The latest on three popular broadcasters who first started surfing the airwaves during the rabbit- ears era
Cumulatively, their careers span more than a century. Back in the day, we invited them into our homes each night while dining on frozen fish sticks and TV dinners. Long before the Internet and social media, the trio provided a lone, critical link to the rest of the world at 6 p.m. sharp. Otherwise, you had to wait for the morning paper.
We caught up with each in retirement, only to hear the official report: they haven’t slowed down yet.
Meet the Local Broadcast Legends
Annette Estes/Anchor, WSPA & WYFF 4
While Barbara Walters paved the way for female journalists nationally, Annette Estes owned the same stretch of news desk locally. In 1977, she became the first female news anchor at a top-forty station. Across fifteen years at WSPA and WYFF 4, she outlasted five different male co-anchors. “They were wonderful years,” she admits. “I wrote a book about that time in 2009, Mouthing Off: Exploits of an Outspoken Anchorwoman. Yeah, if I knew then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have been so outspoken.”
The seventy-nine-year-old is quick to laugh and tell the story that’s grown in Upstate lore—when she dropped the F-bomb on live TV while anchoring at Channel 7. “People think I got fired over that,” she reveals. “But that’s not what happened. The stage manager was crawling across the floor to hand a mic to the weather person because theirs wasn’t working. I was off-camera, and turned to my co-anchor and whispered, ‘Why don’t they check the f-ing mics?’ I didn’t know it, but my mic was hot. Not many people heard it during the newscast; it’s when the station made me apologize during the 6 and 11 that the switchboard lit up.” The infamous fudge-up took place in July. Estes stayed at Channel 7 through the end of the year, but didn’t renew her contract the following January, preferring to jump ship to WYFF 4. “I’d been at WSPA for a decade. I needed to go somewhere else, and they offered a lot more money,” she shares with a hearty chuckle.
In 1991, she put down her mic for good, and eventually moved to Fairfield, Iowa, where her brother lives. She became a certified behavioral analyst and started her own business, working with companies to assess employees’ values for team building and provide life coaching. She also dove into transcendental meditation. “They have programs here where people meditate in large groups,” she explains. “It makes it more powerful. I love it. I just love life. I’m very positive. One of the best things that I’ve ever heard is, ‘Live in the present.’ Remember the past. Plan for the future but live in the present. I’ll never forget when I became the lead story, but it all worked out. I don’t regret anything. My life is great.”
John Cessarich/Meteorologist, WYFF 4
The master of meteorologists was the calm in every storm, guiding millions of Upstate viewers through blizzards, floods, and hurricanes for almost three decades at WYFF News 4. Almost three years into retirement, he still can’t take his eyes off the sky. “It’s in my blood,” Cessarich reveals with a smile. “I knew I wanted to do this since I was in third grade. Just because I’m not in the weather center anymore, that drive and interest doesn’t go away.”
So, what has gone away? The time-consuming shackles of the news business that limit travel. Cessarich now likes to stay on the move with his wife, Connie, or with other family members. He’s returned home to Kansas, retraced his early broadcast steps in Albany, New York, and frequently heads to Myrtle Beach. “We don’t have grandkids yet,” he shares. “So, we hit the road. We just got back from Florida, where I came to a major realization: I don’t want to be around a bunch of old people in a senior living center. It’s either ‘Somebody has died, or someone’s in the hospital.’ I like coming back to Myrtle and seeing a bunch of little kids and young families running around.”
Cessarich is hoping to run around himself. When he first retired, a goal was to jump back into his childhood sport of tennis. He’s since discovered pickleball. “I first tried it years ago, while doing a ‘John on the Road’ at Lake Keowee,” he says. “It includes two of my favorite sports: ping pong and tennis. You just need eye-hand coordination and to be quick. I’m still that, even though I’m an old buzzard. It keeps you in pretty decent shape, and I want to be outside.”
Inside, he and Connie are still figuring out their new routine. “I’m still a night owl and she’s a morning gal,” he states, laughing. “I used to get home and go to bed at 2 a.m., so we avoided this. At first when I retired, she’d be really chatty in the morning. Finally, I said, ‘I just need a cup of coffee and [to] watch Sportscenter before I start talking.’” He still likes to stay up late, and when it’s quiet, he thinks of his former colleagues in the newsroom. “I miss the WYFF family every day,” he laments. “They were my family for over twenty-eight years. That camaraderie and friendship doesn’t just go away.”
Kenn Sparks/Anchor, WFBC-WYFF 4
His voice is still unmistakable, resonating with bass tones that have witnessed history from the front row. Barely a few years “off the clock,” Kenn Sparks has returned home to his native California. “Retirement for me is a whole new career,” the seventy-year-old reveals. “I am now one of the official guides for the city of San Francisco. I love the history of the city. I love the history of the West. I take groups of people from all over the world on walking tours of this great place, sharing stories of the Barbary Coast, the Gold Rush, all of it.”
Viewers may recall some of the top stories Sparks presented while working at WFBC and WYFF across eighteen years. A favorite is the time he rode on the back of an open train platform with then-President George H.W. Bush, crossing the Carolina countryside. “It was just the two of us for about twenty minutes and he wanted to know all about the small towns we were passing through,” Sparks recalls. “He was running for re-election. He asked about BMW and then used some of those comments when appearing in Spartanburg. He had wonderful things to say.”
BMW would catch Sparks’ attention as well. In 1994, the anchor/reporter left WYFF News 4 to form his own media company that served the automotive manufacturer. BMW would eventually pull Sparks in-house, where he worked nationally and internationally, until stepping down in 2019. “I’m loving this new chapter,” he shares. “I’m still delivering history. That’s what brought me to journalism; you get to experience history in a way you wouldn’t as a regular person. I’ve lived some of it long enough, I’m now a part of that history. Wow! I had never thought of it that way.”
