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A Life In The Camera's Eye

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By WALT BELCHER | The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 25, 2007

Bob Hite: Sailing On Special Report

TAMPA Bob Hite's last day as an anchor at WFLA, Channel 8, is Wednesday.
His Apollo Beach home has been sold. His wife, Bonnie, already is at their remote mountain home in Colorado. The nearest town is Durango in southwest Colorado.

Not long after he signs off and attends a farewell party, he'll be flying west.

"I'm off to put on my spurs and chaps, get on a horse and play what my wife calls cowboys and idiots — with me being the idiot," he joked during a recent interview.

Hite literally sailed into Tampa Bay 30 years ago on a vintage wooden ketch named Kinship.

"I'm not giving up the water," he says. "There is a river on my land in Colorado, and I can fly back and charter a boat to be on, in and under the water here."

To anchor at the same station for three decades is an achievement. Only a handful of TV anchors in this country have even made it to two decades.

During his 30 years at Channel 8, Hite has been a weekend anchor, a nautical news expert, a roving feature reporter and a weekday anchor. And, since 1985, he has been teamed with co-anchor Gayle Sierens on the station's 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts.

They have dominated the ratings since 1995.

He will be missed, says WFLA News Director Don North.

"Losing an anchor that has been at a station for 30 years can't be a good thing," North says. "He wouldn't have been here 30 years if viewers didn't like him and trust him."
North says the station has confidence in Hite's replacement, Keith Cate, who has been with the station for eight years.

Hite had hoped to sail out gracefully, but in recent weeks, his private life has made news.
On Tuesday night, Early Wednesday morning, Hite was arrested and charged with driving under the influence. He apologized to viewers and said he was ashamed and sorry. He said he felt like "the ultimate hypocrite."

Three weeks ago, Hite's 28-year-old estranged son, Tyler Hite, of Apollo Beach, was arrested and charged with domestic battery following an alleged altercation with a live-in girlfriend.
Hite, who says he doesn't have a relationship with his son, declined to talk about Tyler, his son from a previous marriage.

Public reaction on TBO.com to Hite's DUI arrest has been mostly sympathetic.

And though he's leaving Channel 8, he's not giving up journalism. At age 60, he wants to devote more time to his Kinship Productions.

Voice-over work, nature and nautical reports, documentaries, even another trip to Iraq could be in his future.

"I hope to do some freelance stories for Channel 8," he says. "I want to get away from the anchor desk while I am still able to do that kind of work."

Decision To Sail South
In the dead of winter in 1977, Bob Hite was working at WPVI-TV in Philadelphia. His beloved wooden ketch, Kinship, was 2 1/2 two-and-a-half hours away, frozen in 19 inches of ice on the Chesapeake Bay.

"I'd been sent out one February night to do one of the first live shots with this new live equipment," he recalls. "We parked our live truck in the median on the Schuylkill Expressway, which we used to call the Sure-kill."

Pelted by snow and freezing rain, standing in six inches of slush in 8-degree weather, Hite was reporting from the median with cars skidding around him.

The news director was so excited about being able to go live, he kept going to Hite for updates throughout the entire newscast.

After Hite got back to the station, as he was peeling the microphone from his hands, the phone rang. A news director at WFLA, Channel 8, offered him a job as an anchor.

Yes, he would be willing to leave the fourth-largest market and take a pay cut, but only if he could live on the water, he says.

"I found a 1-year-old, four-bedroom house in Apollo Beach for $52,000. You couldn't build a boat dock on the Chesapeake for that," he says.

His friends thought he was crazy for taking a "giant backward career step." "But it's worked out great," he notes. "Working here I have been able to experience all I ever wanted to do as a reporter or as a person — except space flight."

Tying Up In Tampa
When Hite finally sailed to Tampa and pulled up to his dock, a fresh-faced young woman sent by the TV station was there to catch his line — Gayle Sierens.

"I was 22 years old and had been with the station all of six months," Sierens recalls. "And like everyone else in the newsroom, I wanted to meet this tall, handsome, hotshot reporter from the big-city market who was coming here."

She says he turned out to be a "special person." She recalls that when she first saw him, she was impressed by his take-charge bravado. "I continue to be impressed," she says.

"Our lives have intertwined for three decades," she says. "It's hard to imagine what it will be like without him. It's going to be hard. He has been a fun partner. We joke that we have spent more time with each other than with our spouses. Those kinds of match-ups don't always happen in this business.'
Hite says he will miss co-anchor Sierens. "I love her like a sister," he says. "We are great pals. I have a lot of respect for her as a wife and mother and co-worker. I call her super woman. She is a full-time mother and full-time reporter, and neither family nor job has suffered."

Hite recalls the birth of each of her Sierens' children and the nights he and everyone in the newsroom were counting the contractions.

"She always worked as long as she could," he says. "She was a cheerleader in college, and she's still a cheerleader for the newsroom. She is so great for our morale."

His Journalistic Roots
Hite grew up on Long Island in New York but spent many summers at Lemon Bay in Manasota Key, where his grandparents had homesteaded since the 1940s.

He also grew up listening to his father, Bob Hite Sr., a CBS radio announcer on national broadcasts of programs such as "The Green Hornet" and "The Lone Ranger."

With uncanny accuracy, Hite can recall his father's memorable lines: "A fiery horse with the speed of light! A cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-Yo, Silver! The Lone Ranger!"

Hite's father, who died at age 86 in 2000, also worked for CBS News during World War II, reading news reports from correspondents. He met Walter Cronkite, and the two men and their families became close friends. Hite remembers sailing on Long Island Sound one day when Cronkite's bigger, 46-foot yacht, "Wyntje," came by, and an impromptu race started.

With little effort, Hite, with just his dog on board, managed to keep the Kinship ahead of Cronkite's boat with an eight-man crew. Cronkite would later be a guest at Hite's wedding. They have remained friends over the years.

Hite says he was a terrible student in school. "Photography was about the only thing at which I excelled," he says. "Photography became my whole focus, other than girls."

He started learning how to use a 35 mm camera when he was 10 years old. By age 12, he had his own darkroom and was shooting film on his father's Bolex 16 mm newsreel camera. He took photographs on for the school newspaper.

When he Hite went into the Marine Corps in 1967, he became a military photojournalist. Stationed in Beaufort, S.C., he was part of a unit responsible for compiling and editing video material from Vietnam and distributing it to newspapers and TV stations in the South.

"That solidified my career as a photojournalist," he says. "After I left the Marines, I worked as a marine salvage diver, a radio announcer and an industrial filmmaker before I started working in television.

"Being an anchorman in a top market like New York was meaningless to me," he says. "I was not in love with the business. I was in love with the craft."

A Singing Reporter
When Hite was a teenager, he took an interest in folk music. He learned to play the guitar and harmonica. Music was easy for him. Melodies and lyrics just popped into his head.

This came in handy in Philly when an assignment went awry. Hite says he was sent to cover the burial of a dog after the station got a tip that a wealthy woman was spending $35,000 on the funeral.

But he was sent to the wrong cemetery. There was just a one old man who was burying his dog. He says he tried to talk the news director out of doing the story but was told to bring back something or don't come back. Hite says he composed some lyrics about the pet cemetery, set them to music, and the first of his "singing reports" was born.

The musical Hite reports were popular in Philadelphia and in Tampa, where, in addition to anchoring the news, he traveled the Tampa Bay area profiling people and places for "8 Country."
Hite's "8 Country" reports were so popular that they were compiled into half-hour specials that aired on Sundays against CBS' "60 Minutes."

"In the 10 months that we were on, the ratings kept climbing," he recalls. "I am told there were even '8 Country' watching parties. It was popular because it was all good news."

His Legacy
Looking back over his career, Hite is most proud of his stories about the local Tampa Bay area troops serving in Iraq and stories about the environment and Tampa Bay.

He shares Emmys with his sister, Cindy Hite, a voice artist and radio personality in West Palm Beach, for "Kingdom of the Sea," an 1989 environmental special produced by Hite that aired in 1989. Cindy wrote the music and lyrics for it.

Among Hite's favorite investigative stories is a 1983 exposé of cracks in the concrete supports in a span of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. The span had just been constructed to replace a portion that was knocked down by a phosphate freighter. The state eventually had to patch the cracks to stop seawater from seeping in and destroying the foundation.

Another memorable environmental story involved an investigation of the Coast Guard dumping old batteries into the Bay next to about 135 navigational lights. Eventually, nearly 2,000 batteries about the size used in cars were brought up and shipped to an out-of-state hazardous waste landfill.
One Another of Hite's favorite stories was his discovery of plans to bring down some of the pillars on the old Skyway bridge. That would have resulted in a potentially dangerous hazard to ships passing under the bridgebeneath.

"The plans called for bringing the pillars down to 32 feet below the water line," he said. "But I had been diving there, and I measured the depth of the pillars to be at least 38 feet. That would have left a massive stretch of concrete sticking up in the channel under the bridge. It could have ripped up the hulls of ships."

He said officials didn't believe him at first but, eventually, the state had to spend an additional $10 million to level the pillars.

"The best stories for me have always been about making things right or people who are trying to make the world a better place," he says. "I want to do more of those kinds of stories. Anchoring the news gets to you after a while because the crime and the level of violence and depravity wear you down. I won't miss that."

Bill Ratliff, another veteran WFLA anchor, says he is sorry to see Hite leave. Ratliff and Hite co-anchored the 6 and 11 p.m. news for almost a year until management decided there had to be a male-female team.

Ratliff was replaced by Sierens. "We were all such good friends that I was happy for Gayle and Bob," Ratliff says "And Bob and Gayle were sad for me. Bob was the first to call and console me. But it all worked out for all of us.

"Bob became a fixture and he's a unique individual, a one-of-a-kind anchor, who did it his way."

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