About 10 years ago, Dan Reed invited a few friends over to his parents’ farm for a campout on a super-hot summer day. The group spent the afternoon outdoors, fishing and tubing before unrolling sleeping bags in the evening, picking guitars and relaxing in a field as clouds obscured the stars.
Later that night, Reed’s father stepped out onto the front porch and told everybody that a big storm was brewing and that they should come inside.
When Robin Reed tells you a storm is coming, you’d better listen.
“It looks like a powerful front is coming this way from out of the northwest,” he said, speaking in the same calm, reassuring voice familiar to anyone who ever watched Reed’s weather forecasts on WDBJ. He stood on the porch as if stationed in front of a weather map, and made a sweeping motion with his arm to urge people to come indoors.
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That was June 29, 2012.
“The day of the derecho,” Dan Reed said, recalling the strange, destructive windstorm that poured down out of the northwest, just like Robin Reed said it would, and caused extensive damage across western Virginia.
“Even at home, he was the meteorologist dad,” Dan Reed said.
Soon, Robin Reed will sign off the air, as his retirement ends one of the longest broadcast careers in Roanoke television history. Reed, who spent 35 years as chief meteorologist and weatherman at WDBJ-TV (Channel 7) before settling into a co-anchor chair on the 6 p.m. newscast for the past five years, leaves local television on Friday, when he and co-anchor Jean Jadhon broadcast live from Roanoke’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
He’ll retire to his 11-acre farm in Botetourt County, where he and his wife, Teresa, will raise pumpkins, watermelons and other crops, and where he will make homemade wine when not tooling around the grassy fields on a John Deere tractor. He will also continue to teach broadcasting-related classes at Virginia Tech, where he has taught for several years.
“It’s been a great run,” Reed said during a recent interview at WDBJ’s studios just off Hershberger Road. “The people who live here have been very kind.”
Through 40 years of broadcasting, Reed has seen a technical and cultural revolution in local television broadcasting. When he started, most viewers received analog TV signals over the air, through antennas mounted on rooftops, and they received just a few local channels. The 6 p.m. newscast was appointment viewing for hundreds of thousands of viewers in the Roanoke-Lynchburg market, who’d watch the evening news over dinner before the national network news aired.
Now, WDBJ carries across several digital channels, and viewers have hundreds of TV choices and myriad channels for news, information, sports and weather. Local newscasts don’t draw the same number of eyeballs as they used to. Reporters are asked to do more, shooting their own video and posting news online, as technology changed the way news was presented and ownership eliminated jobs that included news videographers.
Yet through all the changes, Reed was a constant presence on WDBJ. When the station endured an unspeakable tragedy in 2015 when two Channel 7 staffers were murdered during a live broadcast, he and colleagues persevered and kept reporting the news. Two years later, the station turned to him again to steady the ship.
“Robin represents the best of Channel 7 over the last 40 years,” said Joe Dashiell, who has been a reporter at the station since 1980.
“It will be strange to be in a newsroom without Robin,” said Jadhon, a 30-year news anchor who has co-anchored with Reed the last five years.
“He’s such a steady force in the newsroom. He’s the calm among the chaos.”
From sports to weather
Reed, 67, walked through the spacious broadcast facility where WDBJ has operated since 2002. Reporters worked at desks, editing video on computers and piecing together stories. Giant flatscreen monitors occupy the wall of the control room, where directors and producers watched a local news broadcast and followed the news script on a computer screen.
When Reed first arrived at WDBJ from Harrisonburg in 1982, the studio was housed in a cozy, wood-paneled building on Colonial Avenue next to Towers Shopping Center (in fact, the shopping center’s name comes from the transmission towers that still stand nearby). He came to Roanoke to do weekend weather before quickly moving to the weeknight job. In those days, he wrote temperatures in magic marker and stuck weather decals on a plexiglass map. If you wanted to know the temperature in Norfolk, you had to call the airport there for the official reading.
Technology changed all that.
Twenty years ago, more than a dozen people worked a 6 p.m. newscast — newscasters, camera operators, floor managers, engineers and others. Now, thanks to technological advancements such as directors maneuvering cameras with a joystick in a control room, only a handful of staff is needed.
“When I came here, it took 20 people to make that picture go,” he said, pointing toward a screen.
He remembered Friday nights when the crew that handled the popular “Friday Football Extra” high school football wrap-up show was so large that the lobby would be filled with pizza and other food to feed the multitude.
“Now, three people get it all done,” he said. “It’s a different dynamic.”
Reed didn’t start out as a weatherman or a news anchor or even as a television broadcaster. Growing up in Vienna, in Fairfax County, Reed was into sports and loved playing baseball. His father worked for the federal government, which meant that the family often lived overseas. During a stay in Australia in the early 1970s, a teenage Reed worked at a radio station housed inside a trailer, where a broadcaster asked him to read American sports scores on-air.
“My boss did a sports show and he thought it would be cool for me to read American sports scores with my American accent and he’d read the Aussie scores,” Reed recalled. “From that point, I was fascinated with how much could be done in such a small space with so few buttons. I loved every second of it.”
Back in the United States, he attended James Madison University, where he did play-by-play radio broadcasts for the Dukes baseball team on the college’s new public radio station, WMRA-AM. His partner was Rich Murray, later the longtime sports information director at the University of Virginia.
After college, he worked for WKYY-AM in Amherst, a small station where he did a little bit of everything, including working as program director and a disc jockey. As a student, he had interned at Harrisonburg TV station WHSV, which soon called him when a sportscasting job opened.
It was there while doing sports that his career forecast changed.
One evening shortly before a newscast, the woman who handled the weather called to say she would miss the program because of another commitment. It turned out that she worked as a real estate agent on the side and she had a house showing she could not miss.
“Everybody at HSV had these side hustles,” Reed said, noting that the news anchor also sold insurance.
Initially, both Reed and the news anchor refused to do the weather. Reed lost the argument and was pressed into weather duty.
According to Reed, WDBJ’s veteran weatherman Hal Grant happened to catch Reed’s weather-casting debut. Grant, who was about to retire, told his Channel 7 bosses about a young guy in Harrisonburg. “I think we can get him cheap,” Grant told them.
Deeper learning
Soon, Reed’s face was everywhere in Roanoke.
“We’d be driving on 581 and there was dad’s mug on a billboard,” recalled Dan Reed, who inherited his father’s appreciation for climate-related issues and is associate director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
WDBJ’s 6 p.m. newscast was regularly watched in more than 150,000 households at its peak, more than double the newscasts on WSLS-TV (Channel 10) and WSET-TV (Channel 13) combined. Television personalities are probably the closest thing Roanoke has to celebrities, so Reed’s popularity grew over the years.
His and wife Teresa’s sons attended Roanoke County Public Schools, where teachers and friends knew their famous father.
“It could be a little weird,” Dan said. “Especially on the days when my friends would say, ‘Your dad said it was going to snow and it didn’t snow!’ Fortunately, nobody beat us up.”
Growing up, both Reed sons, Patrick and Dan, remembered that Robin always made time for family, even by leaving the station between the 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts to have dinner at their home in Roanoke County’s Oak Grove neighborhood.
“At home, he was just dad,” said Patrick, who works as director of strategic communications at Radford University. “He’d come home, ask about our day. It was his way to disconnect, and he taught me how to compartmentalize and focus on family. He was involved in [Boy] Scouts and was always part of outdoor trips. When my brother and I played in the band in high school, he’d always be there to catch the halftime show. Then, about 8:30 or so, every night, he’d start getting ready for the 11 o’clock show.”
The fact that he frequently was voted Sexiest Man in Roanoke by readers of Roanoker Magazine earned him much grief from family members. Teresa asked him if she should frame the magazine covers that bore his mustachioed countenance and hang them in the bathroom. His sons and wife say he remained humble even as the recognition increased.
“He’s always been the same guy in person that you see on television,” Teresa said, echoing a familiar sentiment repeated by many friends and colleagues.
Reed typified what could be called the “WDBJ Way” when it came to broadcasting. For years, generations even, the Channel 7 newscast comprised a calm, plainspoken, serious approach to the news.
In an age before stations realized they needed more diverse voices to tell the region’s stories, WDBJ was dominated by a mostly male team, and the broadcasts were short on flash, splashy graphics and over-the-top reporting. The anchor teams usually stayed with the company for many years, with anchor Keith Humphry, sportscasters John Kernan, Mike Stevens and Roy Stanley — and Reed — being staples of longevity.
In the early years, Reed said, management frowned upon even minor changes in a broadcaster’s look, even if it came to a change in glasses, shirt choices or, in Reed’s case, his trademark mustache. Although grayer than it used to be, the mustache is still a big part of his look.
“We always thought it was just an Alex Trebek thing,” Dan said.
Things were changing in broadcasting, though, especially with weather reporting. Once a job held by veteran, affable broadcasters who spoke well but didn’t know an Alberta clipper from El Nino, weather forecasting became a serious part of the news, with licensed meteorologists moving into the field.
Reed said that Roanoke’s massive flood of 1985 prompted him to get more serious about forecasting and become a meteorologist. In the pre-internet era, he enrolled in correspondence classes and took exams at Virginia Western Community College.
“If I was going to be an honest broadcaster, I needed to know the craft if I was going to stand there and profess it,” Reed said. “If I was going to be a good reporter, I needed to know the facts. I had to make a decision to go learn meteorology or go do something else. I didn’t want to do anything else. The longer I stayed in it, the more I became fascinated by the science.”
He urged management to purchase computers that would help with accumulating information and improve forecasting. Soon, he was leading a team of meteorologists, some of whom would go on to work in larger TV markets, the National Hurricane Center and other meteorological institutions.
Reed has supported science education in the Roanoke Valley by helping conduct programs for the Science Museum of Western Virginia, as well as teaching meteorology classes.
Teaching became a passion, as he became a professor at Virginia Tech, where he currently teaches classes in broadcast performance and multimedia journalism. He said that few of his students know much about local television these days.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve been told, ‘My grandmother thinks you’re the best,’” Reed said with a chuckle.
“A steadying influence”
The worst day in WDBJ history was Aug. 26, 2015.
Reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were shot and killed, and chamber of commerce leader Vickie Gardner was seriously wounded during a live broadcast by a former Channel 7 employee who had been fired two years earlier. The shootings, which happened during a remote interview from a retail complex near Smith Mountain Lake, shook the station and brought a legion of national media to Roanoke to cover the story.
Network satellite trucks jammed the road and parking lots next to WDBJ’s headquarters for days.
Many of Channel 7’s current staff was not at the station in 2015, yet Reed said that the “unspeakable horror” of that day still lingers.
“We just tried to get through it,” he said. “We remain damaged by it.”
A year and half later, Channel 7 co-anchor Chris Hurst, who had been in a romantic relationship with Parker, decided to run for a House of Delegates seat. When news of Hurst’s impending candidacy broke, WDBJ needed an immediate replacement and turned to Reed.
By 2017, 35 years into his Channel 7 career, Reed had already contemplated retirement. Becoming a news anchor was a challenge. Instead of speaking extemporaneously for a few minutes in front of a green screen, he read news from a teleprompter, asked questions of reporters and stuck to a tightly scripted newscast.
“That greater structure was something I didn’t have before,” Reed said. “Up until then, the only thing I ever heard from the control room was, ‘Wrap.’ When I got in the newsroom, it was a much different machine. Here I am, coming behind people who are really good reporters, and trying to be the face of the building.”
He was the right person for that role, colleagues say.
“Robin, being in the anchor’s chair and anchoring with Jean, was a real steadying influence during a challenging time,” Dashiell said. “He’s been a steadying influence his whole career. He’s the consummate professional. Completely unflappable.”
Down on the farm
He and Teresa have been planning their farm life for years. The couple, who met when both worked at the Harrisonburg television station, plan to grow crops and maintain a fish pond that Reed has stocked with bluegill, perch, bluegill and catfish.
“It’s his Zen place,” Patrick Reed said.
Reed plans to work with the Virginia Farm Bureau’s Roanoke County branch, advising farmers about effects of the changing climate on crops. He notes that his own pumpkin crop ripens about three weeks earlier than normal due to a warming climate, which also increases the number of diseases and pests farmers deal with.
“I have the ability to enhance the discussion about climate because of my background and be a good farmers’ advocate for change,” he said. “And we will have to change.”
He will continue to teach at Virginia Tech. Freed from his on-camera responsibilities, could friends expect a change in appearance? Does the mustache stay or go? Maybe it’s time for a goatee? Reed won’t say.
His son thinks it’s time to put down the razor.
“Maybe he’ll go full David Letterman,” Dan said.
Teresa, who likes to claim that she and her husband “are the most boring people,” said to watch out for Robin Reed not on the news, but on a tractor.
“He wants to ride off into the sunset,” Teresa said.