The inspiring and uncompromising Melissa Forsythe

On a busy afternoon early in my newspaper reporting career during the mid-1980s, an old friend of our paper's managing editor walked into the newsroom in Corydon, In.

Her name was Melissa Forsythe, but this visitor was much more than just a friend of the boss. Over the previous dozen years, Forsythe had been the best television news reporter in our area, a trailblazer for gender equity and workers rights, and my teenage crush.

Street reporting was at the root of
Melissa Forsythe's career

Forsythe, who died in 2022 at 71, had strong professional talents and unyielding personal will that enabled her to push gender and legal obstacles aside in Louisville broadcasting since she became a street reporter at age 22.

Before all that, Melissa Forsythe had been a high school journalism student of our editor Randy West.

"She just exuded talent," said West, who added that it was his mistake not naming Forsythe editor of the high school paper, though he attributes that to an outstanding journalism class of multiple superb students. "You knew she was going to be a big success. I always thought she was going to wind up on national television someday."

West taught at Corydon Central High School in the mid-1960s before becoming editor, and chief photographer of The Corydon Democrat in 1970. Corydon is 35 miles west of Louisville.

Instead of fulfilling her teacher's belief that she was network TV material, Forsythe achieved the status of Louisville's most recognized TV news fixture over two decades, achieving the highest anchorperson ratings at two stations. She became the city's first woman TV street reporter in 1972 just after finishing college at Indiana University, then in a few years she became Louisville's first anchorwoman.

She started off at WAVE-TV defying a socially conservative community's stereotypes of a sun splashed 22-year-old with a petite frame by carrying heavy TV film cameras made bulkier by tripods and rows of lights.

"She came in and got dirty and sweaty with the rest of us," former WAVE colleague Barry Bernson said in a TV news report of Forsythe's death in February 2022.

                      WHAS recalls the trailblazer Melissa Forsythe

Former WHAS Sports director Dave Conrad, who anchored the station's sports reports from 1976 to 93, said Forsythe, the station's news co-anchor for 12 years during that time, had some paradoxical qualities, including being "very outspoken" over professional issues yet a harmonious work colleague.

"She was personable. I would not say overly sociable," said Conrad, who now lives in Marysville, Ind., about 30 miles north of Louisville. "She was professional at all times. She was one of the best, if not the best journalist that I have ever worked with."

Randy West, who now lives in Bloomington, Ind., said he followed the career of his former student on the airwaves and by chatting with Forsythe at various news assignments where both went, including a few runnings of the Kentucky Derby.

''She was a good journalist. She knew what good TV writing was, and it is different from the kind of writing I knew," West said. "If she were going to be in a newsroom and you were going to be working with her, or for her, she wanted you to be the very best and she would help you."

He said Forsythe's quick reactions at sites of ever changing news stories was another of her strengths. I saw that verified during that impromptu Corydon Democrat newsroom visit.

It so happened that on the very day she dropped in, a state investigation had just resulted in charges of financial mismanagement in a county government office.

Instantly, Melissa was on one of our happily donated desk phones, calling in the breaking story to her employer WHAS-TV, who put it on the upcoming noon TV newscast. Even on a social call, Melissa's work went on, and she was unfazed shifting gears.

With the same methodical and probing technique, Forsythe covered stories of international interest, including the world's second artificial heart implant, the rise of singer John Mellencamp, and the deaths of 25 people -- 22 of them children -- when a drunk driver crashed into a church bus in 1988 near Carrollton, Ky. in the nation's worst drunk driving accident.

"I will always remember the work that she did on the bus crash," Dave Conrad said. "In light of the tragedy she was succinct in her reporting. It was factual and not overly emotive, which is what a journalist needs to be in such a difficult time."

Conrad also said an intangible aspect of the television profession helped Forsythe succeed. "She was so photogenic that on camera it looked like 3-D. She just popped out at you" he said. "She had the 'it' factor.... I can't explain what that is, but you know it when you see it."

Forsythe's even toned voice and unflappable style validated an image of seriousness those in the industry tended to hold of her. West said it's not the whole story.

"She was funny. She loved to laugh" he said. "She was very smart.... She read a lot."

Forsythe died at her Louisville home of natural causes, but her family released no more details, reflecting a trait of Melissa herself.

"She was the most private public figure I have ever been around," former colleague Doug Proffitt said during Melissa's posthumous induction into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame shortly after her death.

Her public persona once took the form of a newsmaker rather than a reporter. By the late 1970s, though lighter minicams had replaced those film cameras which had been so ungainly, Melissa Forsythe deftly carried another burden - this one in the courtroom, rather than the newsroom.

In a drawn out and highly public legal case, Orion Broadcasting v. Forsythe, she won the right to move to crosstown WHAS-TV in 1979, despite an onerous non-competition clause WAVE tried to impose after its station management decided not to renew her contract.

In a case which media dubbed "The Forsythe Saga," the judge's precedent setting decision said that because Melissa Forsythe had not left WAVE voluntarily, the station's pre-existing requirement that reporters not work for a competing station for a full year infringed on her rights.

Though she was an equally great success over a dozen years at her new employer, WHAS decided to drop Forsythe in 1991. She served as the press spokesperson for Kentucky Governor Paul Patton from 1996 to 2000 during the first of his two terms.

While Forsythe was still at WAVE in the mid-70s, I recall reading in a newspaper profile of her that she and other college students had formed a self-made news service to cover the Democratic and Republican political conventions for various local media, phoning in news stories of interest to their clients' regions.

This endeavor stayed in my mind, and a couple of years after I left the Corydon Democrat staff in 1985 I co-founded, with the help of an independent photojournalist, a similar arrangement for regional print media.

This informal news service took us around the upper South and lower Midwest writing feature stories about people -- often athletes and musicians -- to be published by a small set of client newspapers in the hometowns or regions of the subjects.

The crescendo was a working trip in 1987 to Washington, D.C., where I wrote three feature stories for two newspapers about Southern Indiana people who had risen to various heights on Congressional staffs or other institutions.

Financial realities finally caught up with me, but after the gig was no longer viable, I started doing independent wire service reporting for Associated Press and United Press International, also traveling quite a bit.

Though that "it" factor may not so heavily impact print journalism, the many other factors of Melissa Forsythe have gone with me. 

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Brian Arbenz is from New Albany, Ind., where he grew up watching Melissa Forsythe's coverage of his community and the wider Louisville area.

Colleague Doug Proffitt tells "the Hall of Fame worthy story" of Melissa Forsythe: