So Kooiman broke it off, believing that trying that hard to make things work would shift her focus too far away from getting ahead in her career. It was all fun and games until Stuckey’s company transferred him back to Sydney, a move that would make their rendezvous much, much more logistically challenging, time-consuming and expensive. Then they began a jet-setting relationship made possible in large part because she was working so much: The copious OT helped her routinely earn significant chunks of time off, and she’d spend them flying somewhere to meet Stuckey. The day after that, he headed back across the Atlantic. They went out for a drink the next night. He was living in London at the time, and in town for work. In the fall of 2012 - tired and dirty after a multi-day-long shift spent covering Hurricane Sandy, and unable to reach her apartment due to a crane collapse on her block - she met a handsome, charming guy with an Australian accent who was hanging with friends in the bar at the W New York hotel in Times Square. She volunteered for extra shifts.īut somehow, she still found time to fall for a man who would send her life spinning in a wholly unexpected direction. It was really hard for me not to do that anymore. They didn’t want stalkers to come try to talk to me. Meanwhile, Fox News was putting the kibosh on her side hustle, Kooiman says, because “they didn’t want journalists to come try to talk to me. “It felt like I had made a difference to these people.” “(They gave me) cards and balloons, and one girl even gave me earrings, and another girl gave me a little bracelet. were like, ‘You helped me bring my sexy back,’” she recalls. I wasn’t a mom yet then, but a lot of moms. Much to her surprise, leaving her fitness clients turned out to be as tough as leaving her colleagues in the newsroom. WCCB had been priming her for some increasingly feature-y segments, one involving healthy cooking and another involving fitness.īut when Fox News’ offer came, it was a no-brainer: “You don’t say no to New York City,” says Kooiman, who was just 27 at the time. After hooking up with an agent and putting together some tapes, they got a fairly quick bite from Fox News. The “News Rising” team from Anna Kooiman’s first stint with WCCB: From left, Jon Wilson, Kooiman, Derek James and Tera Blake.Įventually, though, Kooiman started suspecting she had the potential to graduate to bigger and better things. Although it took a little while to get comfortable after following her Aussie husband Down Under in 2016, she honestly thought they might be there forever.Īnd today, the Myers Park High School graduate is literally back where it all began, in the house she grew up in, not 20 minutes away from 1 Television Place, where a new studio is being custom-built just for “Your Day With Anna Kooiman,” set to premiere Jan. After getting tapped by Fox News to move to New York City in 2011, she assumed she was in the Big Apple to stay. But she’s grown accustomed to life throwing her curveballs - and to winding up and pitching a few curveballs of her own.Īfter landing the job co-hosting “News Rising” for WCCB (Channel 18) in 2008, Kooiman figured she’d never leave Charlotte. Truth be told, Anna didn’t see this coming, either. “Now you can’t get rid of me,” Anna says to her mom, laughing, “because we can’t find a house!” “I told Wally, ‘They’re gonna have children and they’ll never come back!’” “I cried all night the night she left,” Susan says, thinking back to her daughter’s 2016 departure from the East Coast, as she stands in her backyard with Anna and Tim. Susan, for one, is still pinching herself. And since the beginning July, her parents have been able to get hugs to her in well under 24 seconds, by virtue of the fact that Anna, her husband, Tim Stuckey, and their two young kids are temporarily crashing at Wally and Susan’s home in SouthPark. Then, in June, Anna Kooiman made the surprise announcement that she was returning both to her hometown and to TV, to host a forthcoming “female-focused” lifestyle show for her old station, WCCB Charlotte. Oh, and for almost two of those six years, such trips were just flat-out impossible, due to a global pandemic. For a good bit of the past six years, if Wally and Susan Kooiman wanted to give a hug to their daughter - Anna Kooiman, who famously left a primo Fox News anchor job to move to Australia - it took weeks of planning and close to 24 hours of travel from their Charlotte home.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |