Luzis' husband doesn't believe she is psychic. I know she is.
Luzis answers the phones in the newsroom. She has an incredibly hard job. She listens to people calling in with tips, and with complaints and with suggestions and she listens to reporters who are impatient and cameramen who want something immediately and she remembers everyone's extention and consoles people calling in with problems that they should take to their politicians but instead call a tv newsroom.
That is along sentence. Like her job, it never ends.
She does one other thing. She helps find me stories, magically.
Usually I rely on the story god, and sometime lucky rocks that one cameraman carries for me. But when all else fails, I call Luzis.
"Cross your fingers," I say.
"Trouble again?" she says.
Get daily National news
"Big time. It is late, I have nothing, I need your help."
She crosses them. And a short time later I find something. Like today with the two women who were united following tragedy in world war II. It is a nice story and you can see it if you click on video at the top of the main web site page.
But the story behind the story is cameraman John McCarron and I could find nothing. We looked here and there and underneath that. Nothing.
"Call Luzis," he says.
He knows the secret.
I call.
"Okay," she says, but please call me back after you find something.
Once I forgot to call her and she walked home with her fingers crossed. Her husband wanted to know why. He had a hard time believing. But belive me, it is true. It works.
Luzis is answering the phones with her fingers crossed when Karl Avesjall, the supremely wise editor, walks by Luzis' desk and asks if she has arthritis.
"No, I have McCardell."
"Oh," he says. He understands. He has deal with me pondering for half an hour on what to say at the end of a story when he says, 'why don't you say…….'" Then I say that, and he is right. Why didn't he say it earlier instead of making me wait, I wonder.
Anyway, Luzis crosses her fingers, and five minutes later there are the woman who become the story.
That's how it works.
And to her husband, Denis. Yes, your wife is psychic. Be careful.
Mike
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.