Sandy Hill (television personality) Biography

Sandra Marth Hill (born February 2, 1946) is an American television journalist; she is also a writer and commercial real estate broker.

Sandy Hill (television personality) Age

Sandra Marth Hill is an American television journalist; she is also a writer and commercial real estate broker. She was born on February 2, 1947, in Centralia, WA. She is 72 years old as of 2019

Sandy Hill (television personality) Early life

Born Sandra Lee Marth in Centralia, Washington, she was raised on a farm there. Her father, John Marth, helped build the local Lutheran church. She was heavily involved with music and the church from an early age. She was smart and studious, graduating from Centralia High School near the top of her class.

However, she was a self-proclaimed social outcast. That did not stop her from being crowned Miss Lewis County in 1965 and Miss Washington in 1966. She attended the University of Washington in Seattle on scholarship, where she studied Spanish and joined Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.

After college, Hill worked in human resources as an employment recruiter for Seattle First National Bank in Seattle, where she met Craig Hill, a junior banker at the time; the two married in 1969.

Sandy Hill (television personality) News career

In the 1960s, women were virtually nonexistent in television news, with the exception of the occasional “weather girl.” Hill had intended on going into international relations. By happenstance, Hill and her husband saw a newspaper advertisement looking for a women’s editor on a local TV station. She applied and got the job three weeks later.

Hill began her career on air in 1969, by hosting a midday interview and news show on KIRO, the CBS affiliate in Seattle. Soon she doubled on the local evening news as a “street” reporter.

She earned a devoted following in the Pacific Northwest. During her tenure at KIRO, she won multiple local Emmy Awards for broadcasting; locals also still remember her for hosting the Big Money Movie in the afternoon.

Because of her success in Seattle, Hill was approached to co-anchor at CBS owned-and-operated KNXT (now KCBS-TV) in Los Angeles in 1974. When she accepted that position, she became the first female anchor in Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, due to poor results from a focus group, she and a number of her fellow anchors were dismissed from KNXT in 1976. She immediately received an offer from the ABC owned-and-operated station KABC.

Shortly after joining ABC, Hill was offered a national spot to join David Hartman as co-host of Good Morning America, where she debuted on April 25, 1977, as a replacement for Nancy Dussault.

The format of the show was primarily driven by studio interviews in New York City led by Hartman, however, Hill successfully sought out her own interviews to conduct in the field. In 1980, Hill was replaced in the studio by Joan Lunden, but briefly stayed on GMA as a feature reporter; she went on to work for ABC Sports and Wide World of Sports.

In 1982, Hill was asked by CBS to return to KNXT in Los Angeles as an anchor for the 4:30 p.m. news. In 1986, she was dismissed again by the station (which had changed its call letters to KCBS two years earlier), to the disappointment of her fans. However, she returned as the co-host of CBS Morning News later that year.

In 1988, she started with Home on ABC. She also worked with the British government to create a travelog for Britain that eventually aired on PBS. In 1994, she made a cameo appearance playing a fictional version of herself in the opening minutes of the science fiction film Without Warning, which was formatted as a simulated news broadcast.

Sandy Hill (television personality) Image

Sandy Hill (television personality) Personal life

Along with her husband and son, Hill returned to their home state of Washington. She is a hobbyist author but won the Literary Contest held by PNWA for her book, Dance While the Moon Shines.

The book is a tribute to her family and their moonshining roots. Her husband and son continue to encourage Sandy to write her own story as one of the first women in television news.

Sandy Hill (television personality) Husband

Facing Each Other: “Today’s” Jane Pauley and “GMA’S Sandy Hill

The Washington Star, 1978: NEW YORK — Jane Pauley sits erect on a couch in her office. Very slim, girlish in a cotton dress, her long blonde Alice-in-Wonderland hair pinned back at the sides, she is dutifully responsive but wary; so controlled she is at times cryptic.

Unexpectedly, the nervy confidence she projects as a regular on NBC’s “Today” show seems a little crumbly around the edges.

It has been just two years since Pauley, “at a tender age and with limited experience,” in the words of “Today” host Tom Brokaw, joined the early news and feature show, following on the heels if not in the footsteps of Barbara Walters.

When Walters left NBC’s “Today” for ABC in 1976, to become the first woman anchor of a network nightly news broadcast, Brokaw, NBC’s White House correspondent was named as her successor.

Pauley, barely 26, with little more than two years local television news experience, was given the №2 spot after a summer of tryouts during which she won out over five others — among them NBC’s top drawer female talent. “She was so good, we were all stunned,” says Paul Friedman, “Today’s” executive producer.

When Pauley left WMAQ-TV, where for a year she had been Chicago’s first anchorwoman, television critics there sent her off with hoots — of jealous pique. Pauley was heading for one of the two most lush network jobs for women, at a reported salary of $200,000.

The negative reaction then and other put-downs in the media since (US Magazine recently wrote her off completely), many explain Pauley’s uneasy calm when she’s on the wrong end of an interview. But as Tom Brokaw also says warmly, “Jane’s adjusted remarkably well.”

Meeting Sandy Hill, Pauley’s counterpart on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” is another surprise. She’s not the sugar-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth Girl Friday who introduces other “regulars” and who hovers near butcher Merle Ellis, as he explains how to cut meat with the grain; she’s a tiger.

But a year-and-a-half ago, after a nine-year local television news experience, Hill, 31, was hired — without a talent hunt — as David Hartman’s handmaiden. And she’s adopted.

“Good Morning America’s” executive producer, George Merlis, notes, with understatement, “David dominates the show.” Hartman, an actor-turned-host, is described by a competitor as “the most popular personality on television.” Although “GMA” is just three years old — to “Today’s” 30 years — it has nearly closed the rating gap between the shows.

The programs are similar — with their diet of news, weather, features, celebrity interviews and emphasis on consumerism but, as their producers explain, they come from different directions.“Today” is news-oriented; “GMA,” is a “people” show. These differences also account for the less-than-subtle differences in the roles of the two women.

Shortly after a recent “GMA” program, Hill has shed her dress for a pair of white jeans and a shirt, the kind of clothes that go with her own personality. Every Friday, “someone from Bloomingdale’s” brings over a bundle of clothes her — size 10 — and she selects the things she’ll wear during the week; dresses if she’s in the studio.

She’s vibrant, chatty, full of nervous energy, twisting off three rings and two hoop earrings, tossing them on the desk, tossing her angular body about, sometimes hoisting her legs on her desk, other times plunking both feet on the ground, leaning forward hands on her knees asking you questions.

“I’d hate to have to interview myself on the air,” she says laughing. “I’m not a good interview.” She’s wrong. It doesn’t take five minutes to find out she’s smart, informed and — with a few exceptions when she’s allowed to get her teeth into a touchy on-air piece — vastly overqualified.

Critics everywhere have noted in Jane Pauley similarities to Barbara Walters because of her blonde good looks and her crisp, businesslike style, but the resemblance is superficial. Walters is a hard news journalist with a reputation for getting difficult interviews and conducting them with news-making results.

Interviewing, Friedman admits readily, “was Jane’s week point; she tried too hard the first year but now she’s getting better and better.” She is, but for the time being, at least, Pauley’s test of a good interview is whether she’s made the subject “accessible” to the viewer. “For me, each guest is simply an information opportunity.”

Her most memorable interview didn’t even occur on “Today.” It was when she was with WMAQ and went to a hospital to talk to a dying teenager, a boy who had been shot because he’d had the courage to testify against an assailant. “It was personally meaningful. It was a tug at the heart. And that is the way it was received.”

Pauley says now she’s in her element when she’s traveling with “Today.” “It’s the most important thing we do. We can show a foreign country as well as anyone,” she says, describing her recent trip to Mexico. “That’s when I feel in top form.” Friedman describes her appeal as “the red light reflex. When the camera goes on, she responds to it, she talks to it as if she was talking to just one person.”

Much closer to the Barbara Walters mold is Sandy Hill, who unabashedly cites Walters as her role model. If this is hard to discern, it is because Hill has, at the most, five interviews a week, usually with tepid guests, sometimes with “GMA” fashion “commentator,” model Cheryl Tiegs, who is as animated and informative as a Barbie Doll.

Hill has to make her own opportunities for important interviews by going “off into the field” on weekends, the only time she can be spared.

Not only does that make for what she calls “hellacious” weeks, but it also is not the sort of thing she can do often, even if she wanted to. “We don’t want to wear her out,” says Merlis, who describes her as “like a ray of sunshine starting your day. I love her.” (Hartman calls Hill “bright, enthusiastic, terrific.”)

The interviews where she shows her stuff are sometimes what she calls “borderline tacky because they’re so fragile in terms of good taste. You just have to exercise so much judgment.”

Two of these were “jailhouse” interviews. During her interview with President Carter’s nephew, William Carter Spann, she found him so open and vulnerable she says she had to walk a fine line between being overprotective and exploitative.

As it was, Spann was so outspoken about his family — “my mother (Gloria Carter Spann) cut me off just like that when I was 12 years old” — that the interview was quoted widely in the press.

That kind of interview is so rare for Sandy Hill that even if you’re a fairly regular “GMA” viewer, you may have missed it. You may also have missed the prison interview Hill did in April with Manson family member Charles “Tex” Watson, the born-again Christian who told her — and she believes it is the first time he made the admission — that he is the one who committed all the Tate murders.

At that crucial point, the dialogue was quiet, terse: “Did you do it all?” “Yes.” “Everyone?” “Yes, everyone.” Charles Manson, Watson told Hill, was “my idol, my god.” With her persistent, penetrating questions, Hill evoked not only drama but an atmosphere in that interview. The evil emanations were palpable.

But the Sandy Hill locked in a jail cell with Tex Watson is not the Sandy Hill “GMA” audiences perceive. She is, as George Merlis, says, “one of the members of the family surrounding David Hartman.”

These include Erma Bombeck, the comic homemaker, Rona Barrett, the Hollywood hatchet lady, as well as the butcher, the lawyer (F. Lee Daily), the investigative journalist (Jack Anderson) and the doctor (Timothy Johnson). As to where she ranks among them, Merlis says, “some are more equal than others.”

Paul Friedman uses the same cliche to classify Jane Pauley’s role on “Today.” He thinks the NBC publicists use the term “panelist” for both Pauley and resident critic Gene Shalit. “I don’t know what the hell she’s called,” Friedman says, “She’s not called co-host but in my mind, that’s what she is.”

Unlike Sandy Hill, who always has a guest co-host if she has to fill in for a vacationing David Hartman, Pauley hosts “Today” alone when Brokaw cannot. And perhaps because Brokaw is a journalist and not a show business personality like Hartman, his attitude toward Pauley is that of one professional equal to another.

Pauley does nearly as many interviews a week as Brokaw, as well as two 2-minute essays on any subject of her choosing each week (Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 8:12). “Four minutes of network time all for my self,” gloats Pauley, smiling, “That’s power!”

It is. But she isn’t using it to overthrow the government — or even stir up the young and restless. Her commentaries are, for the most part, clever but inoffensive — the decline of hard liquor drinkers, the hypocrisy of criticism of the new scantily dressed professional football cheerleaders: “Football players have been padding their parts for years. Why not just admit the game’s all for show anyway?”

There’s the occasional political essay — she is particularly proud of the one she did on the plight of the Cambodian people — which may, in part, reflect the company she keeps.

Now nearly 28, she’s been going with the comic strip artist/satirist Garry Trudeau for a year-and-a-half, a fact she admits with a wry grin. It is hardly a secret. Brokaw has kidded her about it, live, before millions. Will they marry? Will she marry? “Marriage is a condition I assume I’ll have,” she says, slowly.

“Decidedly I want to get married. As to whom I marry, that’s a more difficult question,” she adds, enigmatically. And children? “Sometimes when I think nest-y, I look around and see the job and wonder if it’s possible.”

Sandy Hill’s been married for 10 years to a businessman who changed his career to industrial real estate developer when they moved here from Los Angeles.

Hill, who was the first woman to anchor the early news show there — on KNXT-TV — was working as a news reporter for ABC’s station KABC-TV when she was tapped for “GMA.” She, too, has given some serious thought to the possibility of having children — “Thanks to amniocentesis, I have a longer time to make up my mind.”

Although Hill has no complaints about her position on “GMA,” she says, thoughtfully, “I love news a great deal. I loved my job as a reporter. It probably was the best job I ever had.” Now she gets her kicks doing “in-the-field” interviews and stories.

“That’s where I expend most of my energy — setting them up, writing them, editing them.” She’s pragmatic about her relatively limited opportunity. “Would I have all this access on local television?”

Has Sandy Hill ever met Jane Pauley? Hill beams, put her hands on her hips and says, “I’ve been meaning to call her and ask her to lunch. Why don’t you ask both of us to lunch together, that would be a good story.” The next day, the suggestion is made to Pauley, who looks appalled. “I would like to meet her, but I wouldn’t want our first contact to be an on-the-record lunch.”