Anchorman
June 29, 2008 10:30 pm

During my first week on my summer assignment, one of the parishioners of the Paulist parish St. Patrick’s took me out with him as he conducted his weekly run for the local Meals-On-Wheels program. It was a late Tuesday morning, but he wasn’t in a rush; he didn’t have to be at the station until later on in the day.
Joe Birch is the lead anchor for Channel 5 news in Memphis. When I asked him how he originally got into the field, he told me that after graduating from college in Memphis, he started working at the station and simply fell into it. It turns out that he spent his youth in New Jersey. Until that moment I had been struggling to put my finger on the nature of the grace and radiance that exuded from the man – once I learned he grew up in the Garden State like myself, all became clear.
In fact, he went further than that. “You know Tom, when I was younger what I really wanted to do was become a priest. I even spent a few years in the Junior Seminary…” An hour later, I had one of those “wisdom of the staircase” moments – my reply should have been, “That’s funny, when I was growing up I wanted to be an anchorman!” That would have been SO witty…
But I mention that exchange because yesterday I found myself in the role of a reporter, interviewing Joe on the Gibson 5k run that he founded 12 years ago and has to date raised almost five-hundred thousand dollars for the St. Patrick’s Community Center. The pastor of St. Pat’s has asked me to do a write-up of the event for the parish newsletter and possibly Paulist Today, the community newsletter. During the interview, I asked him about the moment he (and not the pastor) offered the blessing at the beginning of the race, with the teen to whom Joe serves as his “Big Brother” standing a few feet away, and I reminded him of his original career aspiration.
He told me that he did see himself as having a priesthood. “The one thing about my job is that because I’m a public figure, I get put into a lot of positions where I’m able to do a lot of good. It’s why I was able to get this race started 12 years ago. And I’m able to serve as the MC for all sorts of fund-raisers throughout town, not to mention bringing attention to some things going on that might not otherwise get attention.
“You know, things don’t always turn out the way that you think that they are going to, but if they’re the right thing they do happen.”
The reason I did not respond with my witticism when he first told me about his early priesthood aspirations was because it wasn’t quite true. Growing up, I wanted to be a filmmaker. But when he made that last comment, I thought of the fact that four days before, I had premiered my 18-minute film on the history of the Paulists, my own premiere as a filmmaker, and I knew what he meant.