All Out by Kevin Newman

All Out by Kevin Newman

Author:Kevin Newman [Newman, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-81389-3
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2015-10-06T04:00:00+00:00


When I’d agreed to host GMA, I’d known I’d be working around the clock for at least the first couple of years. But I’d underestimated, hugely, the distance the job would put between me and my family. We still lived modestly, in the same house, and the neighbours didn’t treat me any differently. But the gulf between how I actually felt, and the strength and confidence I was trying to project, was getting wider every day. My career was exploding in a uniquely public fashion; the hurt and embarrassment were so deep, and the effort I needed to make in order to deny my own emotional reality was so strenuous, that I had very little left for my family. Even when I was present, part of me wasn’t really there.

I saw an opportunity to make it up to Alex, at least, when the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn, was given the chance to do so again on the space shuttle Discovery. Alex and I shared a passion for space and science fiction, and GMA had plans to broadcast Glenn’s October 1998 launch live from Cape Canaveral. I asked for a pass so Alex could join me in Florida, and the producers readily agreed. We shared a flight down, and on arrival the lead producer had arranged a surprise: we stopped en route to the Cape at the studios of Nickelodeon TV—Alex’s favourite station—for a VIP tour. He got to watch shows being filmed and dip his hand in the famous green slime before climbing into a limousine and heading for the tiny spit of land where rocket ships have been launched since the dawn of the space age. We were both kids that day, climbing into simulators, gasping in awe at the size of the Saturn rockets lining the road.

The next day, with a Shuttle simulator right behind us, I was joined by two of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, the guys with the “right stuff,” Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra, for GMA’s coverage. I was able to call on a depth of knowledge I’d been accumulating since I was Alex’s age, but something even more important happened that day. Those guys I shared the stage with had been my boyhood heroes, and Alex was there to be introduced to them. How many men get to introduce their son to their own heroes? Especially astronauts?

That bright moment couldn’t last, though. On my return to New York I reached out to Charlie Gibson, the only other person I knew who might understand the price GMA extracted from a father and husband. He had raised a marvellous family not far from where we lived in New Jersey, and had had his own rough start at Good Morning America. The senior producer of the broadcast at that time had confided in me that Charlie had been a regular visitor in his office, uncertain about whether he was really a good fit for the format. The producer had advised him to give



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