What she did: News anchor at Ch. 12, 1976-78 and at Ch. 4, 1979-2003.
What she’s doing now: Homemaker. Volunteers on boards of Episcopal Children’s Services and the Schultz Center, writes and cooks.
“It surprises me how often I’m still recognized even though I’ve been off the air for five years,” is one of the impressions Deborah Gianoulis-Heald has of her very active “retirement.”
Jacksonville television news viewers got used to her being a part of their daily lives beginning in 1976, when she went to work as a reporter at Ch. 12. She not only got a job at the former WFGA-TV, it’s also where she met her future husband, David Heald. After two years reporting North Florida’s news, Gianoulis and Heald were married and the next day the couple headed to England, where David enrolled at the City University of London as a Rotary Foundation International Exchange Student.
While her husband worked on his master’s degree in journalism, she spent the year as a freelance journalist and then one day got a call from the general manager at Ch. 4 in Jacksonville.
“He said he wanted to talk to me and David about coming to work at the station. He even flew to London to interview us,” she recalled. “We also interviewed at Ch. 12 when we got back but Ch. 4 was owned by the Washington Post, it was a CBS affiliate and the number-one news station in town.”
That job started Gianoulis-Heald on a path that would last almost 25 years at the station. Joined by co-anchor Tom Wills, meteorologist George Winterling and Sam Kouvaris with sports, the Ch. 4’s on-air news team had been together longer than any other local television news team in America by the time she retired from the anchor desk in 2003, .
Gianoulis-Heald said the best part of her job in television news was “being able to tell people’s stories by listening and understanding their relationships.” She also has stories to tell about the evolution of broadcast news, especially the technology.
“Tom Wills and I still like to tell the story about how Ch. 4 was the pilot program for Post-Newsweek stations to switch over to computers. We kept our old manual typewriters under our desks for 10 years because we knew the computers could go down at any time but we had to write the news scripts,” she said.
Over the years, Gianoulis-Heald’s personal life changed including two children, and her job changed in that the focus of television news took a different direction than it had when she started at Ch. 12. The combination of changes led her to a big decision.
“What did it for me in the business was the 24-hour news cycle. I had to put storytelling aside to always answer the ‘hot subject’ whether it was a murder or a scandal or where the yellow tape was up today. It was time for me to let somebody else have that job,” she said, then added, “Even before that point, I had negotiated for a reduction in pay so I could get off the 11 o’clock news because I wanted to be able to spend more time with my children while they grew up.
“The news director told me I would fade away (from the public’s awareness) if I got off the No. 1 spot, but thank goodness that hasn’t happened.”
Gianoulis-Heald stayed with the station for a year after she was last seen on the air doing personal appearances and public-service assignments. She also spent some time as an independent producer of documentaries but soon discovered, “It was 90 percent raising money and 10 percent the part I actually wanted to do.”
That realization led to a retirement career — husband David has a real estate investment business — focused on making a contribution to a couple of issues she discovered while being a reporter: education, particularly early learning, and how the family structure affects a child’s chances in life.
“As I covered the public schools, what became clear to me was how unprepared so many children are when they enter school,” she said.
“I also watched some of my fellow reporters struggle with child care. They couldn’t find quality care they could afford. I even had friends leave the news business because they couldn’t find proper child care.”
One of the stories Gianoulis-Heald discovered as a reporter was Episcopal Children’s Services. She volunteered with the organization for the last five years of her career in television and is now on its board. She also serves on the board at the Schultz Center and will help host the Sulzbacher Center’s fundraising transformation event at the Florida Theatre on Sept. 18.
“What I’ve been able to do in my retirement is focus on one particular need: what is in the best interests of our children? If America is going to continue to be the land of opportunity, we have to support our children and our families,” said Gianoulis-Heald.
“Everybody has to live their life the way it works for them. For me it was my children. Now that they are grown, I can see how their solid family foundation and their education launched them out into the world. I’m very happy that now I can work for all the children, not just mine.”