Holy Tweet! Gloria Campos says she’s hanging up her Teleprompter after 30 years in television news.
March 7 marks her final newscast at Channel 8.
Campos, 59, was the Metroplex’s first Hispanic news anchor, and she’s delivered her nightly spiel with an efficient, pleasant grace.
I still enjoy watching her banter with sportscaster Dale Hansen. And on a personal level, I’ve enjoyed all the dining experiences Campos and I have shared over the years.
Okay, we had lunch together once.
This was in 2000, and American Airlines Center was still being built. I was at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Dallas bureau. The AAC brass invited local media types to come look at the model for the soon-to-be-built luxury suites, and to taste the various gourmet entrees that would be prepared by award-winning chefs for suite owners.
Since my typical lunch consisted of soft tacos and barracho beans at a nearby El Pollo Loco, I bravely accepted the assignment.
Sure enough, the suite was luxurious. Beautiful, mouth-watering steaks, seafood, breads, and dips beckoned from linen-covered tables.
I grabbed a plate, filled it to overflowing, and then added more. I briefly considered pulling a Ratso Rizzo ala Midnight Cowboy and stuffing my pockets with steaks for later. (In the movie, a partygoer asks Rizzo why he’s stealing food that’s free. “If it’s free then I ain’t stealing,” he replies.)
My plate of food’s sheer weight, vertical height, and unstable nature required me to find the nearest table and sit down before the whole thing came crashing to the floor.
I’d just begun stuffing my pie hole when Campos sat down beside me.
I burst out laughing.
Her plate, as I recall, consisted of one piece of sushi and three sprigs of broccoli.
“How can you pass by all that great food and not get more than that?” I asked, truly perplexed.
TV adds weight to a body, and people who appear on the tube regularly learn to curb their appetites, a concept wholly foreign in the realm of print and radio.
My plate would have nourished a village in Honduras. Hers wouldn’t satisfy a gerbil.
So there we were, a rotund yin and svelte yang. Me an ink-stained wretch smelling like a bordello ashtray, she a well-dressed, immaculately coiffed, perfectly made-up face meant to shine under the bright lights.
We had a great time. We joked about the disparities in our plates, discussed the differences between print and TV news, talked about the weather, sports, whatever. She was a lot of fun.
And after she quits in a couple of weeks, she’ll be able to pile more food on her plate.
Jeff,
You should take a lesson from this writer about colorful detail-filled story telling.
Especially like, “… beckoned from linen-covered tables.”
This guy knows how to put you there…
I had to squeeze a lot of juice out of a tiny grape since, in essence, the anecdote is “me and Gloria Campos ate lunch at a press thing years ago.”
The TV news desk covers up a lot of hip and tummy lard. Only the weather girls and sports commentators are fully exposed. Mike Snyder was pretty “unsvelte” below the lower rib cage,as I recall. I wish that they would bring Jane Mcgarry back.