KUTV's newest anchor doesn't want to be tied to that anchor desk.
"I want to also be allowed to report," said Christie O'Connor. "I want that hands-on feel for the community an what the community's concerns are."She'll be out in the field doing some reporting, but the main reason she's headed to Salt Lake City from WGHP in Greensboro, N.C., is to replace 5 p.m. co-anchor Kathy Brock.
Brock is headed for the ABC affiliate in Chicago in June, which is when O'Connor will make the move to Utah.
She's currently a weekend anchor at WGHP, and this will be her first shot at a major anchoring post.
"My forte is investigation," O'Conner said.
She recently won first place in an Associated Press contest for her investigative piece on s series of arsenic poisonings.
"We did a story on this woman who allegedly poisoned several of her past lovers, including her most recent husband," she said. "They ended up exhuming nine bodies and found that she had indeed poisoned three of them."
While O'Connor comes to Salt Lake City with some experience in television news, she readily admits she doesn't know much about the city yet. "I've been there just once, and that was to interview," she said.
She added that she has read a couple of books on the area. Unfortunately, one of those was "The Mormon Murders," the hatchet job on the Mark Hofmann case done by a pair of New York authors. A number of their sources have claimed they were misquoted and the book is generally believed, at least locally, to be the least accurate and most unflattering of the three published.
Hopefully, she didn't take its portrayal of Utah too seriously.
O'Connor does have roots in this part of the country, having grown up in Boulder, Colo. and worked in California.
"I love the West," she said. "Utah is very close to home for me.
"And I'm a real outdoors person. I love to (snow) ski and water ski, so Utah looks great to me."
O'Connor looks pretty good to KUTV news director Dan Webster. She wasn't on his list when the position opened up, but made a big impression with her audition tape.
"I took a look at the tape she sent in and was very interested," Webster said. "She really jumped out of the pack."
O'Connor said she was equally impressed with the staff at KUTV when she was in town for her interview.
"And not only with the news director and the owner," she said. "I talked extensively with employees on every level. From top to bottom, it's a great operation - very people-oriented."
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For KUTV's news director, it's one news anchor down and one to go.
He's hired O'Connor to replace the soon-to-depart Brock. Now if he could just get some relief for Bob Evans, who seems to be anchoring just about every newscast Ch. 2 has.
Actually, Evans is only anchoring the 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. shows Monday through Friday. And the search for some relief for Salt Lake's most-used anchor continues.
"We're still looking for another male anchor," Webster said. "We've talked to a bunch of people and done some narrowing down, but I don't know when we'll have a name."
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I'll admit it. I love Lucy.
I've seen all 179 episodes of that original Lucille Ball series - most of them several times. I've laughed until I couldn't stand it anymore as Lucy got drunk doing that Vitameatavegamin commercial. I've had tears in my eyes when Lucy let Ricky know she was expecting.
So I'm very excited about tonight's I Love Lucy: The Very First Show (9 p.m., Ch. 5). It's the much-anticipated, long-lost series pilot that Lucy and Desi made with $5,000 of their own money in early 1951.
The plot is much the same as so many later episodes: Desi has a chance to audition for a TV show and Lucy can't help but try and horn in on it.
There are a couple of differences: Desi's character is named Larry Lopez instead of Ricky Ricardo, and Fred and Ethel Mertz haven't join the cast yet.
Wrapped around the 34-minute pilot is a Lucie Arnaz-hosted special that includes series highlights and interviews.
Elsewhere on TV, My Two Dads (7 p.m., Ch. 2) wraps up the season with a cliffhanger in which Joey tries to stop his old girlfriend at the altar; Tim Conway guest stars on Newhart (7:30 p.m., Ch. 5); McCall meets the man of her dreams on the first of a two-part Hunter (8 p.m., Ch. 2); and Murphy Brown (8 p.m., Ch. 5) plays Cyrano to Miles' Christian - via a fax machine.
-LOOKING TOWARD TUESDAY: Rescue 911 (7 p.m., Ch. 5) includes a segment on a 911 operator in Utah who tried to hold a gunman on the line as he held two women captive; Roseanne (8 p.m., Ch. 4) tries to repair the relationship between Dan and Becky; and Oprah Winfrey comes to primetime with the premiere of Brewster Place (8:30 p.m., Ch. 4).