Farewell, Rhea, and Thanks for the Memories

Rhea Feikin prepares now to bid farewell to Baltimore TV, wrappingup a sunny on-air career that started with children and puppets and ended with financialpitches for grown-up Maryland Public Television.

She’s been inside our TV screens for six decades. She came out of 1950s Baltimore public school classrooms, where she worked as a speech pathologist, and volunteered to host TV shows aimed at children with speaking problems: first “Betty Better Speech,” then “Miss Rhea and Sunshine.”

Back then, local TV was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be. Rhea moved to the news department at WBAL, delivering the weather with a puppet named J.P., a mythical creature who looked like an early casting call for “Sesame Street.”

The one and only Rhea Feikin, the grande dame of MPT. (Provided photo)

Rhea didn’t know a thing about the weather, but who cared?The station’s general manager, a local legend named Brent Gunts, told her that viewersdidn’t care about barometric pressure, they just wanted to be amused.

So she and a film editor named Cal Schumann grabbed weather reports off the wire services, and Rhea and J.P. winged it on the air. They were a hit.

She worked alongside Rolf Hertsgaard, Joe Croghan and Royal Parker, and a bunch of others whose names are lost to the dustbin of history. She outlasted them all. She also went on to host a weekly game show for the Maryland Lottery.

Then came a home at MPT. She hosted “Consumer Survival Kit,” ““ArtWorks This Week” and “MPT On Location.” For years, she’s hosted the station’s on-air membership drives and “Artworks” series and “Chesapeake Collectibles.”

But now, Feikin says she’s had enough. This Friday night, Feb. 28, her last episode of “Artworks” will air. On Sunday, Mar. 1, she will sign off “live” for the last time while hosting MPT’s fundraising drive from 7-11 p.m. She’ll be joined on-air by past pledge hosts and Larry Unger, MPT’s president and CEO. They plan to give Feikin a royal send-off throughout the course of the evening.

(Feikin’s actual final MPT appearance will come on Apr. 6 on a new episode of “Chesapeake Collectibles.”)

Feikin, who will turn 85 this summer, still projects a kind of eternal youthfulness and energy and optimism. You could still picture her back in her teen years at Forest Park High School.

But she says it’s time to step aside.

“I’ve loved every minute of television,” Feikin told me the other day. “But I’m old. Things happen to people. I really do want to leave before they want me to leave, and avoid that awful moment when they might reach that point. It’s just time to stop doing it, to stop getting up at a certain time and be at a certain place.

“I’m thankful for all of it. And I’m thankful that people are understanding when we interrupt regular programming for fundraising drives,” she said. “Public television is kept alive by public support. Those drives are extraordinarily important. There’s state money and foundation money, but not enough to survive without public support.”

Feikin’s still in there, pitching away, all the way into the bottom of the ninth inning.

But her mind goes back to her early days in local TV as well when “I was this young Jewish girl, and there I was working with Rolf Hertsgaard,” the first of Baltimore’s star TV news anchors, when the medium was just beginning to muscle print out of the way.

“And Joe Croghan,” the sports anchor who was “a real macho guy,” Feikin recalled, laughing aloud. “I told Joe I was going to Europe on vacation. This is the early ‘60s. He says, ‘You gotta get one of those bikinis.’

“I did get one. I put it on with a raincoat over it. And I stood by the studio camera, and just as Joe came on the air, live, I undid the raincoat. He totally lost it,” she said, laughing at the memory.

“As a woman, I never had any trouble in TV,” Feikin said. “Except that I was working with a puppet on the weather, and Lary Lewman was doing his Pete the Pirate character, and Royal Parker had P.W. Doodle –- and they made a lot more money than I did.

“It annoyed me enormously. But it was a different time. And, as a woman, it was the only gripe I had,” she said. “You put that aside, yes, it was just about 60 years. And honestly, I enjoyed every minute of it.”

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Tonight at 6: A Daily Show Masquerading as Local TV News” (Apprentice House). His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.