Brian Williams may be a sharp-dressed picture of success today, but it wasn't always so. The "NBC Nightly News" anchor and "Rock Center" host talked to MediaBistro about running into debt as he tried desperately to break into bigger media markets.
Williams described moving to Pittsburg, Kan., to work at a small television station after his late mother told him she thought he could do a better job than the anchors on TV. He spent 13 months earning $168 weekly — and working seven days a week.
"Not to brag," he joked in MediaBistro's new video feature, "My First Big Break."
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He traveled to stations in Springfield, Mo., Tulsa, Okla., Wichita, Kan., and other cities, but couldn't get hired, he said.
"My experiment in small market television had failed," he said. "I went bankrupt. I had to work out deals with all my credit card companies to pay it down, $10, $20 a month. I was borrowing money. I lost my car. I was, I think, by any standard, poor."
He moved to Washington, D.C., where he was hired as a weekend chyron operator at WTTG. (Chyrons are the titles at the bottom of the screen.) Eventually the news director, Betty Endicott, invited him into her office and gave him a chance to report on the air, covering northern Virginia.
"I decided that this was it," Williams said. "These things don't happen outside Capra films."
Endicott, who rose to vice president and general manager of WTTG, died of cancer in 1989 at the age of 48.
