More Than a Dish

This…

Is the Real Trish

By Greg Paeth

About noon on a Friday not too long ago, Channel 19 news anchor Tricia Macke had pulled on disposable plastic gloves, wrapped herself in a white apron and taken a position on the business side of the cafeteria line at Ruth Moyer Elementary School in Ft. Thomas, where parents are expected to volunteer for lunchroom duty at least once a month.
On this particular day, hundreds of Ruth Moyer pupils disclosed to Macke – on the record — whether they wanted carrots, bananas, apple cobbler or the seedless red grapes that bulged up from a colander that appeared to contain the entire annual production of a small village in Chile.
Based on her careful observations as about 250 pupils in the kindergarten through the fifth grade filed past, Macke felt confident to report that Ft. Thomas kids preferred grapes by a wide margin over the other options that were available on this particular Friday.
Many of the kids probably weren’t aware that the self-described “Grape Lady” is somewhat of a celebrity in Greater Cincinnati, where her name and face have been high-profile ever since she went to work about 15 years ago for WXIX, a Fox affiliate that debuted its first newscast in October of 1993.
If it had meant anything to the kids, Macke could have told them about reporting live in L.A. for WXIX and Fox News when – try as he might — O.J. just couldn’t get those gloves to fit. That she had been with the troops in Bosnia, and reported later from Israel and Germany.  That she had filed reports from Cape Canaveral when U.S. Senator John Glenn, 77, became the only Social Security recipient in space. That she had sloshed around in the Cincinnati sewers and reported from the tunnel that had been carved out for a Cincinnati subway system that was abandoned about 20 minutes after construction began.
Because being a responsible adult and a good Mom and role model are important to Macke, she probably wouldn’t say anything about modeling swimsuits and underwear or being the recipient earlier this year of the coveted “News Hottie Silver Flask” from WEBN-FM, a radio station that knows how to make a leer audible. She might also avoid mention of that whole cocktail waitress thing when she served a Margarita to Van Halen alum Sammy Hagar on stage at the Taft Theater.
Tall (5-10), slender, blond and tan with stunning blue eyes that appear to have been selected from a Teutonic color chart that’s available only in Bavaria, Macke comes across at Ruth Moyer Elementary as just another parent, devoid of any pretense or affectation, any notion that the Grape Lady is any more important than any of the other parents who were alongside her on the line dispensing slices of pizza, chicken fingers and small sacks of Baked Lays.
If Tricia Macke has any News Diva tendencies – any of that throw the script across the room while screaming about the idiots that inhabit the WXIX newsroom — she’s concealed them well.
Sitting near the starting point of the cafeteria line – near the abandoned Peanut Allergy Table where he’s picking at a plastic-bagged sandwich he brought from home – Ruth Moyer principal Jay Brewer said some of the kids are aware that Macke appears on television.
In the annual Kentucky Wax Museum program put on by the fourth grade class, kids dress up as famous figures who have played prominent roles in the Commonwealth’s history. “Every year one of the girls will decide to do Tricia because they know that they will be on the news – that she’ll bring a news crew to the school,” Brewer says.
Macke’s personal history goes back all of 40 years, growing up in blue collar Newport, where there’s a sometimes tangible friction between residents of the once notorious river city and the “cake eaters” on the hill in her adopted hometown of Ft. Thomas, where the jobs are white collar, the homes are bigger and newer, and the kids — like those at Ruth Moyer — are mostly well scrubbed and white.  Although she makes it clear that she’s deeply immersed in Ft. Thomas and its schools and the city’s almost palpable sense of genteel ambience, Macke suggests she sometimes feels a tinge of regret about abandoning her roots in Newport, where her parents still live. Her father Jack Uehlein installs carpet and her mother Sue runs a small upholstery business with some help from her husband.
Macke played basketball, volleyball and softball at Newport Catholic High School and fantasized about becoming the first female Harlem Globe Trotter. “That was what I really wanted to do, but I could never spin the ball very well,” she said with a laugh.
Her resume in the news business goes back to about 1990, when she was working her way through Northern Kentucky University (“I was on the five-year plan.”) in a program that was then known as “Radio, Television and Film” and later morphed into “Communications.”
After working as an unpaid student intern at WLW-AM, WCKY-AM and the predecessor of Insight Cable in Northern Kentucky, where she confesses to committing local news reporting that was world-class awful, Macke said she landed her first real job in the news business at WCKY, where she read and wrote the news and produced some of the live call-in shows.  “At the apex of my career in radio, I was making $6.50 an hour, so you had to do something else (to pay the bills),” Macke recalls.
That “something else” was modeling for the forerunners of Macy’s and Dillard’s, the defunct Van Leunen’s and All About Sports.
On one hand modeling provided a second source of income. On the other, it later emerged as the source of credibility issues when she moved from radio to TV, where she had to contend with what she described as the “bubbleheaded bleached blond” stereotype that plagues attractive young women who decide on a career in TV journalism.  It’s not the kind of issue that long-time Channel 9 anchor Al Schottelkotte or CBS commentator Eric Sevareid ever had to deal with.
As if they had been reading from the same script, Rick Bird, who has known Macke since she began her career, used that same “bubbleheaded” modifier when he talked about her career in Cincinnati.
“I was always impressed that she seemed to really want to learn the business,” said Bird, who first met her when she was an intern at WLW and he was a reporter on sister station WEBN. “ She was very diligent, competent and paid attention…I think those qualities worked well for her when she started for real at Channel 19.
“In a sense, I think her good looks can get in the way and obscure her competency. Sometimes women like her get put in the Don Henley “bubbleheaded bleach blonde” category, but I never sensed that was the case with Trish. She comes across as a very caring and smart broadcaster. I think the proof of that is in her staying power. At some point looks only take you so far. Real skills are needed for longevity,” said Bird, who wrote about radio and television in Cincinnati until The Cincinnati Post ceased publication at the end of 2007.
After graduating from NKU in 1992, Macke said she began a serious search for a job in TV news. “Then I pretty much started stalking television stations, and I talked to everybody in town and then I heard a rumor that Channel 19 was going to be going on the air with a newscast,” Macke recalls. “And I got hold of Lisa Kautz (now Lisa Slattery, who still works for the station). I got hold of Lisa and I would call her every day for maybe seven months. She was the assistant to the news director and I just wanted to get in.
“I finally got an interview after just stalking the station and I was hired freelance at the time because I didn’t have any real television experience,” Macke recalls. “But I was kind of one of those people who would come in even on my day off.  I’d work my radio shift, which started at 5 o’clock in the morning. I got off at noon and I would just show up. I just kind of like would show up at work and walk around the newsroom thinking maybe today’s the day I’ll get a story—maybe I’ll get a story, maybe I’ll get a story. Finally, I think they felt sorry for me and started sending me out on stuff because I wouldn’t go away.”
The vanity plate on her Miata – “Nuz2Me” is one reminder about her early days at Channel 19 News, which then had its offices and studio on Taconic Terrace in Woodlawn, which was, at best, a 20-minute drive to downtown, where the other three stations that produced news were more centrally located and could respond more quickly to breaking stories. “It was a joke back then when we would get to a story because we were so far up on 75 that if it was a fire, they were already repainting the place – it was like news to me that there was a story.”
She said her first “live shot” from the USS Nightmare – an old steamboat that’s transformed into a floating haunted house every year around Halloween – proved to be a personal nightmare. “I was stumbling — I was scared to death. When even members of your family say it was bad, it was bad,” Macke said.
After about six months as a freelancer for Channel 19, Macke said the Fox affiliate offered her a full-time job with the proviso that her modeling career would come to an end. “It (modeling) was kind of bleeding over in the Sunday paper,” Macke said.  “We’d be reading the Sunday paper finding out what our big stories are going to be on Sunday and there were like big ads of me, you know, of me in bras and underwear. I think that’s the reason why I got my job — to keep me out of the paper,” Macke said, laughing.
She said then Channel 19 general manager Stu Powell made it clear that for a station trying to establish credibility in a highly competitive news market, bras and panties were not, so to speak a good fit for serious journalists.
In the newsroom, some of Macke’s co-workers didn’t let her forget that her background had included modeling underwear rather than a doctorate from the Columbia School of Journalism. Once in a while, Macke said, one of those old newspaper ads – typically the ones that included the least flattering photos –- would wind up anonymously on her desk.
But Macke insists that she was able to convince her co-workers quickly that she was more than good hair. She said she proved her dedication to the craft through hard work.
“Hey, I want to be here 14 hours a day. I want to get all angles of this story. I want to find out why that kid died and let’s go around the neighborhood and find out.” Macke said as she summarized how she convinced co-workers that she was serious about the news business. “It didn’t take long to shake it. Now it might have been different for the public to shake it. But as far as the newsroom goes, it didn’t take long to shake it. I was always one of those hard worker types of people who love to put on a bullet proof vest and go on a drug bust with the cops, with the troops in Bosnia, or going in the sewers over in Cincinnati.”
“She’s worked hard for everything she’s gotten,” said
John Kiesewetter, the long-time radio and TV critic/reporter for The Enquirer. “She’s very real,” he said of her on-air style. “She’s more like a good neighbor, a good friend. Her on-air style is who she is.”
While some TV anchors and reporters might have a not-too-hidden agenda in which Cincinnati is just a temporary layover on their way to a major-market job in New York or Los Angeles, Macke seems perfectly content with her career at Channel 19.
“It’s not like she’s going to be like Andrea Mitchell and run off to cover the state department for NBC,” Kiesewetter said.
“She’s always upfront about being a mother and about her family and I think people can connect with her,” Kiesewetter said. “Her style and delivery fits nicely with Fox, where the news is more personality driven, where it has more of a morning show feel to it.”
It’s clear that her family is both a source of intense pride and gnawing “Mommy Guilt.”
She and her husband of 18 years, Chris Macke, a Newport attorney who specializes in patent law, live on a hillside at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Ft. Thomas in a sprawling California stucco that was originally built for former Channel 5 news anchor Norma Rashid.
The terraced back yard has a pool, a putting green, a basketball hoop and a trampoline for the kids, whose toys and bikes and playhouses make it clear that the patio and deck aren’t just for adults and their cocktail shakers.  The walls of her home and her desk at work are crowded with photos of the family – her husband and five Macke kids:  Saylor Blue, 2; Dash, 4; Piper, 7; Spence, 8, and Katlynn, 19, a freshman at NKU.
“The toughest thing is the juggling – getting everything done and the guilt of not being there when homework is being done and for all the soccer games,” said Macke, who sometimes slips home between the new 6 p.m. newscast and the flagship 10 p.m. newscast to help Chris give the kids their pre-bedtime baths.
Her schedule for a gloomy Sunday not long ago provided a glimpse of how a typical day might unfold. She was back and forth to the office/studio in Queensgate a couple of times, stood out in the rain as daughter Piper and the Moyer Mustangs soccer team won one in Ft. Thomas, co-hosted the Oktoberfest Chicken Dance on Fountain Square with former “Cheers” star George Wendt, and then was back in the office in time to submit to an interview and tweak the script for the Sunday night newscast, which she anchors solo.
When she’s not at the anchor desk for the 10 p.m. as she has been for the last 10 years, Macke is responsible for some reporting, some writing, some planning and an abundance of public appearances that are designed to drive home the point that Channel 19 loves Greater Cincinnati much more than its news rivals at channels 5, 9 and 12.
Her longest running volunteer relationship is with Cincinnati’s Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, where she has been an emcee for the annual celebrity waiters’ fundraiser for about 20 years. Over the years, she’s also worked with the Children’s Home of Cincinnati, the Women’s Crisis Center in Covington, the St. Luke Hospital Community Foundation, the Art Academy of Cincinnati Alumni Association, the Northern Kentucky University Alumni Association and a long list of other organizations.
Besides being a mother to four children who range in age from two to eight, she became mom to a teenager four years ago when she and Chris adopted Katlynn after her mother, Tricia’s sister Beth, died of cancer at the age of 39 in September of 2005.
“I don’t know if she asked or I offered to raise her daughter,” Macke recalls of a conversation with her sister. “It was kind of one of those things — she was in bed up at St. Luke’s and we had this conversation and we cried a lot and we hugged and then there was a little bit of a good time after we talked about it…It’s been a hard journey—especially the transition of going from being a really nice aunt to a mother figure. It’s kind of weird.”
“It was a heavy burden on my sister on what was going to happen to her,” said Macke, who said Katlynn’s father was no longer involved in his daughter’s life when Beth became ill.  “And my parents – God love ‘em— but it’s not like they could take on a 14-year old.  It took her a while to call me mom,” Macke said of her relationship with Katlynn.
Macke said it didn’t take her and Beth long to decide that of all the family members, Tricia and Chris were in the best position to care for Katlynn.  To a degree, their ability to support Katlynn is based on Tricia’s long-running position at Channel 19, where she’s moved up the on-air ladder from reporter to weekend anchor to morning anchor and finally to prime time evening anchor.
Early this year, less than 10 days after Channel 19 announced that long-time anchor Jack Atherton and the station were parting company, Channel 19 announced that Macke, who had co-anchored with Atherton since 1999, had been signed to a multi-year contract.
“Tricia is an important part of the franchise and we’ve always seen her as one of the most popular anchors in town,” said news director Steven Ackermann, who’s been in the TV news business for 27 years and is quick to point out that his 10 p.m. broadcast is one of the highest rated prime time newscasts in the country. During the last major ratings showdown of the 2008-09 TV season, more than 62,000 households – better than 10 percent of every home where a TV was in use — tuned in for the 10 p.m. news on Channel 19.  That 10 p.m. rating was better than the 11 p.m. numbers for WLWT news but trailed both channels 9 and 12.
“What we hear time and again from viewers – whether it’s from callers or an e-mail – is that when they turn on the TV and see Tricia, this is someone they can relate to. The ability to connect with viewers is so important. And believe me, you can’t teach that. I’ve tried.”