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Against All Odds
WCCO TV reporter Darcy Pohland followed her dream and wouldn't take "no" for an answer
an interview as part of a story for the
evening WCCO newscasts.
(page 1 of 3)
EDITOR'S NOTE:
This article was pulled from the Minnesota Monthly archives in remembrance of Darcy Pohland, 1961-2010.
Published July 2002
IT'S A MONDAY MORNING in the WCCO-TV newsroom, and reporters, producers, and assignment desk editors are gathered in a stark, white-walled, windowless office to determine the day’s news agenda and divvy up assignments. Photo by John Noltner
Two white boards covered with markings hang on the walls. On one is listed the long-term projects reporters and photographers are already pursuing for newscasts in the days, weeks, and months ahead. But this morning’s meeting is about filling up the other board with the stories the “Hometown Team” will be covering for today’s noon, 5, 6 and 10 o’clock news reports.
Of the names of reporters that appear on the board—Caroline Lowe, Bill Hudson, Alan Cox, Trish Van Pilsum, Kevyn Burger, Pat Kessler, and Darcy Pohland—Pohland’s would seem the most unlikely to be listed among them. Television newsrooms use the term “stand up” to refer to the stock convention of reporters appearing on camera in some germane location to wrap up a story, either live or on tape—but Darcy Pohland cannot stand up. She cannot walk, and has only limited use of her hands.
In a medium where highly paid consultants tutor anchor people and reporters on what to do with their hands while they’re on the air, or when to look down at their scripts, even how often to blink, Pohland is an anomaly.
“Let’s face it,” says Pohland, “it’s a visual medium and you have to look good on camera. If you’re not just perfect, you don’t get a job.” The thing is, perfection can be defined in many ways.
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1983, Pohland was a college intern with WCCO-TV’s Washington, D.C., bureau. She’d studied journalistic theory college at the University of Minnesota and George Washington University, but this internship offered a chance to learn to both shoot and edit videotape—practical, hands-on skills she’d need to land her first reporting job at a small market station, the traditional starting point for aspiring on-air reporters.
But one night that summer, in a moment of youthful exuberance and impulse, Darcy dove into the shallow end of a swimming pool, breaking her neck. The broken vertebrae severed her spinal cord, paralyzing her from the chest down.
Darcy faced relearning the quotidian tasks of day-to-day living. Eating, traveling, caring for herself, even managing to brush her teeth became Herculean challenges. Forget the more arcane skills needed to report the news for television.
After the accident, “I thought there was no way I’d ever be a reporter,” she says. “I always believed I’d be able to use my education to work in TV. But not as a reporter.”
She underwent extensive and difficult rehabilitation followed by successful hand surgery to maximize her severely compromised manual dexterity. “It takes a full year to do and it is very painful,” she says. “It’s bad enough to have limited use of your hands when you’re paralyzed. But then to have one of your hands in a cast—well, you can imagine.”
When the scanners go quiet, the crews are dispatched, and beat calls to the medical examiner and police and fire dispatchers have been made and logged, there’s time for reflection. Pohland began contemplating how she could advance and where her disability would not be a limitation.
“I knew I could do something. I thought maybe I could direct [newscasts]. You don’t need manual dexterity or legs to direct. But once I got into the dispatch shack, I thought about the assignment desk.”
But apart from earning an interview with the assignment editor, simply getting to the interview confirmed Darcy’s worst fears about her viability in TV news. “There was no ramp leading to the raised area where the assignment editor’s office is,” Pohland explains, a rueful smile spreading across her face. “The assignment editor didn’t know how to get a wheelchair up a step, and he was struggling with the chair and I was almost falling out. And I was thinking, ‘Isn’t there another office in the building we could use?’”
But once a ramp was installed, Darcy settled in as an assignment desk assistant. Her days were spent fielding calls, charting the course of the news day, and generally assisting the assignment editors. Her bosses promoted her to planning editor, a position that gave Pohland the opportunity to take a longer view to story assignments in a world dominated by moment-to-moment reaction to news.
She liked working the desk and was content to stay in that position. But then she got a big break in a most unusual place—in church, during reporter Darryl Savage’s wedding. After Pohland delivered an inspired reading from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at Savage’s wedding, fellow guest and anchor Cindy Hilger asked Pohland why she wasn’t on the air.
“‘I don’t know,’ I remember telling Cindy,” says Pohland. “‘Why don’t you ask your husband?’”
Hilger’s husband is John Culliton, who was at that time the general manager of WCCO-TV. Not long after the wedding, Culliton and then-news-director John Lansing called Pohland into Lansing’s office and asked her if she’d be interested in becoming the community news reporter.
“At that time they were rotating reporters doing the community news segments,” says Pohland. “None of the reporters liked doing them, quite frankly. They wanted to do harder news. I didn’t even know if I could do it. I hadn’t done actual reporting since college. But I didn’t tell them that. I just said, ‘yes!’”
In 1996, Ted Canova was hired to replace Lansing as a news director and he promptly cancelled community news, liberating Pohland to become a general assignment reporter.
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Reader Comments:
Thank you for the great story and perspective on Darcy's challenges and accomplishments. This is a big loss to WCCO, the disabled community, journalism and Minnesota.