![]() Their second, Chandler, arrived six years after that.īy then, Janet had made the jump over to WSOC, where she was re-teamed with Mayes and also went on to become the first face of “Family Focus,” a segment related to family and childhood development that was designed to tie into community-service projects. “But Janet troopered through that newscast, through the pain, and when the newscast was over she left,” Garrison said, laughing, “and went and had a baby” - Brett, the oldest of their two sons. Really?’ At that time, my wife Becky and I had two kids and Janet said, ‘I’m think I’m gonna call Becky.’ So, from the set, she called my wife and was like, ‘OK, here’s what I’m feeling,’ and my wife was like, ‘Yup, you’re in labor.’ “I was anchoring a newscast with her,” recalled Mark Garrison, today a reporter for Charlotte radio station WBT, “and she looked at me during one of the film stories that was on and said, ‘I think I’m labor.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa. They were married before the end of the year. “I would have to go to bed,” he said, “then wake back up and pick her up after she was done with the 11 o’clock news for our dates.” (Turns out he had a good excuse he had been babysitting for the couple that had set them up, and they were running late getting back to spell him before his date.)īill recalled being “a little starstruck” at first, and that their courtship was as unusual as their first meeting. “And she said, ‘There something I need to know here?’” Bill recalled this week. When she opened her front door to greet him upon his arrival to pick her up, Bill was standing next to a stroller with an 18-month-old child in it. The night she went into labor while on-airĬharlotte is also where England hung her hat, permanently, after meeting Bill England in August 1980 on a blind date that got off to an unusual start: From left, the others are: Beatrice Thompson, Cullen Ferguson, Bob Inman, Doug Mayes and Larry Sprinkle. Janet England, at right, poses with a group of Charlotte TV news legends in 2002. She left not long after, for a job at a station in Richmond, Virginia.īut she headed one state south in 1977, and Charlotte is where she made a name for herself - initially by co-anchoring opposite WBTV legends like Doug Mayes (who died in 2015) and Bob Inman, who this week called England “a stickler for getting things right.” “How am I supposed to be perceived as credible?,” England remembered thinking, in a 2005 interview with The Charlotte Observer.Įngland wound up with a black mark in her personnel file. When management instructed her to wear a cocktail dress to a party that clients would be attending, she balked. She was young (just 22) and in the minority (the only female reporter on staff), but she wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself. A revered former broadcaster for both WBTV and WSOC, she was 72.īorn in Brooklyn, New York, raised in Marion and Roanoke, Virginia, and schooled in communications at James Madison University, England launched her journalism career in 1973 at a Roanoke TV station.
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