Highly verbal, highly tactile and always in search of his next riff, longtime WJZ reporter Richard Sher is relaxing between bites while sitting on the balcony of the Cross Keys Donna's when he swivels to a young server, touches her on the arm, and asks her age.
"Twenty-one," she replies.
"Ah," he says, looking back at his dining companion for effect, "so you were minus 4 when I started at 'JZ."
Indeed, Monday marked Sher's 25th anniversary at the CBS-owned Channel 13, a lifetime in the high-churn world of television news. Plenty of others have been in the business longer than the 58-year-old Sher, a native of Northwest Baltimore. Few have stayed at the same station that long.
In that stretch, Sher has covered stories spanning the tragic to the trite, sometimes in consecutive pieces. He is described by his colleagues as a total pro and a complete ham, sometimes in consecutive breaths.
Some people find him too acerbic, but he knows from local television. And this is a slightly bittersweet anniversary for Sher, one of Barry Levinson's original diner guys. After college, he became a radio DJ and later a news director then joined WJZ in 1975 as a reporter.
Since then, he has served as a weekend and evening news anchor; as host for "People Are Talking," a syndicated Baltimore-based morning talk show that earned the first following for his co-host, Oprah Winfrey; and as the host for 18 years of "Square Off," a Saturday evening public affairs show. More recently, he led "Hard Look," a regular segment on people affected by stories in the news. Now, he's a reporter again.
Sher remembers it all: There was the convicted killer who used to write him weekly critiques from death row about "Square Off." And Angelena Richardson, the 7-year-old girl who was shot four times and seriously wounded when two feuding thugs broke into her neighbor's house where she was playing. And the woman whose life was saved when she had a heart attack in a bus outside a fire station that had one of the city fire department's eight automatic external defibrillators.
"My stories don't end at 6:15," once the pieces are broadcast, Sher says. "There are people from years and years ago who still call me - I really like that."
When reporting on the woman with the heart attack, Sher asked what would have happened had she been stricken somewhere else. The response came: Without the defibrillator, she probably would have died. So he secured a donation of $146,000 to purchase defibrillators for every city fire truck and fire engine, a move credited with saving several lives. "He took this on himself," said Fire Battalion Chief Hector L. Torres.
