A Quote by Tom Brokaw
In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of $100 dollars a week because I didn't feel I could tell Meredith's doctor father I was making less.
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Finally, I told them I'd drop out of the management program if they'd give me an entry-level job in the newsroom for union wages, about fifty dollars a week.
I've never really had a real job. When I was young doing stand-up, I'd get 50 bucks a week here or 100 bucks a week there. You know, sometimes for headlining one of the rooms, or MC-ing, or something like that. So yeah, I've never had like a normal job.
You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.
It's weird because I once lost a job because I had a chemistry read with the lead actor, and I could tell we had negative chemistry. He was very lovely, but you could tell. We had the chemistry of two chairs.
I'd like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year?
I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days.
Getting into Sundance is a certain sort of passport to a level of anxiety I've never experienced, even having had a baby in the NICU for a week. For about ten minutes, you're a world-class director. Then you become an entry-level, harried, low level concierge with absolutely no juice.
One by one, all of my college buddies had taken these nothing-special entry-level jobs, pushing papers for $18,000 or $21,000 a year (and hating the work besides), and I'd turn up my nose and tell them I wasn't about to get out of bed for anything less than $50,000. That was my line, my attitude.
My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective.
As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he'd promised her, making the father angry?
I never would have been able to tithe the first million dollars I ever made if I had not tithed my first salary, which was $1.50 per week.
In some countries we have had the right to vote for less than 100 years, so the entry of women into political leadership has caused a tsunami.
I never, ever, had a person who could come up with the name of a person who could not get a job because an illegal immigrant had stepped in front of them, because it was either a job that person didn't want to do or didn't exist.
My father grew up in Levittown, L.I., in the first tract housing built for G.I.'s. His dad had stormed the beaches of Omaha and died when my father was very young. My dad had to raise himself, pretty much.
I knew that nobody could be on television week after week as themselves and exist for any length of time, because no one has that rich a personality.... So I knew that I had to create some characters.
Even if you had the wherewithal to embarrass a reporter, there was no mechanism to do it. And in most cases, you might as well save your breath because the reporter had no shame anyway.
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