Loss of a Legend

A few weeks ago when my former colleague Bruce Johnson’s book came out I took the opportunity to reach out.

Bruce Johnson and I met when I was a floor director at WUSA9. He was the weekend evening anchor and I was a floor director working nights and weekends running teleprompter and loading ticket headlines as a part of my big break.

It was a job I could only afford thanks to the then-boyfriend who was letting me live in our million-dollar-row home in NW D.C. nearly free. It was a dream job, that I’d gotten by emailing the Executive Producer a bullet-point list of the skills I possessed that he was hiring for and it represented my first job in the ever-hard to break into television news industry.

“If the CBS affiliate will let me in the front door,” I recall telling my mom at the time. “I will never leave.”

Working aside local news legends like Bruce, Lesli Foster and Andrea McCarren, I felt, finally like I’d made it into the career I wanted to have for a lifetime.

What was special about Bruce was how he treated people, even after the cameras stopped rolling. You can tell everything about on-camera talent by the way they act when they’re not live.

As a floor director, the one who signals to them the difference between when the cameras are rolling or not, you get to know very well which personas are turning it on for the cameras and which are not. That was the thing about Bruce. It was never an act for him. He was always on. Whether he was grilling the weekend sports anchor over the latest Redskins disaster ahead of the sports segment and shooting the shit with me during commercial breaks, he genuinely cared about every person and the stories they held inside.

When I reached out to congratulate Bruce on the release of his latest book, Deep Waters, he responded by asking me whether I was still fostering dogs. That’s the kind of guy Bruce was. “I always thought that was something so special about you,” he recalled.

I decided not to fill him in on how I’d graduated to co-parenting Jax and instead we chatted about book promotions.

As always, Bruce treated me like a friend, not some girl decades behind him in her career. I told him I’d mention Deep Waters to Anna. At the very least, I’d planned, I’d do a review of it for Amazon and my blog.

Somewhere in the boxes of my currently in-motion life, my copy of Deep Waters sits dog-eared with various pages I wanted to highlight in my review.

And this is what I started writing:

If you asked anyone in Washington, DC whether they know Bruce Johnson, they’d tell you of course they know who Bruce is! They LOVE Bruce! Bruce, the badass reporter known for his fearlessness and swagger, is the epitome of what a local news journalist needs to be: trustworthy, tenacious and an unapologetically raucous fan of all his home town's sports teams. What viewers don’t know about, is the incredible person Bruce is, aside from being on TV. In his new book, Surviving Deep Waters, Johnson digs deep (omg I know, sorry I couldn’t help myself) and opens himself up in a triumphantly vulnerable book that the legendary anchor should be as proud of as his illustrious career.

To know Bruce Johnson was to know a D.C. dynamo, who despite his superstar status took the time to get to know you and support you and your dreams regardless of what they were.

In the time since news of his passing broke late Sunday evening, colleagues from across the news world have been sharing memories of Bruce and time and time again they mention how he went above and beyond to nurture their careers.

It’s amazing is to see where all these former Bruce disciples are now.

Some are still in local news dominating. Others have become National Correspondents for major networks. Others have left the news world and found happiness in industries where the hours aren’t 3 p.m.-whenever the 11 p.m. news is done.

But the reality is this, we’re all somewhere better than we would have been because Bruce took the time to help us get there.

I have my own Bruce Johnson story from when he took me under his wing. It was about six months into my time as a production assistant and while I still loved the job, I was eager for my new big journalism opportunity.

Politico’s fellowship application had just opened and I’d asked Bruce to write me a letter of recommendation for the program.

I’d been so nervous to ask him, I hadn’t told him any of the specifics of what the program was or why exactly I was interested in it. I’d just emailed him the link to the fellowship and told him it would mean the world to me if he’d be willing to write me a letter of recommendation.

Then I’d proceeded to have a panic attack over who I thought I was, having the nerve to ask THE Bruce Johnson to write me a letter of recommendation.

My heart rate was still elevated when I saw a DC number I hadn’t recognized flash up on my phone.

“Hello,” I hesitated, this was back in the day when I still answered numbers I didn’t recognize. Just in case they were CBS telling me to grab my go-bag because I was there new on-air talent being flown to the middle-east to begin my career as a terrorism correspondent.

“Amanda, Bruce Johnson here,” he’d said, in his usual no-nonsense tone. “I got your email, I’m happy to write you a letter of recommendation, but I need you to tell me more.”

“What do you want me to say about you… just that you’re great?”

That was Bruce.

He was going to do whatever it took to help you reach your dreams, but he wasn’t going to do it for you.

I ended up not applying for the Politico Fellowship, reminding myself how grateful I was to even be in the WUSA9 newsroom in any capacity. I took advantage of the weekend shifts to start learning how to MMJ, with Bruce's help of course. He'd let Omar and I borrow his own personal set of camera equipment, the two of us taking turns meeting one another at some random parking lot in Greenbelt to hand it off between us on our odd days off. On weekends we'd bring in what we had and in-between recording voiceovers for the 11 p.m. news and rewriting every script he'd read on-air, Bruce would sit with us and deliver carefully honed critiques to help us grow.

Having read Surviving Deep Waters I finally began to understand, that Bruce wasn't tough on us because he didn’t want us to succeed.

It was because he’d tasted for himself the sweetness that was a battle hard fought and won.

He wanted every aspiring journalist he touched to feel the satisfaction of knowing they’d made it to the prime of their career because they’d fought tooth and nail for that success.

Just like he did.

With all the beautiful tributes pouring in for Bruce from across the social sphere today, it felt wrong to leave this one unpublished.

Rest in power, Bruce. You will be so missed.