March 6 - Retirement Dinner

Ann Shepherd retired from Cedar Falls' ABC affiliate on March 6, 2010. Her retirement was commemorated with a dinner that featured a montage of her most noteworthy clips as a reporter.
Naturally, the bulk of the clips came from her stint as one of Iowa's first female sportscasters during the 1970s. The position had not come to her easily. Over a stretch of almost nine years, she put in far more than her fair share of research, copy editing, statistics crunching, and fact checking before she finally got her break as a last (last, last) second replacement for Fred Hammond (who'd caught a nasty cold) to cover the 1972 high school football championship game.
And she crushed it.
Her talent was undeniable so the reports continued and she never looked back, spending the next 30-plus years reporting sports across Iowa and the country, and on a few occasions (the 1988 Olympics in Seoul and the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona) overseas.
Whenever she would be invited to give talks at her alma mater, University of Iowa's School of Journalism, it was inevitable that one of the female professors or students would call her or her work pioneering and talk about how she had paved the way for all of them. Ann always found those accolades flattering but embarrassing. She never thought of herself as a pioneer. Throughout her career, she'd only been doing what she loved doing: talking about sports. If her hard work (and she had definitely worked hard) made it easier for other women to follow in her path, that was great, but she felt funny about accepting their praise, mostly because being a trailblazer (their word, not hers) was never her intention.
In a way, she felt like her entire career and subsequent legacy were at least partially misunderstood. True, she'd always loved sports. The only child of a high school football coach and his football loving wife, Ann had just been brought up watching, talking, and living football. But it's not like it was her only interest. Her mother was a piano teacher and had taught Ann from when she was in kindergarten. And unlike other children who sometimes shied away from their parents' interests, Ann enjoyed the piano immensely and continued playing it through high school, college, and all of her adult life. In fact, she had often toyed with the idea of walking away from sports and trading her career for what she saw as the quieter, more down to earth life of a music teacher.
Life on the road was exciting, though: During the fall, she traveled with the Hawkeyes and in the spring she covered the triple A Cedar Rapids Kernels, and it was during those times that she felt the most alive. But it was also when she felt the most exhausted and lonely. That was when it became incredibly easy to idealize the life of her old college roommate who taught piano and voice at the high school where they had been students. As a broadcaster, she was always on the move. New people were always coming and going, and moving on to bigger markets, different cities, or other affiliates. Yes, it kept things lively, but she often wondered what it would be like to be a part of something steadier and more grounded--to watch and help children grow and mature, to be a part of their development, and to have them come back one day and visit after they had graduated and tell her what a difference she had made. In a way, this happened whenever she visited Iowa's journalism classes, but it wasn't the same as how she imagined it would be as a high school teacher. It lacked the personal connection.
Not that she regretted her career choice. She didn't, not at all. But during those milestone moments like her retirement party, it was hard not to get reflective and play the 'what if' game. As the montage film of her career achievements came to a close, she thought to herself that maybe somewhere in a parallel universe, another Ann Shepherd--otherwise completely identical to the sportscaster Ann Shepherd--was living out her fantasy of being a high school music teacher.
She smiled to herself, accepted their applause, and thought about what she would be doing this time tomorrow.
Maybe playing the piano.