From Anchorwoman to One of L.A.’s Homeless : Once You’ve Fallen Out of the System, a Former Broadcaster Discovers, It’s Difficult to Get Back In

From 1977 to just before Christmas 1981, I was a television news anchorwoman in Los Angeles.

By April, 1983, I was on the streets without a place to live--penniless and afraid. I had fallen out of the system, become one of society’s discards. Even today, I have not been able to fully reestablish myself.

I am hardly a perfect person. But I was never a drug abuser, an alcoholic, a thief or a mental patient.

I’m 43. I grew up, like many people, in a tough home environment with divorce and rancor and sometimes even physical violence, and it has shaped me. But I had a college education, worked hard, never lived extravagantly and advanced to progressively better positions.

How could it have happened to me?

My difficulties began when I lost my news anchor job at Channel 11, did not quickly get a new job in television and went through my modest savings.

During the next four years, I suffered abuses that will forever be branded on my consciousness, among them an attempted rape by a man who knew how desperate my plight was and invited me to dinner. That experience was one of the first to show me how differently we are treated when our social position changes.

While homeless, I was mugged three times. After I had sold all my possessions--even my typewriter and my television--a co-worker at a temporary job suggested that all I had left to “sell” was myself. In what he apparently thought was an act of kindness, he offered to let me sell drugs for him instead of my body.

Now, looking back at the last 4 1/2 years of my life, during which I have managed to rent my own place for only 15 months and for a period was forced to live out of my car, I see how difficult it is to get back into mainstream society once you fall outside its boundaries.

The longer I was out of work in my field, the more employers questioned the length of my unemployment and the harder it was to get back in.

When I sought work as a junior reporter with news organizations, because those were the only openings, I was told I was overqualified. When I applied for secretarial jobs, some potential employers thought I was joking.

‘Just Hold On’

I was so busy looking for work, dropping off resumes and going to literally hundreds of interviews, that I kept putting off the (to me) drastic step of applying for welfare. Friends kept saying: “Just hold on. You’ll get on. You’ll get hired.”

Before I realized it, I was trapped in a downward spiral that made it more difficult than ever to reestablish myself in a permanent, self-sustaining job. As my debts and letters of rejection piled up, my self-image and self-confidence plummeted.

Once you can no longer afford to pay rent or live with respectability in your community, you begin--it’s inevitable--to undergo emotional changes that make it more difficult to relate to people in a positive way. I tried to put on a good face, but I know my anxiety came through in employment interviews and in the jobs I managed to hold down for a time.

If this could happen to me, what about others who do not have an education or a profession?

I had joined Channel 11, then the Metromedia station in Los Angeles, as a field reporter early in 1977 after more than a decade as a print reporter. Soon I began anchoring the station’s half-hour morning newscast.

Two years after I began anchoring, the ratings on that newscast had increased 200% and remained at that high until the day I was dismissed, just before the Christmas in 1981.

In a letter of recommendation dated Dec. 17, 1981, KTTV News Director Larry Attebery wrote:

“I have the highest respect for Jacki’s professional ability. She is an excellent reporter, a fine writer, and did a very successful job of anchoring for us.

“During the period that Jacki King was anchoring our 11:30 news, the ratings of that program more than doubled . . . .”

At the time Larry dismissed me with two weeks’ pay, he made it clear that I had done nothing “wrong”; he simply wanted to make a change. TV stations change anchors all the time. Still, it was a shock because I had built an audience for KTTV.

The public has a perception that all news anchors are highly paid, but I was not. In my fifth year at KTTV, I was earning less than $25,000 annually and living in a modest $430-a-month apartment. I bought my own clothes, paid for my own hair styling, answered my own fan mail and did all my own research for the daily in-studio interview I did as part of the newscast. In my spare time, I was speaking on behalf of KTTV to community groups.

My salary left me with little savings in reserve to bounce back right away. I needed to find work immediately to keep me going until--as I fully expected--I landed another television news job.

A Solid Background

I had plenty of solid experience as a journalist. I had worked for the Gardena Valley News and gone on to become a staff writer in The Times’ San Gabriel Valley section, which I left after 14 months to join the Associated Press as a reporter in its Los Angeles bureau, a job that offered the opportunity to cover national stories and even be a White House pool reporter.

At the AP, I won a national writing award and also worked as an editor, responsible during my shift for the news from 10 bureaus from Phoenix to Guam.

But television jobs are not as easily come by as I thought, and perhaps I should have known, having interviewed with local television stations for eight years before KTTV gave me a chance. After my Channel 11 job ended, I went to every interview I could get and even spent some of my dwindling savings chasing job prospects in other cities.

When my money ran out after 16 months, I had to get a job right away. I started applying at major companies for secretarial or filing positions to tide me over.

Many people recognized me, which was not surprising given my nearly five years of on-screen visibility. I was rejected as overqualified by those who took me seriously. One man agreed to hire me as a waitress, then realized I had been an anchorwoman and withdrew the job, saying he was certain I was really there to investigate his business.

I approached friends about staying with them until I could get back on my own feet again. But most nice people, I found, simply don’t want a friend with no money or job coming to live with them for an extended period.

Several friends and former colleagues graciously took me in for a month or two. But it was as difficult for me to live with my successful friends and their families as it was for them to have me there.

My mother had committed suicide a few years earlier; another close friend had died. I was not the easiest person to be around.

One guy on the news crew at Channel 11, who lived with his girlfriend, took me in for a month. At one point he became angry and said: “You were once a role model for us. How could this happen to you?”

Between job interviews and temporary work, I searched for a safe and clean place to live that I could afford. The social service agencies would keep me waiting for hours while they checked their files and my paper work. They would always make one or two recommendations, none of which ended in adequate living space.

On one occasion, an agency referred me to two people who wanted to share space, but pointed out they had not checked either of them out. One turned out to be a woman in her 20s with four children who decided not to share her small apartment after all because her boyfriend was moving in. The other referral was a male security guard, who confided to me that sometimes he didn’t stay at work at all, but would come home at night, watch television, and broadcast from his walky-talky to the rest of the security force that “all was well.”

I spent hours searching. Most days it just seemed easier to sleep in my car.

I’d rather sleep in my car than stay in a shelter, so that’s just what I did about 30 of the nights since I was fired.

I went to many agencies, such as Better Valley Services, the county’s Sundown program and the Valley Rescue Mission. One man, Barry Smedberg of Lutheran Social Services, took an interest in my case. He said he’d ask members of his congregation if anyone with a large house would be willing to rent me a place, a room, for $50 per week. He even gave me his home telephone number so I could call and check.

After three days, he said he couldn’t find anyone, even though I seemed like a nice person. He said he felt sad about my situation.

A harsh reality I learned is that there really is no system in Los Angeles County, and I presume anywhere else, to help people continue looking for work after they have become homeless.

Most of the people I met on the streets had little hope that they could ever again work within conventional society. Many had lost their desire to try.

When I sought work in my own field, potential employers checking me out soon learned of my periods of homelessness. My predicament was no secret because I had turned to many friends for help. Once, the news crew at KTTV dug into their pockets and came up with $60 to help me. Word spreads fast among news people.

One major studio executive, interviewing me for a professional position, told me that if I took off all my clothes and stood in the center of the room, I would be working in two weeks. I refused. Furious, he told me he would see to it that no one in Hollywood would hire me.

As time passed, potential employers grew more leery. A former anchorwoman homeless? It was almost as if there was a scarlet H on my resume.

I felt forced to take any kind of honest job I could land right away. I got temporary secretarial work in dozens of offices.

A local real estate company hired me after I lied about my past, telling them I had been married but my husband had left and I had no work experience. I showed up for work on time every day and was told my work was “above average.” But after six months of good work I was laid off because of a cutback in the office budget.

While I was grateful for whatever work I could get, one aspect of it shocked me: Most of the people I encountered in poorly paid, entry-level secretarial positions were what I would consider to be semi-literate. Even though most were native English speakers, they had such limited language skills that I doubted they would ever escape the cycle of low-paying jobs and advance to positions that required strong reading and writing abilities.

I also found that those who manage to get re-introduced into the work force generally must accept minimum-wage positions.

Once I got on as a cashier for a chain store. For 17 hours’ work--roughly half a 40-hour work week--my take-home pay was $53.34. If they had needed me full-time, I would have taken home less than $120 per week--enough to keep me alive, certainly, but not enough to maintain even a modest apartment, much less my former living standard.

Many of the people I worked with were poorly educated and had large families. But most of them were quite industrious. Almost all had side businesses, ranging from enterprising to illegal.

Some would buy children’s clothes on sale at places like Toys R Us, and then resell them for a small profit at neighborhood garage sales. Some held bake sales. A few women supplemented their incomes with gifts from generous men. Some of the men did part-time car repair work. Many people stole merchandise from the places they worked, and then sold it. More than a few dealt drugs.

In August, 1986, I began renting a room from an elderly woman who had been an acquaintance during the years I’d worked on television. I had gifted her with tickets to the theater and other favors, but she treated me quite differently as her tenant.

She lived with her 76-year-old brother. I paid her $50 a week plus cleaning her home and doing chores on weekends.

I had managed to get a car--after a former colleague and his wife co-signed for a loan--so I could go to work. One Saturday I told her that I needed to get my car repaired because the brake light was jammed on. Sternly, she ordered me to get to work cleaning the pool again, adding that lots of people drive in Los Angeles with brake lights that don’t work.

Scared about losing my tenuous grip on stability, I meekly obeyed. I had run up debts and after paying my rent, most of the balance of my salary from working in the real estate company typing pool was going to my creditors.

I went to dozens of churches and temples in 1983 asking for work in my field or related fields or living space. But it was my experience that churches generally won’t help someone who is not already a member of their congregation.

One congregation offered me a chance to write, as a volunteer, for their newspaper and I did a feature for them. They published it, said thank you very much, we hope you get off the streets and, by the way, we sure would appreciate it if you volunteered to do some more articles for us.

Only one religious group helped me. I was sleeping in my car and didn’t have money to eat when some nuns gave me a clean bed and meals in their Palos Verdes convent, even though I am not a Roman Catholic. Their kindness allowed me to continue looking for work.

Through a connection the nuns made, I got a reporting job on the Sonora Union-Democrat, a small daily newspaper in the Sierra foothills.

After three months and many good stories, I felt confident and I wanted to return to Los Angeles, to come home where I knew people, to see if my luck had changed. I was sure I would land a job now that the stigma of long-term unemployment in my field had been wiped away, now that I had proved myself again.

I showed my resume and my recent clips to news organizations, but nobody hired me. I wonder, now, if potential employers were put off by a former big-city anchor working on a small rural daily--if my success is now seen as a mistake.

A Temporary Break

Even so, the job in Sonora may have been a watershed of sorts. After that, I was able to land a few good jobs. My worst period of desperation seemed to be over.

In 1985, a former AP colleague told me about a temporary job as a writer with the Stanford University Medical Center news bureau in Palo Alto. Soon I was offered a permanent position writing news releases about medical research, preparing brochures and other writing. I made $634 per week, the most I’d ever earned.

Unfortunately, I had no background in science and medicine. It took me days to figure out what a “monoclonal antibody” was. I knew before I was hired that this was not the right job for me, but I took it for obvious reasons. I didn’t have a cent.

I put a lot of energy into the job and worked long hours. My boss liked my features on social and economic issues in medicine, but I didn’t like working in public relations instead of journalism. It became academic, though. After six months I was let go because I just didn’t have a strong enough science background to do the job.

To potential employers this would look on my resume like another short-term job, another work history item to question.

But when you are out of work, and have been out of work a long time, you have such limited choices that you grab at whatever comes along, even if it isn’t appropriate.

Earlier this year I took another inappropriate job. I got hired on the 5 a.m. shift at City News Service, a local wire service that is long on hustle, a starting place for reporters fresh out of school.

I had to drive as much as 100 miles a day, rapidly wearing out my only asset, my car, for which I didn’t have insurance. The emphasis on being fast instead of thorough grated on me, but I could deal with that. However, I made no more money than in secretarial work and with the wear on my car, this was not a better deal for me. After a month, CNS and I agreed this was not the job for me.

I see the world differently now. I realize how, in a market where many people are offering their skills, there can be just a slight difference between candidates--but for the one who doesn’t get the job that difference can mean living on the streets.

In some ways, I also realize that I was my own worst enemy. Like many women, I was not acculturated to be an aggressive advocate for myself. At Channel 11, for example, I resisted getting an agent, choosing instead to take refuge in the more comfortable assumption that hard work would bring job security.

Had I obtained an agent then, he or she could have immediately gone into action when I lost my anchor position, negotiating interviews with people in positions to offer me a jobs that utilized my experience.

Had I been quicker to react, and more self-confident, I might have immediately lined up some free-lance writing assignments that would have provided income and, more importantly, current writing credits and visibility.

I never thought much about those things before. But then I had never considered homelessness a possibility. I see now that it’s far more possible that most of us imagine.

A Biological Deadline

Right now I am staying temporarily with my father, who is 80, in his small one-bedroom Marina del Rey apartment--an option that hadn’t always been available to me. I am doing temporary secretarial work through an agency that has been placing me for several months, and I continue to apply for a job in the communications field.

I often think back to a day in 1980 when I was invited to examine world hunger on a panel with futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, Assemblyman Tom Hayden, actors Joanne Woodward, Valerie Harper, the late Lorne Greene, Jeff Bridges and others. We discussed ways of ending starvation on our planet before the end of this century. I believed it was a real possibility. Now I am doubtful.

Sometimes these days I go to the more depressed areas and talk with the homeless, from whom I am only tenuously separated by circumstance.

Most of those I talk to seem to feel I am one of the lucky ones, to be getting my life back in shape. Almost to a person, their words show they feel depressed, degraded, desperate. They feel there is little hope they can ever return to a productive life style. They believe that mainstream society has no room for them anymore.

I cannot disagree.