Ramon Antonio Escobar

LITTLE ROCK — Ramon Escobar has heard - and told - his family’s story over and over in the more than 20 years since he became a member of the media, with different people in the starring roles.

“I actually found that my family’s story was basically the same story that was happening everywhere,” says Escobar, 43, vice president of talent recruitment and development at CNN Worldwide. “Their story started in 1961, but it might as well have started in 1981 or it could have started in 2001 or it could be starting right now in Springdale. I think these stories are very universal. In many ways, it’s the story of people coming here and looking for something better.”

It’s not his story, per se, but it’s at the heart of who he is.

His parents, Ramon and Blanca Escobar, arrived in Little Rock in the winter of 1961 for a short visit with Blanca’s sister. The elder Ramon Escobar left his family’s home in El Salvador before he finished high school and found work as a mechanic, hopping from boat to boat and working on engines as he traversed the world. He met Blanca, whose family pulled her out of high school to care for her younger siblings, in a Colombian port. They married and decided they would have better opportunities in America.

The senior Escobar secured an entry-level position in a factory in New York, where some of their family members lived. A snowstorm closed the airport in Little Rock, though, stranding them long enough that the factory job went to someone else, and that is how the Escobars came to make their home in Arkansas.

BILINGUAL FAMILY

The elder Ramon found work keeping the grounds for the Catholic diocese, and for several years, Blanca stayed home with their children. When Ramon, the youngest of three, started preschool, she got a job as a teacher’s aide at the older children’s school, Forest Park Elementary. Soon she started an after-school child-care business in her home, and that allowed the family to afford sending all three children to Our Lady of the Holy Souls Catholic School.

“Growing up in the home we only spoke Spanish,” he says. “It was an absolute, ironclad, concrete rule; there was no flexibility.”

Escobar’s mother insisted that he would learn English because he was in school, but that if he didn’t speak Spanish he would lose that language.

“And once again, these are people who didn’t finish school,” says Escobar. “They’re supposedly not as educated as others and yet I found their decision-making to be utterly brilliant and their planning to be just so forward-thinking.”

His mother taught herself to speak English.

“The way that she learned about English and culture and the United States was by watching the news and reading news magazines,” he says. “So at a very early age Time, Life, National Geographic, and all of those types of news magazines were in my home.”

Escobar developed an affinity for news, history and politics.

“I watched my mom learning English and culture by watching the box with wires, if you will, so I understood the power of television - the transformative power of television was very clear to me because it transformed my mom,” he says.

As graduation neared, Escobar toggled between dreams of a future in politics and one in journalism. Boys State, and a Boys Nation victory, in 1986 helped him firm up his goals.

The Boys Nation senators were given a briefing on protocol before meeting President Reagan at the White House. Escobar discovered that only certain boys would be allowed to ask questions of Reagan, and that those questions would be preselected and handwritten for them on index cards.

As they entered the Rose Garden, Escobar was summoned over by one of his idols, ABC News White House correspondent Sam Donaldson. Donaldson, he says, asked him to ask the president a question about apartheid.

Escobar explained that he couldn’t ask the question without getting sent home, and the whole experience served to seal his decision to pursue a journalism career.

“I didn’t want to be on the politician side, where the rules were different,” he says. “There were no rules on the journalism side. The rules on the journalism side were to get the truth. I was much more cut out for that.”

But he had a run at politics ahead of him still - president of the student body at Catholic High School for Boys. One of his opponents for that seat was John Moran, a good friend since sixth grade.

“Ramon and I hatched a scheme whereby we would be each other’s campaign managers, as we were both running for student body president,” says Moran of Little Rock. “We thought it would send a message about how you could be rivals, but still friendly rivals.”

Escobar won the election and served his term as student body president - and finished his senior year of high school - while living with family friends. His parents had moved to New York by then so his mother could open a Colombian restaurant with some other family members.

He started his career in 1991, fresh out of journalism school at the University of Missouri in Columbia, as producer of the 11 p.m. news at the Spanish language Univision TV station in New York, which had just added a second Spanish-language newscast.

“It was ironic because I never thought I was going to be in Spanish-language media. But there was also something about it that I found very appealing and that was that Spanish-language media at the time was going through a pioneering phase,” he says. “I could be part of something that was transformative. I was part of helping a community that I felt like I came from and that I could give back to.”

COMING HOME

This fall, Escobar returned to Little Rock for the first time in almost 20 years for his 25threunion at Catholic High School, and he has pledged his help to his alma mater’s three-year $15 million capital campaign.

Principal Steve Straessle says the school is to be renovated from top to bottom. The money will also help keep tuition affordable, and increase an endowment to pay the tuition of boys whose families can’t pay it.

Escobar is fairly certain his family benefited from tuition assistance.

“They found a way, and they were very good at disguising it for us about being really poor,” he says. “I didn’t think we were poor at all. My confidence in life stems from the fact that my parents were brilliant at keeping that stuff away from me.”

Straessle was pleased to see Escobar at the school’s alumni dinner in October.

“I recall Ramon as one of the most engaging personalities that I’ve ever met, very bright, athletic and personable. He was the voice of Catholic High’s closed-circuit TV program for many years,” he says.

Straessle also remembers him from junior high at Holy Souls.

“Ramon was a strong athlete. He was a punishing running back. He was one of those guys who, when he hit you, you remembered it,” he says.

As for Escobar’s career progression, after two years in his first job he was recruited to work as executive producer for Telemundo, a Univision competitor.

Escobar met Don Browne, then executive vice president of NBC News, at a journalism conference while in that position. He had read about Browne, creator of the magazine show Dateline, in journalism school. Browne took Escobar on as executive producer of the NBC affiliate, Channel 6, in Miami when Escobar was just 24.

“I was in that job and it sort of kept progressing. After a couple of years I became the managing editor of the newsroom, which was overseeing all the reporters and all the editorial content,” says Escobar.

When the news director resigned, Escobar asked Browne for a promotion.

“He looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I think that’s going to be an uphill battle for you. I’m going to find the best person in the country to take this job,’” Escobar recalls. “I said, ‘OK, that’s fair, because that’s me.’ That’s what I was thinking - you know, I’m a confident guy.”

No news director had been named by the time fashion magnate Gianni Versace was murdered in July 1997.

“I had run the investigative unit and I’m also gay,” says Escobar. “If you recall the Gianni Versace story, the guy who killed him was this gay maniac so I had this insight into the gay community and I pulled all that together and put the unit together and we kicked butt. I mean the organization did a great job. We broke every story, we led the Today Show every day for the whole week because of our stories - we were breaking news, we were getting all the information.”

That success helped Escobar secure the news director position.

“I was the youngest news director in the history of NBC,” he laughs.

MOVING UP

In three years there he helped transform key shows and raise ratings. Eventually, he took a job as executive producer at MSNBC, and later was promoted to vice president. He was in charge of live news programing, including the 2000 election and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. When NBC Universal bought Telemundo in 2002, Escobar joined the transition team appointed to merge the two companies. At the end of that year, he was promoted to head of the entertainment division.

At the time, Telemundo bought its prime-time programming from companies in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. Escobar was to change it from an acquisition company to a production company.

“The mainstay of Spanish-language programming are soap operas, or what are called novellas. And I was not a big novella watcher - I hadn’t grown up with novellas because I didn’t grow up in Latin America and we didn’t have a lot of novellas,” he says.

In four years, Escobar made more than 25 novellas as well as reality shows, game shows, and music and variety shows, increasing Telemundo’s original prime-time production from 0 percent to 80 percent of programming.

“Telemundo is now the second largest producer of Spanish-language programming in the world. I’m very proud of the fact that I was part of an important team to create that. You know, we created the business in America.”

He had come to love transformational leadership then, and he got the chance to do a little more of that in his next job, with Stuart Sucherman Consulting Group.

Sucherman had met Escobar while he was at Miami’s Channel 6.

“He was extraordinarily bright, energetic, a very, very smart and dynamic guy with tremendous insight and talent and also very charismatic, so you knew he had tremendous potential,” says Sucherman of New York. “What I could do with him was to send him into an organization like Discovery and help people figure out what their programming strategy was and he did a very, very good job with Animal Planet, which at that time was in not great shape.”

Animal Planet was one of Escobar’s favorite assignments.

“Animal Planet had been focused on kids. We transformed it from that sort of channel to an adult channel,” he says.

Telemundo was another of his clients, and he returned there to run the news organization.

“That was during the whole immigration battle, with [Senate Bill] 1070 in Arizona and so that was a really big deal because it sort of brought me back full circle to the story of my parents and the importance of immigration reform here,” he says.

NEW DIRECTION

Comcast bought Telemundo in 2011 and Escobar took some time off.

He did some consulting for CNN and then was hired into his current job with that company.

“My role at CNN is in the area of talent and programming development and the idea is to be very strategic about how we hire and recruit talent and how we develop talent within the organization, and by talent we mean mostly on-air anchors and correspondents,” Escobar explains. “The other part of the department that I’m part of is that they oversee program development as well, which is developing external and internal pilots of new potential program ideas.”

Throughout his life, Escobar has seen his parents’ story as universal and as inspiring. Where he comes from is as much a part of him as where they came from.

“When people get to know me they’re not surprised that I’m Latino and they’re usually not so shocked about me being gay, but they are inexplicably confused by the fact that I’m from Arkansas. They find that to be the strangest part of who I am. I am a proud Arkansan. I think my view of how you treat people and trying to be a kind and courteous person, the kind of person who, when you see someone you say hello to them, a lot of that came from Little Rock.”

SELF PORTRAIT Ramon Escobar

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH April 30, 1969, Little Rock

MY MOST VIVID MEMORY FROM HIGH SCHOOL IS swinging out over the gymnasium filled with the student body to land and sing “The Love Boat.”

TO MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY I WOULD INVITE Father George Tribou, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harvey Milk, David Letterman, Edward R. Murrow and my mom.

I WANT TO BE REMEMBERED AS someone who made you laugh and left the world a better place.

THE BEST MEAL I CAN IMAGINE WOULD INCLUDE my mom’s lentils.

MY FAMILY THINKS I'M smart and good looking (at least someone does).

I NEVER GO ANYWHERE WITHOUT my iPhone 5.

MY ADVICE TO KIDS TODAY IS be true to yourself.

THE THING I'M PROUDEST OF IS being Latino and from Arkansas.

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Fun.