They also need to cover some national and international news. Doing a big story that has nothing to do with Sarasota is risky. The big networks can do it better, but if you don’t mention a major national or international event, you lose your news credibility. The answer is to “localize” it. Today’s big national story is shaping up to be a large gas leak in Manhattan. Ideas are discussed to make it relevant locally. They could call doctors at Sarasota Memorial’s emergency room and get sound bites about the health issues. They can call the local utility company and ask, “Can it happen here?” They can stop the man on the street and ask, “So what do you think about that gas leak in New York?”

            The meeting ends. Much is still up in the air, but it’s supposed to be that way. The world is in a constant state of flux, and what will actually end up on the broadcast will be decided closer to air time.

            Linda has two other matters to get settled before lunch. First she heads to Robert Eckert’s desk in the newsroom. Eckert is a city editor, and he’ll be taped just before the newscast, telling the viewers what will be on the front page of tomorrow’s Herald-Tribune. “Are we doing that tonight?” he asks, startled. But he assures Linda and Drew Smith that he will be prepared.

            Then it’s on to commercial production manager Jim Kosub’s office on the second floor. Jim has prepared a new set of “bumpers” and “lead-ins” for the new show, and he and Linda watch them. These are the little five-second intro and segues that function as title cards and transitions, those little blobs of color that comes flying off the screen saying “LIVE @10 weather next.”

            They are sensational, better than Linda hoped for, and she’s delighted.

             “They’re as good as anything I’ve seen,” she tells Jim. “Very urban. You really got the concept. That nighttime feel, the way they go from light to dark.”

            She leaves his office vastly relieved. Maybe they’re in better shape than she thought.

            The popular image of a successful, hard-driving career woman with no time or inclination for a personal life doesn’t hold true with Linda. She has an addiction to the feminine arts of decorating, shopping, cooking, collecting china, silver and jewelry. The house she shares with Doug Barker in Southside Village is an 82-year-old Tudor Revival, unusual for Sarasota but one which perfectly suits Linda’s style— prosperous, conservative, densely packed, with a frilly feminine aura that suggests the pages of Traditional Home meeting Southern Living.

            Linda’s taste is something she inherited from her mother, a remarkable—and remarkably difficult—woman who was, as Linda puts it, “born dirt poor in Appalachia” but through her ambition and beauty became a top model and married four times, to a succession of progressively richer men. In her mother’s life Linda sees many lessons, both good and bad, and it has taken her many years of therapy to put the mother-daughter bond into perspective.

            “I was the latchkey child of a single mother,” Linda says, describing the early years of her childhood in Washington, D.C. “I came home from school and watched TV.” Her friends were the Mouseketeers and the characters on Howdy Doody. A new marriage and stepfather would mean temporary prosperity, but after the divorce it would be a return to reduced circumstances.

            Linda planned to become a journalist, but an internship at the Washington Post put an end to that. “All anybody was interested in was digging up dirt,” she recalls. “That wasn’t what I had in mind.”

            Just a few credits short of graduating from college (her car had broken down and she needed money to buy a new one), shetook a job with an independent TV station in D.C. "I was hooked. It was right for me," she recalls. She still remembers when the station's American Bandstand-type show wnet on: "Winging's on and we need dancers!" She jump up from her desk and run to the studio and dance like crazy for half an hour.

            One of the big attractions of television was the camaraderie. At this time the Mary Tyler Moore Show was America’s reigning sitcom, and the vision it presented of a workplace where the employees became a family—a slightly dysfunctional one, to be sure, but ultimately loving and accepting—spoke to her and would shape the emotional content of her entire life. “You could assemble a family,” she says, marveling at the concept. “I’ve done the same thing. I’ve surrounded myself with a professional family.”