JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Most mornings in the News4JAX newsroom, you can hear Frank Powers before you see him.
He arrives each day and parks his Toyota Corolla — which is comically small for his large frame — before he saunters through the front doors.
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As he makes his way inside, he loudly whistles the last song he heard on the radio, usually some classic rock song.
At his desk, he plops down his brown bag of homemade trail mix — his lunch each day — and sits in his weathered and outdated faux leather chair with a seat cushion that looks like it’s been torn to shreds by a lion.
Then he gets to work.
As he settles into his desk that’s slightly above the rest of the newsroom he looks out like a presiding judge over the morning show producers finishing their shifts. He reads headlines and emails and sends replies using just his two big index fingers to type one letter at a time. If an email is important enough, he yells out to anyone who’s listening to make sure we saw it.
But most days, his work starts long before he sits down.
Powers, 69, is constantly on the phone with connected sources that fill him in on the big stories of the day. He hears a lot of things that will never make air but informs our coverage and makes sure we get it right.
You see, Frank Powers eats, sleeps and breathes news.
And perhaps no one has more of an impact on the stories News4JAX covers each day — and how we cover them — than he does.
That’s why when Powers officially retires at the end of his shift on Monday after more than 40 years in the business, the impact of his loss will be huge.
“Frank is a wealth of knowledge with a network of sources that consistently elevates our coverage and sets us apart from the competition. Whether leaving the desk to chase breaking news or seeing a story through from start to finish, Frank is truly dedicated to his job as a journalist,” News4JAX News Director Kathryn Bonfield said. “I have always valued his opinions on coverage decisions and often ask him what we might be overlooking. When Frank disagrees with something, he is not afraid to speak up.”
Nowhere is this more evident than in the morning meeting, which begins every weekday at 9:15 a.m.
“What’s going on, Frank? Anything we need to jump on?” Bonfield asks each morning.
“Well, it’s been a cactus in the ass morning,” he will sometimes respond in his booming voice with shades of a 1920s newsman. (If you have ever called the newsroom, you’ve probably heard it.)
Powers has a way of making it seem like he’s fed up with the nonstop demands of his job as Assignment Manager and often comes across as gruff, but don’t let that fool you; he loves it. He loves being the go-to guy for history and crime information and holding court at his desk to recount stories of years past, which he does using his incredible memory that at times can seem photographic. His end-of-the-year emails looking back at some of the biggest stories, which were probably written without any Googling, were so good we started publishing them on the website.
Not only does his big voice carry weight, it often carries humor, and his newsroom quips and quotes said to either people on the phone or coworkers are so infamous that one employee who sits near him started writing them down for posterity:
“The damn cat peed in my shoes again!”
“Ghosts don’t leave fecal pellets, it’s rats!”
“Hi, are you aware of what’s going on in two locations in our fine metropolis?”
“So, there weren’t UFOs? No unexplained disappearances in Putnam County?”
“Hi, it’s Frank Powers. Your fellow Doobie Brothers fan.”
“It’s rushing up to meet us like a fish slap to the face,” he said recently about his impending retirement.
It seems Powers was destined to tell stories engagingly, and his love for journalism started at an early age.
His uncle was in radio in Providence, Rhode Island, and he can remember his parents taking his family down to visit him. Powers would sit in the booth and watch him do his show.
“I guess it sort of sunk in,” Powers said.
Powers, who says he’s got “a face for radio,” followed in his uncle’s footsteps and worked at his hometown radio station in Newburyport, Mass. He later worked in the Boston metro area before making his way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where everything would change.
“It was a culture shock, let me tell you,” Powers recounted in a News4JAX podcast honoring the legacies of him, Jim Piggott and Tom Wills, who also retired recently. “A little guy from New England wound up out on the plains chasing tornadoes and immersing himself in the criminal justice system.”
But one story in 1995 changed Powers’ career trajectory and left a scar that will never heal: the Oklahoma City bombing. On the morning of April 19 that year, an ex-Army soldier and security guard named Timothy McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The bomb inside that truck destroyed the building and killed 168 people, including 19 children.
“To this day it remains the most important story I’ve ever covered,” he said. “And it changed me on many levels, and a year later, we decided that we needed a change and I started looking around and found a job opening at WOKV for their morning anchor and wound up [in Jacksonville] in September of ’96. I needed a change. I do miss chasing tornadoes though.”
Since arriving at News4JAX in 1999, Powers has been known for his meticulous record-keeping. He has countless “grids” and folders that make up the unofficial News4JAX archives, detailing all the high-profile stories he has helped cover over the years.
He has passed the baton to his replacement in recent weeks as he begins preparing for what’s next.
And what’s next for him is a lot of time with his wife, Mary, and their grandchildren.
“I can’t envision myself not being a grandfather. You find a whole new level of love,” he said.
“Frank will be missed tremendously, but I’m thrilled he now gets to spend more time with his family, especially the grandchildren he often talks about in the newsroom as he shares their photos,” Bonfield said.
Perhaps that’s why one type of story hits him harder than others.
“The worst two words you can hear in this business are ‘missing child.’ Even worse than tornado warning or hurricane watch. Because nine times out of 10, it does not end well. And then it drives the news cycle not just for a couple of days but weeks, if not months,” Powers said.
But somehow through all the difficult stories and talking to people who have lost loved ones, Powers said he doesn’t lose sleep at night.
“When you share their grief on a personal level, when you’re sitting talking to them face to face, you can’t help but absorb that. And then you have to find someplace and somewhere to put it...You can’t wall it off. You just have to give it time. And what happens is it becomes a part of you, but you can’t let it become a damaging part of you. And then you should go on to the next one there. What you learn from the last interaction helps you with the next interaction,” he said.
It’s one of the many lessons he’s tried to pass on to reporters.
As Powers steps into retirement, he doesn’t plan to completely step away from the news, which is no surprise to anyone who has seen his dedication to his job.
“I could go out and get video maybe. I’m going to write, try photography. I’ll do some volunteer work, see more of my grandkids’ activities,” he said.
With Powers leaving, it will be up to everyone else in the newsroom to work their sources, keep detailed records, track difficult court cases and deadpan jokes. There is no doubt News4JAX has the people who can do it, but one thing is for sure, News4JAX won’t be, or sound, the same without Frank Powers around.
Before Frank walked out of News4JAX one last time on Monday, he sent out a station-wide email where he tried to sum it all up:
"This one’s going to be a little different than the ‘Year in Review’ emails.
Hardly seems like it was April 16, 1999, that I first sat at the Assignment Desk here at CH4, which was the last of the three TV stations where I interviewed after departing WOKV, but former News Director Skip Valet made the first offer. He wanted someone on the desk with field experience, it seemed like a good fit, and I had reporters pitching for me, including one Jim Piggott (look how that turned out). 20 years in news radio took me to some unforgettable and challenging scenes, so when I sent crews out on stories, I was able to tell them I wasn’t asking them to do anything I hadn’t. I also shared with them the three pillars that made this work so fulfilling and rewarding. Make a difference, kick ass with friends, and have fun. It was my professional philosophy.
Funny to say, but a generation on The Wall (my nickname for the desk) went really quick. That “One Shining Moment” they play at the end of the NCAA basketball tournament lasted 25 years here, and I was privileged to have been a part of the telling of historic stories. The first week alone saw the Columbine School shooting. There was the 2000 presidential election night that lasted six weeks, the world-changing attacks of September 11th, months-long fire seasons in 2007 and 2011, Hurricane Matthew in 2016, Hurricane Irma in 2017, the wreck of El Faro, and way too many haunting stories about missing children. When you cover life and all that goes with it, you can’t help but change. You’ve heard me say I take being called a dinosaur as compliment, because dinosaurs thrived on this planet for millions of years. They did so because they kept evolving, even after the comet hit. Well, today is my comet. And, so I must evolve again.
This was the best job of my life, if for no other reason because of the life-long friends I got to work with. To all of you here, and elsewhere— thank you for making this a better-informed world. Keep making a difference!
Frank”