HIGH PROFILE: KATV news anchor Chris May

“It was never a question of ‘if’ we were coming home, it was just a matter of ‘when.’” - Chris May
“It was never a question of ‘if’ we were coming home, it was just a matter of ‘when.’” - Chris May

After 18 years of delivering the news on television stations in Boston and Philadelphia, Chris May is home.

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“In the era of live television, you need a real journalist.You can’t have someone sitting there who is just a pretty face and a reader.You have to have someone who can ad-lib and take over a situation in a command sort of way when you have an emergency.” — Bob Steele, former news director at KATV about Chris May

The fresh-faced Little Rock native, who began his broadcast career at KATV in his hometown, is once again behind the desk where his career started 23 years ago.

SELF PORTRAIT

Chris May

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Sept. 30, 1970, Little Rock

FAMILY: wife Lea; son Owen, 11; and daughter Mary Evelyn, 7

GO-TO FOOD IN BOSTON: clam chowder

FAVORITE PHILADELPHIA FARE: “No matter what a store says or what a box says, the only place in the world you can get a Philly cheesesteak is in Philadelphia.”

THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION ABOUT TELEVISION ANCHORMEN IS that we don’t do much and that we have words put in our mouth.

MY SHORTCOMINGS ARE that I’m probably not as patient as I should be sometimes. And I’m working on my punctuality.

AT HOME I READ the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in print and The New York Times and Wall Street Journal online.

IF I HADN’T GONE INTO NEWS, I’D HAVE BEEN in trouble. From an early age it’s all I ever dreamt of doing.

ON MY DESK AT KATV YOU’LL FIND pictures of my kids and my original Circle 7 pin from 1993.

MY MOST PRIZED MATERIAL POSSESSION IS a watch given to me by my wife as a wedding present.

MY WIFE WOULD DESCRIBE ME AS a great father and a good husband who needs to go to bed earlier.

FAVORITE MUSIC/BAND: Improvisational music in all its forms: rock, jazz and bluegrass, to name a few.

MY PRE-NEWSCAST ROUTINE INCLUDES an afternoon editorial meeting, reading and editing copy, scouring the internet for the latest news, and coffee.

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: steady

He's loving it.

"We're not going anywhere," May, 46, says of himself and his wife, Lea, who's also from Little Rock. "It was never a question of 'if' we were coming home, it was just a matter of 'when.'"

In August, May replaced Scott Inman, who had held the lead anchor's job at KATV for 13 years. Given the longevity of news anchors who dominated the market before him -- Steve Barnes, Carolyn Long, Amy Oliver and Dave Woodman, among others -- the job could have easily been Inman's for the next 30. Instead, Inman left for a job in the business world.

In stepped May. Boston was great; Philly was better, he says. And each of his two children were born in those cities. But Little Rock is where it all started for May -- in more ways than one.

On a late summer day, May walks up to the counter at Milo Coffee Co. in Hillcrest and orders "the biggest coffee ever made for man." He settles for an iced latte instead.

This guy is not a morning person.

In flip-flops, shorts and a plain white V-neck T-shirt, he's not as buttoned-up and coiffed as he is for the 5, 6 and 10 p.m. broadcasts. But he's just as engaging. His rise from Little Rock to networks in two of the nation's Top 10 markets hasn't affected his Southern charm or affable disposition.

May first landed at KATV as a general assignment reporter fresh out of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

"I had no experience whatsoever," he admits.

He attributes his big break to Bill Clinton's first campaign for president in 1992. The major networks set up shop in Little Rock, with ABC taking the top two floors of KATV. ABC interns from New York and Washington got the opportunity to work in close proximity to KATV's execs.

Over the Thanksgiving break before May was to graduate from Arizona State, his father suggested he contact former CJRW exec Ron Robinson for possible leads on a job. With Robinson's help, he got a face-to-face meeting with Jim Pitcock, the longtime news director at KATV.

They clicked right away.

"I think because of the experience he had with those other young people he met through ABC News, he looked at me and saw someone ... who had potential," May recalls.

He says "the adventure of discovery" is what he enjoys most about reporting. His most memorable story was one in Arkansas early in his career. He and a photographer traveled to an Arkansas Delta community to be with a multigenerational family as they got running water in their house for the first time.

"The joy and the pride that that family felt, to be able to be there and record it and then to be able to share it with everyone else in the state," May says. "I thought, 'This is how things should be.'"

About 18 months into his reporting job at KATV, he was made anchor of Saturday Daybreak, adding that to his weekday reporting duties. About a year later, then-anchor Rob Johnson took a job in Houston. May remembers being in his car and leaving the parking garage at the station on Main Street in downtown Little Rock when news director Bob Steele came flying out the door and waved him down.

"I rolled down my window; he leaned in the car and said, 'Rob just resigned. You're anchoring the newscast tonight,'" May says. "That was it. I pulled my car over, I went back in and anchored the newscast that night."

After a three-month tryout, they gave him a contract working alongside biggies like longtime weatherman Ned Perme and the late, legendary sportscaster Paul Eells.

Steele says he promoted May over the advice of Pitcock, who thought May was too young to be the main news anchor. Steele says he told Pitcock: "I don't care if they're young, I just care if they're good. And Chris proved me right."

May was mature beyond his years, Steele says, and he believed May's reporting skills would make him a great news anchor.

"In the era of live television, you need a real journalist," Steele says. "You can't have someone sitting there who is just a pretty face and a reader. You have to have someone who can ad-lib and take over a situation in a command sort of way when you have an emergency."

KEYS TO THE KINGDOM

Once promoted, May set out to buy his first house, though he got much more in the process.

Perme recommended real estate agent Jan Zimmerman, Lea's mom.

"In addition to selling me a house, she introduced me to her daughter," May says.

Chris and Lea were engaged when he started looking for his next big move. Within a month's time, Lea graduated from the William H. Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the couple married, and they moved to Boston, where May went to work for NBC affiliate WHDH and she became a prosecutor for the Massachusetts attorney general.

"It was really overwhelming in a lot of ways," Chris May says. "We'd left our family and the only place we'd ever really called home."

After seven years with NBC, May moved to the city's CBS affiliate, WBZ, for a year. When the owners proposed a move to Philadelphia, May says he rejected it out of hand. He knew little about the city and didn't think his wife would want to live there. When he did check it out, he found Philadelphia to be a smaller version of New York.

"We took a shot and went," May says. He started as the anchorman of the 4 p.m. newscast five days a week at KYW.

Nancy Amoroso, the station's stylist, took notice of him right away. She says he had charm, charisma, good looks and a sense of calmness about him.

"There was never any pretense," Amoroso says. "He was just who he was. He didn't try to be somebody else." His personality was confidence without arrogance, she adds.

Six months after May started in Philadelphia, he and Lea were unplugged on vacation in Mexico and had opened a laptop to check their return flight when they saw that the primary anchor at May's station had been fired. The situation was the same as it had been at KATV: May was called to fill in for a departing lead anchor, given a tryout and then landed the job full time months later.

May's friend and co-news anchor at KYW, Susan Barnett, describes May as "the smartest and most trustworthy" co-anchorman she's ever had. Sitting 6 inches from each other for four newscasts a day, they were with each other more than with their families, she says.

"I always knew he had my back -- the best position to be in when you're in such a vulnerable position," Barnett says.

May also remained dedicated to accuracy when others had chosen not to, she adds.

"I'd worked with others in the past who I noticed had taken liberties in certain situations," she explains. "Chris had such a knack for recall in his mind ... if he said it, I knew it was right on, and I could repeat it if necessary.

"Being able to rely on that is huge."

Kathy Orr, the meteorologist who shared the news desk with May and Barnett, says their time together was "magical."

"People usually say that a great anchor is someone who makes everybody better on the desk, and I think that he's one of those people," Orr says.

Laughter filled the set. May never took himself too seriously and took ribbing easily, even on the air, she says.

"What you saw on the air was pretty much our friendship off the air," Orr says.

BLESSING IN DISGUISE

After eight years in Philadelphia, though, May's job came to an end.

Over the course of about 18 months, Barnett left and was replaced, and the station got a new general manager. May says the new manager decided to make some changes, which included firing May, the news director, the sports director and Orr in July 2015. May posted a simple tweet to let viewers know he was leaving.

"I learned more about myself and my character in losing a job than I ever did from any promotion," he says.

Still, May had 16 months left on his contract with CBS, so he had time to plot his next move, and more importantly, spend more time with his children. He had been in television news for 22 years and his kids were then 10 and 6. It took only a week for him to settle into a new routine.

"It was a sense of just complete freedom," he says. He'd always worked from about 2 p.m. to midnight, so he reveled in the simple pleasures of being a dad, like picking up his children from school and tucking them in at bedtime.

"It gave me an opportunity to recalibrate my whole life."

Just before a trip home to Little Rock for Christmas last year, May got a Facebook message from KATV General Manager Mark Rose, who already knew Inman was leaving. May and Rose had lunch at the Capital Hotel Bar and Grill and eventually struck a deal that allowed May to come back to KATV "in a way that worked for me, worked for KATV and worked for CBS [in Philadelphia]," May says.

"It was the easiest decision I ever made in my life," he says.

The conversation between Lea and him about the move was short.

"It was the perfect time in our lives to do this," he says. "Our kids can have the kind of lives we had growing up with the grandparents, their cousins and their aunts and uncles."

The couple are living with Lea's mom while they remodel a house they bought in the Heights.

Coming back to the KATV newsroom, May enjoys being around "this really confident, successful group that sets their own agenda on a daily basis.

"They don't worry about what the competition is doing," he says. "They don't look to be fed their news from a newspaper or somewhere else.

"They do their own thing."

NEWS WAS HIS DNA

May, the youngest son of Gordon and Beverly May, knew early that he wanted to be a journalist. He remembers sitting on the floor of his grandparents' house on West Markham Street watching Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings and others as they interacted with correspondents in Moscow, Jerusalem and other far-away places.

"To me, that just seemed like the most exotic and exciting thing in the world," he says.

Childhood friend John Scott, now a lawyer in Fayetteville, is a year older than May and a year younger than May's brother, Craig May. Together they were like the three amigos. As kids, the May brothers and Scott would get on their landlines with an old tape recorder and put on make-believe call-in sports talk shows.

"There was always sort of an interest in people in media interviewing and talking about issues," Scott recalls.

He says May's quick and offbeat wit makes him fun to be around. When they were young, May would doctor memorable sports moments published in Sport Illustrated by placing cutouts of his face over the famous sports figure who was making history.

And during his yearlong break, May grew what Scott describes as "a full, Grizzly Adams-thick beard."

"It scared my 8-year-old daughter," Craig says. "She was a little terrified of it."

May eventually trimmed the beard back for a trip he took with Lea to Hawaii, but it had to go all together when he went back to work.

Much more intense than his enthusiasm about the beard is May's passion for the Arkansas Razorbacks.

Gordon May began taking his sons to Razorbacks games by the time Chris was 7. While at Arizona State, May remained a die-hard fan, even calling the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from a pay phone during halftime of Sun Devils' games to get the Hogs' score.

Craig has gone to every game, home and away, since former coach Houston Nutt's first season in 1998. Whether Chris lived in Boston or Philadelphia, he went with Craig to four or five Razorbacks games each season.

"My passion and my connection always stayed with Arkansas," May says.

Craig, a technical consultant for AT&T, says he figured Chris would be coming back when he got a text about Inman leaving.

"We always kind of knew that was an option for him, and it was exciting to think about it," Craig says. "But I would put it out of my mind until I had some definite news."

Now Chris May is back and being reintroduced to Arkansans.

During May's first stint at KATV, people came to recognize him in public and approached him to talk or take photos.

"There was one moment when I was with [Scott] and I complained a little bit about it to him -- not bad -- but just a little," May says. "He looked at me and said, 'It must be so hard to be loved.' And that stuck with me. I never try to take it for granted."

Does he feel that same sense of celebrity now that he's back?

"Not yet," he says with a laugh.

High Profile on 10/09/2016

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