After nearly 24 years of joining New Hampshirites in our living rooms at 7 p.m. to tell us the story, Fritz Wetherbee, host of New Hampshire Chronicle, has retired at 88 years old.
Fritz said his project for retirement is to work on his memoir at his Acworth home.
In an interview with The Equinox, Fritz recounts his time as an early journalist and radio broadcaster, lecturer at Keene State and television host.
In the early 1960s, Wetherbee had been a “beatnik in New York for a while” and “in and out of the U.S. Army” when he started in Jaffrey, N.H. working for The Monadnock Ledger, now The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript. Working for the Ledger he met Cornelius “Budd” Lyle, a freelance writer for the Ledger and The Keene Sentinel and professor of journalism and English at Keene State College.
“I had come there for a job as a salesman selling ads, but there was a drowning in Fitzwilliam [N.H.]. I was a photographer; when I was in high school I developed my own pictures and that kind of thing. I was crazy for photography, and the editor of the paper [Monadnock Ledger] sent me over to cover the drowning and he said, ‘Write a story on it, a ‘color story.’’”
Wetherbee continued about The Monadnock Ledger hiring him as a reporter after a “landslide” of positive feedback from his reporting on the drowning.
He added, “I was a newspaper reporter for the next six and a half, almost seven, years on The Monadnock Ledger.”
Wetherbee said he went to Keene State to learn more about subjects including journalism, English and history.
“But I wanted that journalism course, that’s what I wanted more than anything because I didn’t know anything about it. There’s an old [saying], ‘There’s no such thing as teaching, there’s only learning,’ and I went there to learn, not to be taught.”
Wetherbee added about his experience with Lyle, saying, “He was one heck of a good teacher, really good teacher. He was smart and he understood stuff and he’d been a reporter on the Keene Sentinel and [I] worked at the Sentinel as well; I learned all of my journalism from him and he was wonderful.”
After Wetherbee’s time with The Monadnock Ledger and The Keene Sentinel, he talked about how he became the news editor for WSLE (AM) and WSEB (FM) in Peterborough, N.H.
Wetherbee said, “I needed a job and they [radio station] were all news at that time. They were a news and information station for NBC … and I was listening to it and they had a bunch of young kids that had just gotten out of college. I was listening to it and all I could hear was the fact they were mispronouncing all the local names.” Wetherbee was then hired as a reporter and NBC’s news and information group went bankrupt leading to mass layoffs.
“Suddenly this radio station in Peterborough had to fire everybody, and they did, and the only one they kept was me. By nine years later, I was the general manager of the station,” added Wetherbee.
He brought his experience in radio to Keene State as well, teaching a course called Methods of Production. He said, “It was a senior course in the evenings. I did one in the winter, the second semester and the next winter, the second semester there and I had a real good time.”
“I got to know the students and it was a lot of fun. Later, I ran into somebody and [they] said, ‘Oh, that was my favorite course in the entire time I was there.’” Wetherbee talked about the appeal of the unorthodox approach to his class, adding, “I go beyond where I should be sometimes, political correctness is not my forte.”
Wetherbee later went on to work at Channel 11 for 24 years in Durham N.H., on the campus of the University of New Hampshire as a tech worker, creative director of the radio station, cameraman for the N.H. PBS show NH Crossroads and later the host of Crossroads.
“They hired me [to be the host] and put my name in the title, Crossroads with Fritz Wetherbee, and that ran for 10 years,” Wetherbee said.
The New Hampshire Chronicle, Wetherbee’s most recent television show, started as a spin-off of The Chronicle on channel 5 in Boston, Wetherbee said.
“Peter Mehegan was one of the stars of that show from the beginning. He went around New England to different places. So they decided they would do it, [because] it’s a money maker. A lot of people like to be associated with stuff that’s close by,” said Wetherbee.
He added, “What they [would] do is that they [NH Chronicle] were going to use Peter Mehegan’s stories on New Hampshire because they had six months worth, so they’d be up and going. Well, two months later, they’ve gone through all of Peter Mehegan’s stories … and their email just exploded, you can’t have that, you can only do reruns so much.”
This is when Wetherbee got involved with the television program. Wetherbee was asked by the producers to do a story every night on New Hampshire, with him answering. “No, I can’t. That’s madness! There’s no way you can do a story a night.” He adder, “They said, ‘Well, how about up against the wall?’ Wonderful tune. In TV, what that means is that you stand up against the wall and you do radio.”
Wetherbee went on to film nearly 5,000 episodes of N.H. Chronicle and in that time has written eight books and wrote a satirical cassette course called “Speak N’Hampsha Like a Native.”
As Wetherbee would say, that’s the story.
Timothy Fitzpatrick can be contacted at
tfitzpatrick@kscequinox.com
