Familiar and friendly WNED personality Goldie Gardner may have retired, but her vision and beliefs in the importance of public broadcasting live on
Goldie Gardner signs off at Ch. 17
Channel 17’s best-known voice has been quieted. On June 27, Goldie Gardner, the station’s iconic pitcher, retired. “She was just a great person for Channel 17,” said Mike Collins, former president of Western New York Public Broadcasting. “First, she’s a believer. She was a member before she became an employee, and I’d say she’s one of our proudest members.”
Western New Yorkers may best remember her for the times when they settled in for a much-anticipated show, maybe the Three Tenors or Leo Buscaglia, and 20 minutes into it, up pops Goldie. All sweetness and smiles, she reached into our collective wallets, assuring us that it’s absolutely necessary for continued programming and it’s for our own good.
“I certainly have always been able to understand that I annoyed people,” said Gardner. “You’re watching something and then there I am. It was worse before the days of the remote when you couldn’t mute me or change the channel. But from our point of view, I’m not ashamed or apologetic that to get great programming this is what we have to do.”
She was selling something that she’d bought into years before –the mission of public broadcasting. “It’s one of the hardest things in world, asking people for money for something they can get for free,” said Gwen Mysiak, manager of corporate communications.
She did it so well, for so long, that Goldie became known nationally in public broadcasting circles, well beyond the expected reach of Buffalo and Toronto, where she held celebrity status.
“When we used to go to Toronto for season previews, you’d always know where Goldie was because there were 30 people crowded around trying to get to her,” said Collins.
“She was a master at it,” said Eileen Koteras Elibol, WNED senior graphics designer and photographer. “It’s not something you can learn. She honestly wanted to tell you how she felt about the program you were watching together. She made you feel as if she’s talking just to you.”
It’s an absolute fluke that a kid who graduated from St. Luke’s Elementary School, and whose loftiest ambition was an office job, ended up in the spotlight.
It started in 1974 when she accepted a bookkeeping job just to be associated with public broadcasting. The first thing she did was to get an accounting book to learn the terminology.
“At the interview, I just nodded my head knowingly when they said ‘spread sheet,’ ” she said. “I figured somebody else is doing it, so I should be able to do it.”
That attitude prevailed for every task she took on: whether it was building sets, running a camera, acting as a floor director, helping organize the first classical guitar competition in conjunction with the BPO or her most recent achievement, and one of her proudest, being program manager for the ThinkBright team.
“I was never afraid to tackle something, even if I didn’t initially know what I was doing,” she said of her role in bringing ThinkBright, the lifelong learning channel, into existence.
Perhaps the most on-air fun were the cooking segments, “Plain & Fancy Cooking,” that she co-hosted with Elibol. “It was kind of a Lucy and Ethel team, two friends cooking together,” said Gardner.
“Plain & Fancy” began because she and Elibol were constantly talking about the cooking in their Polish families or a recipe they wanted to try. Cooking came naturally, but they had to try the recipe over and over in their own kitchens to whittle preparation time to 10 minutes. Then, during the program, they were never sure what pranks the crew might pull, including the time someone substituted a hardboiled egg for a raw one, causing Gardner to keep whacking at it until she realized what was going on.
Gardner said she never expected to be an on-air personality. “I didn’t even act in any school plays,” she said. “I never, ever, thought I’d be on air.”
It happened because she and coworkers teased the on-air people that their jobs were so easy that “even chimps” could do it, prompting Collins to invite them to try it.
“We were terrible, awful,” said Gardner. “It’s not so easy to talk without a script for 10 minutes.”
Later, when Collins needed a pitch partner, he invited Gardner back. “The thing about Goldie is that she is so quick on the uptake,” said Collins. “There was never a pause, or look or a blank stare. She could always pick up on where you were going.”
It was Collins who gave her the name that stuck. When she started at Channel 17, there were a few Barbaras already, she said, so someone tagged her Goldie because of her blond hair. “It’s a name that I only had at the office, so I was surprised when Mike referred to me as Goldie on air.”
When she started pitching, she said, she was terrified. “We used to offer this big National Geographic book as a premium and I’d hold onto it to steady my nerves.”
Because nothing was scripted, Gardner said she spent lots of time thinking of what to say. “The biggest thing is if the phone rings you know that something you say is being heard,” she said. “When the phone doesn’t ring, you are thinking, ‘I’m giving this my best stuff and nothing’s happening.’ But you have to be relaxed. If you start feeling desperate, if falls apart.”
In 1981 Gardner married David Cady, who also worked at Channel 17 until his retirement last year. They are parents of Ben, 25, who works in the governor’s office in Albany and Adam, 23, who is entering a graduate program in the English department at the University at Buffalo.
After her first son was born, Gardner remained connected with the station for pledge drives and the auction, not as a full-time employee. With her sons in school full time, she enrolled at Buffalo State College and earned a degree in elementary education/special education in the early 1990s.
“It was very important to me to get a college degree,” said Gardner, who then taught in the Buffalo public schools before losing her job during budget cutbacks.
In 1996, Collins invited her back to the station. “That was a fork in the road because I really loved working with children,” said Gardner.
Her retirement decision came down to this: With her husband’s retirement, the timing began to seem more and more right. “I just thought, ‘Well, I’ve been working a long time,’ pretty much from the time I was 16, at least part time,” said Gardner. “I did want to retire when I still felt energetic and in good health, to have time to explore some other options. When you work full time, that’s pretty much your focus –and there’s not a lot of time or energy to really get involved.”
The first big project is renovating a bedroom in their classic old Buffalo house. Then, each Wednesday she sails with her husband off the Erie Basin Marina. And she’s happy for the time to do more reading, another of her passions.
“I initially said I wanted to give myself a year of doing nothing,” said Gardner, who is mulling over where she’d like to volunteer. “It wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility that I’d take a walk to a nearby school sometime and say ‘what can I do?,’ ” she said.
“But what I’ve been telling everybody is that all I need for retirement is a library card and a cheap bottle of wine.”
