Mother, Teacher, Traveler Now News Chief : Career Shift Made Her Radio Active

When Nanci McGraw decided to pursue a career as a radio newscaster eight years ago, she encountered plenty of skepticism from her friends.

After all, she was no kid fresh out of broadcasting school. She was a 36-year-old mother who had spent her entire adult life teaching high school English and German, traveling around the world and raising a family.

“People kept coming up to me and asking, ‘You’re starting so late. Why are you doing this?’ ” recalled McGraw, who for the past year has been the one-woman news department at San Diego adult/contemporary radio station KYXY-FM (96.5).

“But having all this experience under my belt really worked in my favor,” she said. “Teaching, traveling and having kids gave me an extremely good background for hunting down news stories, dealing with people and asking the right questions.”

In the six years McGraw worked as a news reporter with Sacramento radio station KOXA-FM, she received more than 40 broadcast journalism awards from such regional and national organizations as the California Teachers Assn., the National Commission on Working Women, and the Associated Press.

Prize-winning stories included an investigative report on incest and a documentary on latchkey children and working moms.

Since leaving the news department at KOXA in December, 1986, to become the news department at KYXY, McGraw has won nearly a dozen more broadcast prizes, most recently a coveted Golden Mike award from the Radio and Television News Assn. of Southern California.

“My husband is in charge of nailing them on the wall, and my kids are in charge of counting them,” she said with a laugh. “As for me, I just keep on working.”

And work she does. Each weekday, McGraw gets up at 4 a.m. and starts scanning wire reports and newspapers for stories. Later, she writes, edits, produces and anchors five-minute newscasts that air every half hour from 6 to 8:30 a.m.

After that, she hits the streets, seeking out unusual news stories and features for future broadcasts.

“I have a real expanded view of what news is,” McGraw said. “One time, I did a medical story about TMJ, the yuppie jaw disorder. Another time, I did a feature on the new Hall of Success downtown, and just the other day, I reported on recycling limbs and trees felled by the recent storm.

“I don’t chase ambulances or run after sensational fires. I’m mostly looking for life-style stories, things that people can relate to and that the other media in town don’t cover.”

One of McGraw’s regular features is “A Day in the Life Of,” which airs each Monday morning on KYXY and spotlights ordinary people with ordinary jobs.

Among the people she has profiled are a doughnut-maker, a policeman on horseback, a lawyer, and a wardrobe master for the San Diego Opera. The last interview netted McGraw a Golden Mike in the “Best Specialized Segment” category.

“In the radio news business, you spend most of your time interviewing politicians and other news makers,” she said. “But the real heroes are the people out there working regular jobs.

“They’re the ones who run this world, and they deserve a lot more attention, a lot more recognition, than they normally get.”

Born in Arlington, Tex., McGraw was 14 when “the broadcasting bug first bit me,” she recalled. She was living in Germany--her father was in the Army--and she was one of the teen-age hosts of “Rhine High Teen Time,” a Saturday morning radio show on the American Armed Forces Radio and Television Network.

A few years later, McGraw moved back to the United States to attend Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. After graduating in 1967 with degrees in English and German, she got married and relocated to El Paso, where she taught high school.

Before long, however, McGraw was back at Brigham Young, taking several communications classes while her husband earned his doctorate in musicology. In 1974, the couple moved again, this time to Cape Town, South Africa. There, McGraw worked as an educational counselor for the United States Information Agency, and her husband played with the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra.

“I also did a little radio on the state-run network, mostly interviews and dramas,” McGraw said. “That prompted me to do some soul searching about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

“And by the time we returned to the United States five years later, I had decided to do whatever I needed to do to get back into broadcasting and pursue it on a professional basis.”

McGraw’s first radio job was spinning country-Western records, and being host to a German-language hour, on a tiny station in Santa Rosa, Calif. A year later, she was the overnight deejay on an adult/contemporary station in Sacramento, where her husband had found work with the Sacramento Symphony.

“Real quick, I got kicked into the news department because of my love for words and information,” McGraw said. “A year later, I switched over to KOXA, where I became a full-time reporter, and now, at KYXY, I’m a full-time news department.

“The reason I wanted to be a broadcaster in the first place was because I enjoyed talking with people and assembling information.

“And even after eight years, that’s still what I enjoy doing the most.”