My entire career in television is attributable to one weekend the fall of my Senior year in high school. It was the weekend after football playoffs and before the SAT tests. Having nothing else to do I decided on a lark to enter the Whitfield Co. (GA) Junior Miss Pageant.

I won! That look of stunned surprise on my face is because my talent was sewing!

The shock was bigger when I won Georgia’s Junior Miss. The sponsors of the pageant asked me, "Don’t you sing when you sew or tap dance when you sew?" 'Nope,' I replied. "I pretty much just sit there and sew."

Again, they no doubt sighed, Georgia wouldn’t win at America’s Junior Miss. And to think, my talent was sewing and I still won!

That's me on the right at the televised finals introducing Michael Landon to the CBS Television audience.

That technician laying at my feet and the other production staff seemed to have so much fun working the long hours they did, that I decided to get into television.

I took the research part of Law that had intrigued me, married it with TV production and dreamed up that I'd be a TV reporter.

And before long, I was.

Even before I graduated from college, I was working as a reporter at WAGA-TV 5 in Atlanta.

This is a shot of me covering a Civil War re-enactment for the weekend news. I'd been lucky enough to get an internship in college that caught the attention of the station manager, who for reasons I will never understand, gave me a gopher's job for the summer.

By day three, that turned into a reporter gig that continued through my senior year in college.