Linda Ellerbee, the longtime network correspondent and anchor who wrote a bestseller about her life in TV, “And So It Goes,” will retire from television later this month. “It’s really nice to be one of the few who walks away from television news on their own time and of their own choice and I’m really lucky in that,” Ellerbee told the Associated Press. “That really didn’t happen for so many of my contemporaries, didn’t happen because of age or cutbacks in news…I go smiling.”
Ellerbee rose from local news in Houston and New York to anchor NBC News Overnight with Lloyd Dobyns. In 1983, she talked about becoming a very un-glamorous news anchor in an interview with People Magazine:
“I never had any desire to be an anchor, because of the air-head image for women,” she says in her smoky Texas lilt. “You’ll see a lot of people on air who look like they blow-dry their teeth. I’d prefer being behind the camera just writing, if it paid as well.”
Advertisement
She was cut by NBC after her book became a bestseller, and she began a 25-year run working at Nick News, where she won awards for tackling serious topics for an audience of kids.
“I can hold my head up, look in the mirror and I didn’t have to be ashamed of anything I ever did or wrote,” she said. “I fought some battles and I won some and lost some. But I get to walk out the door and look back feeling good about it.”
Ellerbee will retire, she says, after Nickelodeon airs a one-hour special dedicated to her work, set to air on Dec. 15.