On Her Trail My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News' First Woman Star

Chapter One There were many Nancy Dickersons. I'll start with the first one I knew. On July 5, 1968, Mom started the day at Saks Fifth Avenue before the store opened. Three times a week she arrived with the morning shift for her appointment with Mr. Eivind, the Norwegian hairdresser. She said hello to the ladies arranging the compacts at the makeup counter. She knew them well. After Mr. Eivind had shaped and set her brunette hair, Mom raced in her blue Mustang convertible -- the top up to keep the freshly done work intact -- and pulled into the NBC studios by 8:00. She had been repeatedly named among the best coiffed women in America for a reason. She was disciplined. She would have two hours to write her script and prepare the stories she would deliver onThe News with Nancy Dickerson, from 10:20 to 10:25, the first NBC newscast anchored by a woman. She sifted through the Friday papers. On the front page of theNew York Timeswas a story about a Dallas bar that had refused to serve an African diplomat because he was black. Alec Rose completed a 354-day sail around the world. The wires were reporting that Allied ground forces found three major caches of enemy munitions as they swept the provinces around Saigon. By 9:00 she started typing out her script. Her long nails made almost as much noise as the typewriter keys. By 10:00 her colleagues could hear her practicing to the ping of her regulation NBC stopwatch as it switched on and off. Twenty-four hours later I was born. Dad was in Fort Lauderdale closing a business deal so my eighteen-year-old about-to-be-half sister Elizabeth had to drive Mom to the hospital. Dad took the first flight he could find and arrived just before the blessed event. Mom was 41. Viewers were shocked when they heard thattheNancy Dickerson, whom they had just been watching, had given birth. They had seen her every day and weren't aware she was pregnant. She and her bosses at NBC had stuffed me under the desk, careful always to shoot her from the chest up. Any signs of pregnancy or blatant womanhood would distract viewers from the news. In the summer of '68 Mom was in the middle of covering the presidential race, and so my birth was reported in that context. "What's in a Name," read the headline of aWashington Postitem. "Lyndon Hubert Eugene Richard Ronald Nelson seemed like a nice name to NBC's Nancy Dickerson, who was looking for something safe to call her son. Now she thinks it's just as well that she and her husband decided to call him John Frederick instead. 'Because,' she said with a sigh, 'we never even thought of Spiro.'" Three weeks after I was born, Mom was in Miami covering the Republican convention. That confused viewers even more.Didn't she just give birth?She had, but she gave up on her experiment with breastfeeding and went off to cover the story. Nancy and Wyatt Dickerson, my father, were leading an exciting life. Mom was not only one of the country's most famous newscasters, she was a celebrity. Dad was the CEO of a successful conglomerate. His company, Liberty Equities, developed real estate and owned businesses that manufactured everything from industrial pipe to processed foods. A butler polished the leather in their Rolls-Royce and they flew off for beach weekends in a private plane. They lived in a very big house and their liquor was excellent. In Miami, Dad stayed in their apartment at the exclusive Palm Bay Club while his superstar wife stayed in grungier digs with her press colleagues. In the pictures from this era, my parents appear in conspicuously hip clothing -- Dad wore turtlenecks with his blazer and looked like the Man from U.N.C.L.E.; Mom wore minis and pink lipstick. Their lingo matched the fashion of the times. "Come on upstairs. The party in 4-A is really swinging," Wyatt Dickerson is quoted as saying in aWomen's Wear DailyartiDickerson, John is the author of 'On Her Trail My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News' First Woman Star', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743287838 and ISBN 0743287835.