Richmond signs off, reporter reflects

-by Catherine Mylinh
May 30, 2008

If I was having pangs of regret over my decision to leave the broadcasting industry, all doubt was erased last week.

Longtime KTVU anchor Dennis Richmond retired after 40 years of delivering local and national headlines to San Francisco Bay Area residents. I grew up watching and idolizing the iconic journalist. He is the quintessential newsman: he's got all the smarts and wit to know a good story when he sees one, but without the frivolous bells and whistles and matching ties and hankies and insipid banter local news is so racked with these days.

Richmond gave you the facts and he gave it to you straight. There was nary a glimmer in his eye, not the faintest crack of a slight smile when he told you about the fundraiser for homeless children. He didn't artificially emote when he gave you updates on the fatal highway shooting. Richmond told you the news exactly as it happened. He let you decide where you would stand on the issues. I will always appreciate that.

But after nearly four decades of telling it like it is, Richmond announced his retirement early this year. He signed off for one last time on Wednesday, May 21, 2008.

I was back in the Bay Area just in time for Richmond's last newscast. I knew I wanted to catch this final goodbye. I also knew I had dinner plans that night. What's a girl to do?

Enter TiVo. And YouTube. And a host of other online sites that captured the poignant moment.

I caught the last hoorah on my TiVo, zipping through commercials and the blood and guts at the top of the hour. I logged on to YouTube, filtered out all the other noise and watched the handful of segments that interested me in this man's career. It is ironic that I now get my information from someplace other than the television, considering I spent the better part of my adulthood working in the television news industry.

And then it hit me. I am not alone. This generation receives its information in e-mails, on iPhones. People are not waiting around for the evening newscast to find out what's going on with the world.

Richmond's sign-off, in many ways, signals the end of an era, both for me and the industry. He is the last of his kind. The all-knowing, authoritative voice of God that boomed into your living room at 6 p.m. sharp. Overseas disasters, soaring fuel prices, a plummeting economy--my parents and their parents depended on these men and women to understand the world. Today, I have Google, ready at the click of a mouse whenever and wherever I want or need it.

I am grateful I worked briefly with Richmond in the early years of my broadcast career. While I was an intern at KTVU, Richmond treated me with respect. He was extremely knowledgeable, approachable and caring. He wanted young people to succeed. He gave me tips on how to do it right. The way he'd done it right for four decades.

True journalism, the kind Richmond delivered, may get buried in the hustle and bustle of high tech as the Internet continues to revolutionize information flow and, hence, the news industry. But, to this perpetual reporter and storyteller at heart, true journalism, the kind Richmond delivered, will never be forgotten. I will always have YouTube to remind me.

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News blues

Bud Elliott and Catherine Mylinh
KSEE NBC - Fresno, Calif.
September 2006

News blues
by Catherine Mylinh
May 12, 2007

It's 8:40 on a Saturday night. I am, once again, sitting in the newsroom. My eyes are red and aching from reading all the wires and news flashes that have been coming down since the ambush in Iraq. Several U.S. soldiers were killed this morning, several more are now missing.

In between reading the doom and gloom that is my profession, I am surfing the Web. I am looking at my friends' photo albums. Pictures of them with their wine glasses raised, cheeks stretched and pink from laughing too hard. Pictures of them on vacation, sunburned and happy. Snapshots of the moments we live and die for. And I lament.

It is, after all, 8:40 on a Saturday night and I am sitting in the newsroom.

When I was eight years old I was sure I wanted to be a reporter. I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to write stories about their lives, be the first to know something important and to relay it to the rest of the world. It's true what they say: be careful what you wish for.

It is, after all, 8:40 on a Saturday night and I am sitting in the newsroom.

I am going through a quarter-life crisis. It is a little late in coming but make no mistake about it, it is here. I love my job. The eight-year-old in me, the one who's chasing down a story and pounding on the keyboard, trying to gracefully make deadlines, is thrilled. The 20-something Cat is torn.

I am working long hours. Weekends, holidays, you name it. I cannot take two weeks off at a time because news never sleeps. Some months I can't take time off at all. For the last five years, I have given up everything to be where I am now. I have packed up my bags, moved to wherever I could find work, said goodbye to those I love too often.

Is it worth it?

My family is having dinner tomorrow night for Mother's Day. I won't be there. My boyfriend is throwing a housewarming party tomorrow afternoon. I can't be there.

Tomorrow it will be 8:40 on a Sunday night and I will be in the newsroom.

I love my job tremendously. I feel very fortunate to be working in this fiercely competitive business. I feel blessed to be a mere three-hour drive from my real home. But I no longer own my own life. At what point do you weigh the scales and make a decision?

My biggest fear is I will wake up one day, in my 40s, alone. I'll have a big house and a kick-ass career but I won't have anyone to share it with. I am too far from all the people I love. And when I do get to see them, it is for snippets at a time because they all have 'normal' schedules and 'normal' hours. I am missing out on all those moments now. All the Thanksgiving dinners and weddings and baby showers and birthday parties and Christmas recitals and lazy Sundays. All the frolics on the beach and dancing until dawn. All those moments that will become inside jokes you all will laugh about for years to come. I am missing out on all of that.

It is, after all, 8:40 on a Saturday night and I am sitting in the newsroom.

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The story of Hau and Kim

Hau and Kim at Yosemite National Park
circa 1983

The story of Hau and Kim
by Catherine Mylinh
October 1, 2006

One of my earliest memories is sitting in the backseat of an early 1970s Chevrolet Nova with my younger brother, Peter. It was a junky piece of metal, the white paint chipping off, the upholstery, a gaudy bright blue. My parents were in the front. All around us the flood waters were rising during a particularly bad storm. Peter and I were terrified.

"Everything's going to be okay," my dad said.
And it was.

It was the early 1980s and we were living in New Orleans. A lot of Vietnamese refugees immigrated to the Bayou State after the fall of Saigon because there's a fantastic shrimp industry there and that's what they knew to do. However, my father, Hau, and my mother, Kim, knew nothing about crustacean; they had been raised in the city back home and considered themselves young, cool, educated hipsters. We'd been in the country for about two years and were living in Louisiana with my grandparents, who'd arrived to the states first. One day, after much thought, my dad decided there were better opportunities in California. And, like any typical Asian family, my grandparents agreed to follow us out there as soon as we'd settled.

So west we went.

When we arrived in California, we lived in Sunnyvale, south of San Francisco. My parents scraped what little money they had saved and rented a garage that had been converted into a bedroom. We also rented a room from a nice lady. She had two grown children: a son was who away at school, and a daughter who played tennis. She was rarely home because she had a rich boyfriend who took her on expensive cruises. We had free range of the family room, one bathroom and the kitchen.

My mother and father would take turns looking after Peter and me, as the other went job hunting. "They're making computers out here. That's where the money is!" my father would always excitedly claim in Vietnamese.

But those first few years were a struggle. Both my parents had fled war-torn Vietnam with nothing but a few photographs of their wedding day and the clothes on their backs. They had decided to stay after the Americans pulled out, optimistic South Vietnamese forces would win the civil war. After the Viet Cong entered Saigon, they knew it was not the same country.

My parents rarely speak about the night they left their land. What little I've been able to glean paints a horrifying picture. They left in the middle of the night, paying a fisherman to take them out to sea. Hundreds of boats carrying thousands of refugees fled for the Philippines, China, Indonesia. My grandparents told me Thai pirates came abroad their ship, robbed them, burned their belongings and threw the men in the ocean.

I tell my coworkers I once lived in a cardboard box and they laugh. It's true. My parents' boat took them to Malaysia, where I was born. We lived in a refugee camp made of large cardboard boxes, held together by electrical tape and string. I have the pictures to prove it. We stayed nearly a year before our papers were approved and we were on our way to the U-S of A.

Like I said, those first few years were a struggle. My parents have never believed in welfare, saying, "If you can walk, you can work." In Louisiana, my father held several jobs while struggling to learn English. My mother did the same. I remember my dad coming home early in the morning with candy for Peter and me. (One of his jobs was as an overnight cashier at a 7-11. He quit after some men robbed him at gunpoint one night.)

But in California things were different. With their broken English, my parents were able to secure jobs as technicians with blue chip companies in Silicon Valley.

We moved out of that garage after about six months and got ourselves a little apartment in Santa Clara. And like they promised, my grandparents made the trek out west and joined us. They took care of us kids while my parents went to work. And still, even though they could have chosen not to, my parents both held two jobs each. I saw my mother for only a few hours a day before she'd leave for her swing-shift. "We're going to buy a house soon and you can have your own bedroom," she'd promise me every afternoon before she headed out the door.

She was right. Within eight years of arriving in this country, my parents were able to purchase an 1,800 square-foot piece of the American dream. They bought our home before it was even built. On Saturdays, they would drive Peter and me out to the dirt lot so we could watch first the foundation being laid, then the wood frame being erected, then the insulation being weaved in. I didn't realize it at the time but the slow construction of this home would be the symbol of my parents' freedom.

Today, my parents are American citizens. They own their own home. They own their own business. And still, in true fashion, they hold conventional, 9-to-5 jobs. My dad is now an engineer at the company he's been with for years. My mother continues to work in high tech. They've put me through college and are doing the same for my brother. They're looking forward to retirement.

My parents' story is the one I love to tell. When I left for that little town in the desert for my first reporting gig, I was a long way from home, terrified, in a strange place. But I would think of what my parents went through: how they came to this country without a penny to their names, where they did not even know the language; how they have thrived.

And I think back to one of my earliest memories: an old Chevy, rising flood waters, a Vietnamese immigrant couple and their two young children in the backseat.

I hear my dad, loud and clear, "Everything's going to be okay." And it is.

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