A Firing That Couldn’t Have Been Forecast

In four decades of newspapering, I have never seen anyone fired due to human pregnancy.

I qualify the species because I once knew a reporter who took time off to care for his cat whenever the animal had kittens.

He was “let go,” as we say, because the cat got pregnant too often and the city editor began to suspect he was being scammed.

I am not saying newspapers are saints when it comes to employment rights. Journalists are canned for reasons so obscure that they challenge credulity, but, to the best of my knowledge, human pregnancy has not been one of them.

Television is different. It’s a business wherein one can be tossed out the door due to age, body size or simply because “we’re moving in a different direction.”

Which brings us to Dianne Barone. She was the sweet-faced weather lady for the KCAL-TV midday news for seven years, shepherding us through drought and storm with an equanimity of spirit rare among weather reporters.

She gave us rain and sunshine without judgment in a manner that concealed no secret desire to be either a stand-up comic or a circus clown.

Last April, feeling secure in her job, she began a maternity leave, during which a daughter was born to her and her husband, Harley. It was a time of deep contentment for them, as well it should have been.

KCAL couldn’t have cared less. Ten days before she was to return to work, they fired her.

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One would imagine that in the Age of Woman these kinds of things wouldn’t happen. More and more companies are becoming family-friendly to the extent that they’ll even teach an expectant mother how to breast-feed her newborn. Trust me when I tell you mom didn’t have that 40 years ago.

For organizations such as KCAL that still don’t get the message, there are state and federal laws that say you can’t fire a woman for getting pregnant, which is pretty much what KCAL did to Barone.

I met with her the other day on the sunny patio of her home in the Hollywood Hills and found a woman perfectly trained in understanding and being able to discuss the vagaries of weather.

She became interested in the elements while working as a part-time assistant to George Fishbeck, ABC’s Johnny-Jump-Up forecaster. “I became,” she says with chipmunk perkiness, “a weather nerd!”

Under normal conditions, I find perky people difficult to be around, but Barone manages to balance perk with sensibility to just the right degree, which is what makes her credible.

She went on to study meteorology and climatology and got her first television weather reporting job in Harlingen, Texas, where the pay was so low she had to iron shirts to supplement her income. From Harlingen it was on to better jobs in Spokane and then Atlanta until she was hired by KCAL in 1991.

It was big-time, it was a return to the city of her birth, it was perfect. Or so she thought.

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For seven years she built an audience delivering the weather in that “big sister” kind of way that endeared her to just about everyone. Her biggest fan, my wife, called her reporting “weather without witlessness.”

All that ended on July 17. “Dennis Herzig called and said, ‘We have to talk,’ ” Barone says. He’s the station’s news director. “I thought maybe he called about moving me to the evening, which would be great because I could spend the day with my baby. I had no idea I was about to be fired.”

They met at a coffee shop where, after a few minutes of chit-chat, Herzig said, “We’ve decided we’re going to sever our relationship with you.”

“I was shocked,” Barone says. “I felt sick. I said, ‘Why?’ When he didn’t answer, I said, ‘Tell me something, Dennis! Tell me anything!’ He said, ‘We’re going in a different direction.’ ”

Near tears then and now, Barone remembers saying to him, “I can’t believe you’d do this to me. You don’t know how much I love my job.” From Herzig, she says, nothing but silence. “He didn’t even say he was sorry.”

Silence has been KCAL’s response generally to me and to others who have asked. It doesn’t matter. The facts are immutable: Barone got pregnant, took a maternity leave and was fired before she could return to work.

Forget the awards she’s won doing her job. Forget compassion. Forget laws that say you can’t fire a woman on maternity leave. Forget her audience.

Just say we’re moving in a different direction and to hell with any kind of humanity involved. Just say, sadly, it’s show biz.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com