Don Alhart celebrates 50 years at Rochester ABC affiliate WHAM tonight.
He started at WROC in Rochester, N.Y. as a summer relief engineer in 1962. WHAM hired him two days after he graduated from Ithaca College on June 6, 1966.
The Democrat & Chronicle reports Alhart once interviewed for a job at WJLA in Washington, D.C., but didn’t get the job.
Alhart thought he interviewed well, but two years later got his answer as to why the offer went to someone else. Jonathan Murray, another former colleague who’d go on to become a reality TV pioneer with shows like MTV’s The Real World and another about some women named Kardashian, had spoken to the folks in D.C.
“The tone of all your interviews was that you really didn’t want the job,” Murray told Alhart. “You wanted to see if you could get (an offer), but didn’t really want it. They sensed that.”
Alhart thinks he knows why: “My heart has always been here,” he says in what is an iconic voice throughout the region.