Before the Cameras

After more than 35 years as a television anchorman, award-winning journalist Hoyt Harris recounts shenanigans from his Tennessee youth in high school and college that culminate in a federal offense. Before cameras become "the wallpaper" of his professional life, he takes you along on a transatlantic voyage when, at 16, he competes drunk in a dance contest during a fierce storm at sea. You are in the Vatican when his name is screamed in St. Peter's Basilica during an attempted rape. The reader also learns why it took a full year for his close encounter with a Maui shark to finally scare him "witless." Once he enters the "wild and often wacky world" of broadcasting, he gives the reader an up close and personal look at what it's like to stalk an elusive pop diva/icon for a news story and to spend more than half the weeknights of his life before the cameras, anchoring more than 17,000 newscasts. He takes the reader on location for a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of the Peter Sellers/Shirley MacLaine movie Being There in which Harris winds up cast in a speaking role. Harris says he never wanted a life of routine. His memoir Before the Cameras shows he got anything but.