it together on the air night after night, but the horror caught up with him when the cameras stopped rolling.
“When we were on the air we kept doing our job,” he said. “Then one time I went into my office, this had to be two weeks in, and I was talking with someone ... about what had transpired and I lost it,” Anastos said. “I didn’t lose it on the air, but I lost it in conversation. All of that emotion built up in me.”
Anastos still has a chunk of glass from one of the twin towers’ windows that a fireman gave to him at the site of the fallen skyscrapers. When he attempted to tell a charity event crowd about that piece of glass a couple of years later, he broke down again.
“I couldn’t go on,” Anastos recalled. “I really had to stop and catch my composure.”