Don Decker, a former news director at WRGB and WTEN in Albany, died Monday at his home in Rotterdam, N.Y. He was 79. Friends and former colleagues recalled working with Decker in The Daily Gazette:
Liz Bishop, longtime anchor at WRGB, said Decker had the ability to see a “hidden light” in the people he hired. She was one of those hires, joining WRGB in the mid-1970s.
“He never gave up on people,” Bishop said. “I look back on myself and say I was just a kid doing weekend sports and there weren’t any women doing that. It was tough, it was hard, all these guys who didn’t want a woman delivering their sports news or writing angry letters. The potential was there for Don to say, ‘You know, I don’t know, this may be offending or annoying more people. It may not be working.’ But he never did that. He gave me time to learn the business, he gave me time to get good. He believed in me, and because he believed in me, I made it. … He invested so much in the people he hired. They weren’t just employees, they were his friends, they were his family, his TV family.”
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