Lake Forest’s Very Own June 2007 Getting up and going to work is often hard enough. But when you have a job that requires you to wake up before the newspaper has landed safely in your driveway, you need to have a passion for what you do. Alarms start ringing at 3:20 a.m. in the Lake Forest home of Larry Potash, the WGN Morning News anchor. Before he heads into work each morning, he scans the Internet for any stories that may have escaped the program’s producers, who have already been working for hours. The WGN Morning News show is like no other in the market. There’s a chemistry and comfort level between Larry and his co-host Robin Baumgarten—not to mention the sibling-like relationship he has with Paul Konrad, the morning weather man. Larry reports the news with the confidence that 13 years with a station brings, but also with a sense of humor. “Some of the other networks have tried to do what we do, and it just doesn’t work. If we run a report that isn’t good—we’ll say it’s terrible on the air. We’re all self-deprecating. We’re not afraid to laugh at ourselves,” explains Larry. “We like to say that Bozo taught us in comedy that somebody’s always got to get the pie. Nobody on our team is afraid to get the pie.” When Forest & Bluff caught up with Larry, his wife Lisa, and his darling nearly three-year-old Kaylin, it was almost naptime for Kaylin—and Larry. “Larry usually gets home sometime between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. We all sit down and have lunch together and then Larry and Kaylin take a nap,” says Lisa of their daily routine. “But then they both wake up and we still can have a nice afternoon together. It’s so much more than any other father with a ‘normal’ job would get.” Although Larry certainly has reason to complain about his hours, he doesn’t. He has wanted to be a part of the news for as long as he can remember. A native of Lynn, Massachusetts—a town just outside of Boston—Larry set his sights on journalism when he was in the eighth grade. But it was sportscasting that captivated him. “I was very much interested in watching the news on TV when I grew up in Boston. To me, they were as much a part of the community as the sports teams,” Larry says. “The fact that I like to write and that I like history—I was drawn to this sort of thing.” So, after college, Larry left the Boston area to begin his career but found himself liking the journalistic aspects of news more than sports. He worked in Texas, Indiana, and Oklahoma before being hired by WGN in 1994. Larry was honored with a 2006 Silver Dome Award for Best Anchor in Chicago from the Illinois Broadcasters Association. He’s won five Emmy® Awards, including three for Best Anchor: in 2005–06, 2002–03, and 2001–02. He also received an Emmy in 1999 for the conversation series “People to People.” “I don’t spend two seconds thinking about how I am on television. I think about making television, producing television, and mapping it out. It’s all about the writing—coming up with the idea and telling the story—one that is compelling and comprehensive.” When asked to cite the most interesting story of his career, Larry immediately thought of an investigative piece he did for WGN when he was new to Chicago. A city hospital had just made headlines after a child had been raped in her room while being treated there. To test if security had been improved, Larry and a cameraman (with a hidden camera) were sent to the hospital to investigate. “I thought we were going to get bagged right away. For one thing, my cameraman looked like a child molester. He was wearing overalls and big, thick glasses. He had a hat on with a long, gray ponytail. And I was wearing a coat and tie. We were two unlikely characters to be matched up and walking around together at a hospital,” laughs Larry. “But that day, anything that I had hoped would come true for a great story happened—and then some. At the end, I was begging them to catch me. We had been there for four hours and I was getting bored, so we started raising the stakes. At one point, I actually asked a doctor, ‘Where do you keep the kids?’ and he told me! I then had a conversation with a three-year-old in front of a busy nurses station. We then decided to enter a child’s room to see if someone would stop us—no one did. As I was standing in front of an infant in a crib, my line was something like, ‘How long do you think it would take or how easy would it be?’ Our last stop was down to their security center in the basement. I walked right in and began asking questions. ‘What does this camera do? What do you see here?’ And the security guards would answer each one—never asking who I was,” tells Larry. As Lisa listens to Larry recall this story, she’s surprised he doesn’t mention September 11 as his most memorable story. “We were actually flying home from Rome on September 11,” says Lisa. “Larry and I were there on vacation. We were on our way back, and the flight attendant announced that we would be making an emergency landing at Heathrow—that U.S. air space was closed,” adds Lisa. “Then Lisa sees the flight attendant crying and making the sign of the cross. So I pick up the phone and got through to the news room, where they told me what happened. News people are typically pretty hardened from covering the news, but all I could think was ‘Oh, my God,’” Larry remembers. “As the news room relayed the story to Larry, he was repeating the details out loud: ‘Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center.’ With his naturally loud news voice and the fact that he was on an air phone—it wasn’t long before the entire plane knew why the U.S. air space was closed. When Larry got off the phone, he was surrounded by other passengers,” says Lisa. Lisa and Larry landed in London where he filed reports for WGN on the events, as well the European coverage of what was happening in the U.S. It took them eight days to get home. “It’s something we’ll always remember,” says Larry. When Larry’s not on the air, he’s busy producing other projects for the station or writing a weekly column for the RedEye. “My column allows me to personalize things. I try to relate certain topics through my experience. It’s hard for me to go off and cover certain stories. I used to do a lot of investigative reporting. But as the show has grown, and now that I have a family, I just can’t do it as much anymore. So the column really allows me to write a little more creatively,” says Larry. In addition to being a voracious reader and a huge sports fan, another little-known fact about Larry is that he’s the unofficial moderator of a men’s discussion group. He thought it would be interesting to assemble a group of men with different spiritual and professional backgrounds—priests, rabbis, atheists, evangelicals, paranormal experts, private investigators, doctors, lawyers, professors, etc.—to discuss various topics. Only five or six men attend the sessions at a time, but about 50 people make up the entire group that meets once a year. “It just got started with an old friend of my dad’s who was a Greek Orthodox priest and a philosophy professor. We’d get together for lunch and talk about God, religion, history—you know, some heavy stuff. And then this priest would bring some friends. Pretty soon, I was getting calls from priests and rabbis asking about when the next lunch was,” tells Larry. “These men were finding that they were so busy counseling and so on, that they didn’t get to talk about theology—which was what drove them to their jobs in the first place.” But to really know Larry is to know that his family comes above all else. And his move to Lake Forest is testament to this. “We loved living in the city. But once you have a child, you look at things with such different eyes. We moved here because we really wanted to be close to my parents. And we wanted [Kaylin] to have a yard with kick-the-can and kids running from yard to yard,” says Lisa, who moved to Lake Forest when she started at Lake Forest High School. “We were nervous about Larry’s commute. We were literally two blocks from the station when we lived downtown, close enough for Larry to walk. But it’s worth it once you get here—when you can be near family and see the stars. The pace is much healthier here.” When Lisa and Larry visited Lake Forest before moving here, they called it their “northern retreat.” “It’s so calm, so peaceful—very relaxing. And you never have to worry about a four-lane highway going in or a Best Buy coming in on the corner. That would change everything, and Lake Forest gets that,” adds Larry.