The Last Don
Don Shelby is retiring—and he’s taking the golden age of television news with him.
SHELBY HAS BEEN feeding names to me since shortly after we first met for this story, and now there are more than two dozen. Sometimes they are just first names or last names and occasionally they are just nicknames. “Suggestions,” he calls them, people he thinks I should talk to about him, the co-anchor of WCCO-TV’s nightly newscasts and arguably one of the most recognizable names in Minnesota.
Sometimes he’ll hand the names to me in person, half a dozen at a time, scrawled on the business card of someone I take to be yet another suggestion. But generally the names arrive by e-mail, with something like an apology (subject line: “I can’t help myself”). They arrive almost daily, typed with a similar sense of urgency: no “dear” or “hello” and always just signed “Don.” They read like wire copy, ripped off the printer and read on the air: This just in.
The delivery of the names has by now become something more: a running commentary, a confessional. Along with the name of a friend, Shelby writes, “This is a part of the story I have yet to tell you: How hard it is for me to have friends, because I am always afraid that I will have to say something terrible about them on the news.” Along with the name of a nemesis: “He may not have very good things to say about me…. But I am a fearless bastard.”
One night, Shelby e-mails me with a suggestion he won’t name. He says he’d rather pass it along over a Silver Butter Knife Steak at Murray’s, the venerable restaurant and cocktail lounge in downtown Minneapolis, where the Murray brothers display a photograph of him near the entrance and always seat him at the same rear table.
“You ready?” Shelby asks, straightening his tie in the lobby and tugging at his French cuffs. In his right ear, I glimpse the tiny dot of an earring—invisible to his television audience—glinting under the chandeliers in odd contrast to his conservative coif, like misplaced punctuation. He seems to glow from within, likely because he is already wearing his television makeup. Shelby applies his makeup before he even leaves his house in the morning, so that the moment he steps outside he is no longer Don Shelby but Don Shelby, anchorman.
Shelby, at 62, is in many respects at the height of his powers. Since 1985, he has been the co-anchor of WCCO-TV’s 10 p.m. newscast, which in recent years has occasionally overtaken that of KARE-11, the perennial front-runner, to become the Twin Cities’ most-watched newscast. For his reporting, Shelby has won two Peabody Awards (often described as the broadcast equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize) and several national Emmy Awards. He has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists with the Distinguished Service Award for his contributions to the field and by the American Academy of Pediatrics for reporting on child-welfare issues. He has 2,535 friends on Facebook, and his MySpace profile features an illustration of him in the familiar abstracted style of President Barack Obama’s campaign posters.
Shelby earned $1 million a year until last winter, when he volunteered for a 10-percent cut from his radio salary to help WCCO trim costs. This places him among what is likely to be—in the face of an increasingly shrinking mass media—the final generation of highly paid anchors. Accordingly, he is “the last of a kind,” as a colleague of his put it: “a guy with a really big megaphone.”
As Shelby glides through Murray’s dining room to his table, a chorus rises behind him, whispers in his wake: “Shelby,” “Don Shelby,” “Shelby?” Whispered like supplications. If the anchor hears these murmurs, he doesn’t let on.
Comments may be edited for length, clarity, or appropriateness.