Anchor Babies
John Brown of KSPR Springfield 33 and his family
John Brown, a news anchor at KSPR 33, acts like he’s got it made. A career in the spotlight, yes, but much more importantly, a wonderful wife, Teresa, and a cute-as-a-button daughter named Lauren–his and Teresa’s first child.
“She’s with me all morning.” says John. “We go the park, we go to the gym. We have a little lunch. She’s active, always in a good. It’s kind of great, all the time.”
Lauren and John have birthdays just a day apart; hers is November 11; his, November 12. “If you do the math,” John says mischievously, “that works out to Valentine’s Day.”
Working in the media, of course, comes with extra challenges as far as balancing a demanding career with personal and family life. John, who does a radio show in the morning from home, is lucky in this regard: he gets to work with Lauren, right there with him.
“When she lets out a yell,” he says, “the people listening to the show love it. They get a kick out of it.”
Teresa, a psychologist at the Forest Institute Professional Psychology, does the balancing act, too. “I’ve redone my schedule,” she says. Teresa goes into the office from 8 a.m. to noon, then works from home in the afternoons while John is at the TV station.
The Browns, as a young family, are still setting up Christmas traditions. “He always had to work on Christmas,” says Teresa. ‘The past couple of years, he hasn’t.”
John recalls one year when the producers called him as he and Teresa were coming back from a family holiday gathering. They had forgot to schedule an anchor for the Christmas Day evening newscast. John went in and delivered the news.
This year, the couple is looking forward to Lauren’s second Christmas. Teresa’s family, had been pretty eager for John and Teresa to have their first child. “The demand was that we have a baby by this Christmas,” Teresa remembers. Teresa’s family loves babies.
“Teresa has a big family,” says John, “and when we walk in the door Lauren disappears a wonderful for an hour. It’s nice to sit down.”
Sitting down, it turns out, is one of those simple pleasures that the Browns have come to “We appreciate more after Lauren’s birth than they did before.
“I could just fall asleep right now,” says John. “This is what I do all day now. I used to Lauren and John have birthdays just a day hit three or four newspapers a day and a apart: bunch of Internet sites. Now I watch Clifford the Big Red Dog and Arthur.”
“Never say never,” Teresa remarks. “I said I’d only feed Lauren in the high chair. Well, last week I was giving her Cheerios down here on the floor.”
“I am Mr. Mom now,” says John, who had prepared warm sugar cookies and specialty flavored coffee for a small group of visiting magazine journalists.
Speaking of journalism, Lauren Brown is “the perfect media baby,” according to John. Whenever she’s with him at the station, she’s the picture of calm-very desirable in the news business. John has a photo of Lauren sitting on his lap at the station, while he’s typing in his scripts ahead of a newscast. “When people bust out the cameras and the lights, she gets so calm. She sat right beside me and didn’t say a word for 10 minutes while I was doing radio news cut-ins.”
It’s a special TV variation on the life of new parents.
“We don’t go out so much,” says Teresa.”When we do, we don’t take it for granted.”
“When we go out, we live pretty large,” says John.
“Sleep,” says Teresa, “You learn to live without it. You learn you won’t get it back.”
“Lauren doesn’t care if it was a busy news night,” observes John. “On Monday Night Football one night, the Cowboys and Giants went overtime. The news runs after the game. We got off the news at 1:05 a.m. The whole time, I’m thinking, somebody kick a field goal so I can go home and go to bed.”
417 Magazine, September 1999
