ST. LOUIS — “My parents always said when God closes a door he opens a window,” said Ruth Ezell, senior producer of Nine PBS’ Living St. Louis show. “My career has been when I see a door cracked I slide it open.”
Her career has had many twists and turns, but she says it always has aligned. She began her media career in 1976 with WJR-AM, a Detroit radio station where she worked as an assistant in the sales department.
“I did a closed circuit broadcast to all the smaller stations in Michigan that carried [Detroit] Tigers baseball,” she said. “My job was to go and do the broadcast a day or two before game day. I told them where they could run their spots and about the spots we had to run according to our schedule.”
“One day as luck would have it” as Ezell recalls, she was sitting in the booth reading an ad script when the news director heard her voice, and offered her a production assistant position.
“The spring of 1977 is when I started as a production assistant,” she said.
“Some of my duties were ripping wire copies. I’d rip UPI, AP, and Reuters, sort them and distribute them to the reporters because they all had different beats. Another part of my job was taking recorded audio sound bites from AP’s radio division and chopping it up into individual parts for individual cassettes.”
She adjusted to the role and also started working at WJR’s FM station where she wrote and edited wire copy. She figured she would get a chance to cover stories.
She was soon reporting once or twice a week. Then another opportunity arose. One day while at her parents’ house she saw people in their neighborhood going from door to door with clipboards.They had received their property tax bill and were upset about an increase.
“I said ‘Oh really, let me come back with my tape recorder.’ So, I got an exclusive story before anyone else,” she said. “It became big news and I broke it right in my parents’ backyard.
She covered stories more often for both WJR stations, attended news conferences and other events, and became acquainted with reporters at other stations and sometimes jokingly asked them if they had any jobs.
She learned WXYZ-AM had an opening available and they were transitioning into a talk radio station.
“They said we need to beef up our newsroom, we need more people,” she said. “That day I dropped off my exclusive story and resume and ended up getting the job.”
She spent a couple years doing that before plotting on her next career move. ABC owned two radio stations and a TV affiliate in Detroit. She started working at the TV station after a new General Manager was hired at WXYZ and fired most of the staff including her.
“I wrote a script telling the editor and reporter I need this and this, the editor found pics and I would put sound bites together and put it on air,” she said.
Ezell didn’t want to get too comfortable and eventually decided it was time for her to move from Detroit to somewhere new. While working at WXYZ she saw a job opening in Chicago for WLS on ABC’s bulletin board and took a temporary position. A writer was on medical leave and she was filling in.
During her next temporary job at a CBS station in Chicago, she was offered a full time position in the midst of controversy concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion.
She found out in a statement the station released expressing how they were working with a temp employee and it looked like she was going to work out so they're going to hire her.
This came after they were embroiled in a battle with Bill Kurtis who replaced Black anchor Harry Potterfield, which got Jesse Jackson, and Operation PUSH involved. Jackson and his team learned a Black producer and reporter hadn’t worked in that newsroom for five years.
“It was just a result of a problem that needed fixing, just like my first radio job,” she said. “It was something cosmic going on and I was at the right place at the right time.”
From there Ezell realized her career needed to move in one of two directions: either she was going to stay behind the scenes and do production management or she was going to move to another market and start over from scratch to build her on-air experience.
After job searching for two years she landed a job in Cincinnati at WCPO.
“I lived in Cincinnati for two years. I loved the job and my team, but I didn’t like living there. It wasn't the right fit for what I wanted to do. I saw more growth and potential moving to another city.”
She learned about a job at KSDK from a friend and relocated to St. Louis in 1992. She worked there for 10 years, then at KMOX beginning in 2003 as co-host of “KMOX Weekend at Your Service.”
Not long after that she was offered a producer position at KETC (now known as Nine PBS). She wasn’t ready to give up radio hosting just yet so she split her time between the two. In 2004, she accepted a full-time position at Nine while still working Saturday mornings with KMOX for five years.
Ezell celebrates 19 years with Nine in April and is senior producer of the network’s “Living St. Louis,” show alongside Jim Jim Kirchherr and Anne-Marie Berger. Ezell, Jim Kirchherr, and Marie-Berger have been with the show since its beginning. Brooke Butler recently joined the team.
Living is celebrating its 20th season on air, and has produced 600 episodes and won more than 30 Emmy Awards.