Chauncey howell biography

First, those Dodger rascals desert Brooklyn; then, the legendary Times Square cabbies lose their garrulous affability, and finally, even the mayoral “How’m I doin’?” runs out of charm. But something of the natural, quirky singularity that used to be New York remains in the person of Chauncey Howell, a willing and most genuine idiosyncrat who has planted a foothold on the collective affections of Manhattan, not to mention the Bronx, and Staten Island, too.

With an eye for the unfamiliar (or for the familiar made new) and his WABC television cameraman by his side, Howell trucks through the metropolitan boroughs and beyond to cover essentially undercovered chunks of New York life for Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News.” (His segments air between 5 and 6 p.m. most weekdays).

The three-minute vignettes are actually little movies. Howell first selects the subjects, then writes, produces and presents them. They can range from an everyday sort of feature on a museum’s shrunken head exhibit, to a piece on a once-derelict Greenwich Village street groomed to bloom with pear trees, to a silly-sided tribute, sung by its townspeople, of a village in neighboring West Chester County as set to a Rossini overture (“Muh-muh-muh- MAR-aneck, Muh-muh-muh-MAR-aneck . . .” you know the tune). That one made it to the parent network screen of “Good Morning America” and netted him a New York Emmy award.

This tall, jaunty boulevardier, this dapper original who has been described as a non-homespun Charles Kuralt, this gentleman of weighty intellect (Amherst ’57, with a major in Greek) who gets down cheek to jowl with the common folk and loves nothing more than to hear a robust “Yo, Chaun- ceeeee . . . ” hollered by a burly stranger on a produce truck, this quintessential New Yorker with the love of all language and especially “Noo- Yahkese” is not an indigenous quantity at all.

Howell is a native and product of Easton, where his late father was once a prominent lawyer and where he returns fairly often because he loves it still and could see himself retreating there for good one day. If that seems surprising, given the scope of acceptance awarded him by the historically hard-bitten Big Apple, you might want to remember that it’s probably not wise to pigeonhole this particular medley: Tom Wolfe, H.L. Mencken, Noel Coward, earnest imp and master dialectologist all rolled into a practicing one-of-a- kind.

He is as apt to speak pridefully of the Dylan Thomas Award given to him and his family of Welsh antecedents by the St. David Society last year as to launch into a serious dissection of the evolution of the names for certain bodily parts as spoken in various European languages and dialects. Or to be thrilled to the ego that he has been cast to appear on the daytime soap opera “One Life to Live” in programs to air June 28 and 29. (“Oh, look, there’s Chauncey Howell,” star Erica Slezak will cry out at her first sight of the tuxedo-clad Chauncey playing Chauncey.) Or to regale one laughingly with a favorite quote from a fellow writer and wit, Sir Max Beerbohm, that he used when accepting his two Emmys from the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences earlier this spring: “Learn to juggle little golden balls well and allow others to stagger under heavy loads of significance.”

He calls that “the most pithy quote you’ve ever heard.” Juggling little golden balls is, after all, what his current job is all about, he says at a West Allentown deli, where he is breakfasting on two eggs over and his favorite onion bialys, eaten with cream cheese and gusto. An irrepressible personality unfolds as he talks. The eyes crinkle with incipient mischief as a clever and rapid-fire conversationalist emerges. A story branches off into anecdote, or a new thought triggers a moment’s digression onto a parallel subject and someone or something is skewered. Real malice is missing, though. There is more, in his style, of the little boy who says the first thing that comes to mind, then presses four flattened fingertips against his lips, eyes wide, in acknowledgement of his naughtiness.

America does not hallow its eccentrics and having a witty and wide conversational range lost its cachet on television some years ago. Maybe a Chauncey Howell could only be what he is and do what he does for a living at a local network affiliate in New York City. In any event, he honestly counts his blessings because he loves his work. “Few people do, you know,” he says.

“I’ve been on TV for 15 years. I worked with NBC for 14. WNBC, that’s Channel 4 in New York. I helped make a show called ‘Live at 5.’ It’s now dead at 5 ratings-wise. Two years ago I went to ABC, that’s WABC Channel 7. Kaity Tong is one of our anchor ladies. Yes, she’s the one everyone mixes up with Connie Chung, and she’s not happy about that. She’s a lovely woman, she went to Bryn Mawr as a matter of fact. Most people on TV aren’t well educated.” He laughs a little. “It’s true. You know that. You’ve suspected that all along, haven’t you?”

“I worked at Women’s Wear Daily a long time ago. I worked at newspapers for a while and then I got a letter in 1974 from a man at NBC saying ‘What do you look like? We like the way you write.’ I went up there and that was it. He was interested in expanding his news show to two hours. We would be the first two-hour news show. They needed people to fill up those two hours and some of those older guys still believed that they should cast from newspapers.

“Now they don’t bother any more. They take young kids out of TV stations around the country . . .

“I’ll tell you my job history if you want to hear it. I was born in Easton, went to Easton High School, had a paper route in Easton. That’s when I started my journalism career, when I was 12. I had two routes at one time on College Hill. I was a little paper route entrepreneur. For the Express.

“And one day I realized that style is more important than content, which is an important lesson. I had a teacher on my route, a very fat lady who had to be taken up in the freight elevator of Easton High School. The drill procedure for her was that I would ring her bell, she would drop a basket from the window – she lived upstairs, it must have been a great travail for her to get up to her apartment – she’d drop down the basket from the window, I’d put the paper in the basket. But before she dropped the basket she’d shout down, ‘Who is it?’ as a test. She knew who it was. She wanted to hear me announce myself, she was such a stickler. Instead of saying as a normal kid would, ‘It’s me, the paper boy,’ I’d said ‘This is I, your paper carrier’ which pleased her so much that later when I got her in high school, she always gave me very good grades, even though I fought with her about the Civil War monument at Centre Square which I now love, but then I thought was dumb.”

Later: “I went to Amherst College where I majored in Greek. I had nine years of Latin, too, which has stood me in good stead in many unexpected ways. Then after college I went in the army for three years. I was extended a third year, so my career didn’t start until the early ’60s.

“So, after three years with the army in South Carolina and Georgia I came to New York and I worked for Fairchild Publications for 11 years. Women’s Wear Daily was one of them. I had a column for Women’s Wear and was children’s wear editor for a time. But before that, I spent two years covering the cotton yarn market . . . How do you like that? No, it wasn’t my kind of thing. It was a job.

“Before that I worked for a drug news weekly where I wrote for pharmacists – “How to Promote Up Front Sundries” was one of their things – and then I went to Women’s Wear Daily and I built a reputation slowly as a writer. I got pieces in the Sunday Times, I was a restaurant reviewer for Playboy for five years – that’s no big deal because your name is not on the piece – and little by little you build a career, building block by building block.

“Then I got on TV, which was quite different, and that took awhile too. It’s been 15 years. Now I have one of the biggest Q ratings (a secret industry poll that measures a personality’s instant recognition by the public) in New York City. Somebody told me it was on a par with Willard Scott’s. I don’t mean to brag but it’s true. People shout at me on the streets and it’s very gratifying, I must say.”

He says there are three categories of people who know him very well. “I can’t pass a fire house without them all shouting. When a fire truck goes by it’s ‘Hey, Chauncey,’ because firemen watch a lot of TV. And then there are nuns. Nuns are our best audience. They must go to a nice nun lounge with the other ladies, take off their wimples and relax and watch a little TV.

“The homeless in the shelters, they watch TV all day long. So when I come through the Port Authority, you can imagine how many know my name.

“I’m not sure they all know what I do but they seem to like it. I met a Polish lady who said (the dialect is now in place): ‘ ‘I don’t understand it but I love you. You’re wonderful.’ All the Jews ask me if I’m Jewish. ‘You use a little Yiddish. You changed your name didn’t you?’ I’m interested in language. I do a lot of Italian now on the air. I like to speak Italian when we’re in areas like Little Italy . . I work very hard at it. I’m reading ‘Pinocchio’ in the original Italian before I go to sleep at night.”

He enjoys people, it turns out. Not for him the Somerset Maugham distancing, being interested in their peculiarities without liking them very much. “Interviewing people is my job. It’s my job to pull things out of them, and make them natural and idiosyncratic, if that’s the word, in their most adorable way. You never, ever, talk down to your audience,” he said, relating the story of one boss who wanted him to.

“I have never done that. If a Latin or Italian phrase occurs to me when I make reference to something, and I would naturally use it in conversation with a real person, I put it in the story. What is on my lung is on my tongue,” he says in one of his several variants of Polish-Yiddish.

“One of my objects is to show the viewer that there is life out there. Most of them – and I don’t want to sound sentimental – most of them are lonely, I think. I really believe that TV and the automobile have ruined American society.

“People stay at home but they don’t go out and hang on the backyard fence the way they used to do and talk to their neighbors. They go to shopping centers to look at consumer goods. They don’t talk to each other . . .

“Have you noticed how many people pick their noses in their cars? Well, it’s true, because they’re floating there all alone in their four-wheeled living rooms, never looking at each other, just looking at each other’s cars.

“So what I’m doing is looking at faces. I’m a great caster out on the street. ‘Sir, come here. I want you.’ And you have to be kind of rude and pushy to get it done right, to be director and caster.”

“Somerset Maugham was a different sort of person. He didn’t have to touch the people. He could observe them from far. I have to grab them by the back of their arms or the back of their necks and steer them to the camera. I have to lay hands on them often and I’m a good one for laying on hands. That’s how we get them to be themselves.”

“You have love in your heart,” he says one woman told him. “I do like most people,” he confirms. “There are some people you don’t want to be around too much or too long or too close, though. I had a cameraman . . . I don’t work with him anymore because he was a scornful suburban prince who had a sneering look on his face when we were out working. It puts people off. The best cameramen I’ve worked with have gotten engaged in the story, involved with the people, too.

“I don’t know if it’s that I have a kind heart. I’m just interested in people. But I’m kind, yes. I can cry on camera and have on a number of occasions. But I’m not on TV to cry on camera. Some people do, though, the people who milk the sentimental, do the sob sister stories all the time. There’s a lot of terrible insincerity on TV in addition to pomposity. And unnaturalness.”

He is not like Kuralt, not like Charles Osgood, he critiques. “I like what they do but I’m a little more oblique, a little more idiosyncratic, to use your word. They’re a little more mainstream and their voices are pitched lower and slower. That’s because they are ‘network gu-uu-uys,’ ” he says, his voice mimicking the overly mannered tones of a Ted Baxter-type anchorman.

A lot of these “network gu-uu-uys” have phony voices and tend to sound alike, he says. Then, too, “They do stand-up straight into the camera. I like to do things that are a little more artistic. I use lots of music in my pieces.”

It takes him all of a long working day to do one piece. “We do whatever comes down the pike. I have a whole lot of evergreens in the back of my head. One I haven’t done in three years which I love is called ‘What’s Wrong With Your Face?’ “

In it, Howell gets the man on the street to examine his face in a mirror and tell the world precisely what he doesn’t like about it.

“They trust me, you see. As I become better known in New York, it’s been easier to do this kind of a story. Originally, when I wasn’t known, to get people to open themselves up on camera was hard.”

He says he was lucky to come to television when he did, that younger personalities assume what they believe is the going voice, the going look, the going delivery because “they just don’t have fully formed personalities yet. I came to TV when I was advanced in age, 34, so I already had a personality. It was formed. By 40 your face is set, isn’t it? A kind of shamelessness sets in. After 40, too, there’s more of a willingness to be yourself and not worry what other people think.”

He says he constantly catches himself making “little facial expressions, little moues that I’ve been making all my life that horrify me.”

And “What’s Wrong With Chauncey Howell’s Face?”

“It’s not a handsome face but that’s okay. It’s plain but expressive. I think expressiveness is the most important thing. I used to worry that I looked like a pudding face on the air. I’ve always had a round face. Most of the viewers think I’m short and heavy; when they see me in the flesh they’re surprised that I’m so tall.

“Betty Furness put it perfectly – she’s a wonderful lady – she said ‘TV makes everybody look the same age, the same height, the same weight and the same sex.’ ” Howell laughs hugely at the image of all the homogenized, interchangeable types in television news.

“In Philadelphia, where it’s all fires and police and killing, the men are only distinguishable from the women because they’re wearing Windsor knotted bow ties,” he laughs again.

He has had the same agent, Richard Leibner, for years. Perhaps Leibner hasn’t done as well by Chauncey Howell as he has for another client, Dan Rather? Says Howell: “He had an unfortunate way of describing me as an eccentric for a couple of years and I said ‘Richard, you must stop that. I’m a normal person. I should be perceived as normal with my little idiosyncrasies, but don’t describe me as an eccentric. That puts me in a category that’s not very useful for these TV people. They have to believe that if there’s a fire I could cover it.’ “

If there were a fire, Chauncey Howell could cover it. “When I was a straight news reporter I did the best fires, the best murders. After I went to TV, I did art stories for the first year and a half and they wanted to try me on hard news stories, which I was very happy to do and made quite a name for myself. I was great at cop funerals.”

The background knowledge and experience was helpful “and it helped make my name. However, the principals of story-telling are the same regardless of the subject matter. I can make a crime story live as well as I can a little town in New Jersey. We kind of savor a town on a feature we do called ‘Chauncey’s Nabes.’ I turned Ho-Ho-Kus into a musical comedy.”

Sure, he worries about the future. He has another few years remaining on his contract and doesn’t know what will happen after that.

“You see, I’m funny. I like a regular job where they expect me to perform a duty every day. I’m happy that way. I’m not so nervy that I want to be out loose, foraging. And I don’t have to be paid that much money because I like . . . communicating,” he grimaces.

“Oh, I hate that expression. I like to tell stories. I like to have conversations with people.”

And he doesn’t really ponder or agonize over the human condition, he says. “Oh, I have on occasion, when I’ve been self-pitying. It’s usually when you’re upset about something in yourself, that you blame it on the world as though the world is doing it.”

Anyhow, his mission in life is not to prick pretensions. “But I do love to needle people,” he says. “I needle myself, too. I show myself up,” he nods conspiratorially.

“But I’m so lucky to be allowed to do what I do. I had no idea years ago I’d be doing this. I had no idea what I’d be doing. I guess I assumed I’d be a teacher, because what else do you do with Latin or Greek?”

He could see himself doing what he is doing for the rest of his life. Plying a certain universal outlook in a local setting is, to him, heaven on earth.

“Local is the best. Small things make for good stories. Small things illumine. ‘This little corner of the world smiles for me beyond all others,’ ” he says, quoting the Latin poet Horace. And means it.

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