Maureen O’Boyle will leave WBTV in July. Here’s what she’s thinking about doing next.
On Tuesday morning, Maureen O’Boyle showed up in WBTV’s newsroom ready to make a bold statement, for the second day in a row.
“I thought — when I was getting ready for work — ‘I’m wearing my hair curly today,’” the Channel 3 news anchor told The Charlotte Observer by phone Tuesday, from the front seat of her Subaru while on her lunch break. “‘It will look ridiculous, probably, but I’ve been straightening my hair with hot irons since I was 19 years old, and mmmmm, I don’t think I’m gonna do that today. Maybe tomorrow.’”
While the hairstyle might have been a bit of a surprise, less than 24 hours earlier, she’d made a much bigger, much bolder statement. O’Boyle, one of the station’s most high-profile anchors, revealed on Monday that she would be leaving the position she’s held at WBTV for almost 18 years at the end of July, just over two weeks after she turns 59 years old.
She told her co-workers first, then talked about it on the 6 p.m. newscast with her co-anchor Jamie Boll — then breathed a sigh of relief.
“I wasn’t super-sad like I thought I would be,” she says. “I was surprised at how happy I felt. And that just kind of affirms to me what I felt deep down in my heart, that I was making the right decision when I told them I didn’t want a new contract.”
Once she’d told co-workers and the segment had aired, she posted a link to the station’s news release on her Facebook page. An avalanche of well wishes flooded into the comments section. “You’re a great broadcaster and have earned a well-deserved retirement,” one wrote. “Have a happy retirement,” another chimed, “and enjoy your free time!”
Careful viewers and astute readers, however, may have noted something important while digesting O’Boyle’s announcement: She never used the word retirement.
In fact, she’s weighing several different directions.
None, so far, involve news. And most, at this point, involve her wearing her hair curly a lot more often.
From L.A. to a log cabin and back (to Charlotte)
O’Boyle made a big splash when she returned to her hometown of Charlotte to work for WBTV late in the summer of 2004, at the age of 41. After all, she’d gained a fair amount of fame in her two decades since leaving.
A product of Cotswold Elementary, Randolph Middle, Charlotte Catholic and West Charlotte High, she dropped out of East Carolina University as a sophomore, she says, on the advice of some of her teachers. She says they basically told her that her prodigious amount of potential as a broadcaster coupled with her underwhelming academic performance (due, she says, to dyslexia) — and, on top of that, ECU’s failed promise to make a mass communications degree available — made ditching school worth the risk.
The gamble would wind up paying off.
After bouncing around reporting jobs in Wilmington, Macon, Georgia, and Spokane, Washington, O’Boyle caught the eye of the syndicated tabloid-TV show “A Current Affair.” She landed a job as a reporter in 1986, and four years later, she succeeded Maury Povich as the show’s host.
Then in 1994, she was lured to help host another syndicated show: the L.A.-based “Extra,” which saw her reporting on entertainment news and celebrity gossip.
She looked, sounded and carried herself so perfectly with a microphone in her hand and a script in front of her that, in the ’90s, Hollywood cast her several times as herself in a variety of TV series and films — including the movie “So I Married an Axe Murderer” and sitcoms like “Caroline in the City” and “The Larry Sanders Show.”
But in 1999, she gave birth to her first and only child, daughter Keegan; and right before Keegan’s first birthday, O’Boyle left her job at “Extra” and moved to New York to raise her daughter as a single mother.
From 2000 to 2003, they lived in a 100-year-old log cabin on a 28-acre farm in Woodstock, New York, 2-1/2 hours north of New York City. Then in the fall of 2003, she started splitting her time between the cabin and an apartment in Manhattan’s financial district as she tried to get a new career going as a voice-over actor.
It was when she ran into another voice actor on the subway after one of her auditions that the seed was planted for her to come home.
“‘Why are you trying to start this now?’” O’Boyle recalls the man asking her. “‘You’re still so good. I know you from television. Why don’t you go back to television?’ And I said, Well, who would have me? I mean, I’ve been on this entertainment show. I can’t really see that that’s a possibility.’ He said, ‘What? What are you talking about? Don’t you know people in local news somewhere?’
“And I said, ‘Well, in fact, I do, but I hadn’t really thought about that.’”
So she did. And after thinking about it, she reached out to people who knew people at WBTV — because Charlotte made so much sense, given that her parents were there, and most of her eight siblings were there.
She gambled again, taking a co-anchor job opposite Paul Cameron, Tonia Bendickson and Shannon Bream.
It paid off, again.
‘The thing I don’t know that people realize’
When people look back at her 18 years with WBTV, O’Boyle hopes that, first, they remember her as a great storyteller.
She says her knack for narrating news stems from growing up with so many brothers and sisters, explaining that “to get the floor, so to speak, at the kitchen table, you had to be a good storyteller, and you had to be articulate, and you had to tell it with interest and drama.”
She also says she hopes to be remembered for her clarity, and says that trait was instilled in her from a young age, too. “My best friend growing up across the street (had hearing issues), but she read lips. So I speak very clearly. I hear that from viewers all the time. They’re like, ‘Thank you so much. I can watch your newscast and I can understand everything you’re saying. You’re so articulate.’”
But as much as anything else — maybe more — it’s this paragraph from WBTV’s announcement that she takes pride in.
“O’Boyle has always been an advocate for the people of Charlotte and the surrounding areas,” the release said. “Her list of volunteer and charity work is beyond impressive. She has donated her time and efforts to countless causes, including Dress for Success, Second Harvest Food Bank, Latin Americans Working for Achievement (LAWA), the Crop Walk, and the Boys & Girls Club of Gaston County, just to name a few.”
Indeed, if you search the newspaper archives for her name, you’ll find a raft of stories about charity-related events in which she’s noted as being honorary chairperson, or guest speaker, or emcee, or host, or moderator, or grand marshal, and on and on.
“I just counted back to 2014, and it was up in the hundreds,” O’Boyle says. “So those are weekends, mornings, evening-gown rentals, you know, all of this stuff to support and raise funds for boots-to-the-ground organizations that are changing people’s lives. That is my legacy. It’s not what I did on WBTV. It was what I did when I was off-camera.”
And this is the point she says she wants to make most about that: “I’ve never been paid for any of my events that I do. Not a single dime in 18 years. ... That is the thing I don’t know that people realize. It was my heart.”
What life looks like after WBTV
As for the directions she’s thinking of heading off in from here?
“There are so many different things that I have in mind,” O’Boyle says.
In the short term, it’s pretty simple. She’ll focus on hobbies. Some traveling, for sure, and just general excitement “to play in my yard, do my DIY projects. I’ve already asked (a friend) who’s a local builder, can he teach me how to frame? Because I’ve been to several Habitat (for Humanity) builds and been the girl who was too scared to pick up a hammer.”
At some point, she might take an online course or two, but shoots down any serious talk of finishing college.
“I don’t want to make any promises about anything, because they kind of bit me in the rear end when I declared that I was gonna try to get my degree,” she explains, recalling a time back in the 2000s when she told others she had plans to do it but decided it was too much to take on as a working, single mother. Besides, she says, not having a college education “doesn’t seem to really affect my future. So I don’t know about that.”
In terms of second careers, she’s got a couple in mind.
One would be making another go at doing voice-over work; “that,” she says, “is one of my most favorite things to do — reading books on tape and interpretative readings and things like that.”
The other will seem like a much harder-right turn ... although she thinks anyone who really knows her won’t be surprised.
“I’ve been trying to find a brick-and-mortar building for an antique store for about seven months now,” she says. “I’ve looked between Hendersonville and Charlotte.”
Antiquing, she says, has “been a part of my life since I was in third grade” — her parents even owned an antique store in Connecticut for awhile — “and it was the way I got to have special time with my mom, as eight of 10 children on a Saturday morning, when she knocked on my door and said, ‘I’m sneaking out to garage sales. Do you wanna come?’ It was, ‘Oh my gosh! I get to have alone time with Mom. Absolutely!’ Studying art, studying furniture, studying its meaning in a culture at a different time, has always been something that my mom passed on to me.
“So I can’t say I’m retiring, because if I open a store, that’s a lot of work! Even more work in some ways,” O’Boyle continues. “But I can be in jeans and a T-shirt. I’ll be so happy not to have to be dressed up every day.”
“I’m a mountain girl. I’m a curly-haired, not-a-lot-of-makeup, play-in-the-dirt mountain girl. ... I just really like peace and quiet in the country.”
Or, at least, in the most peaceful, most quiet, most countrified part of Charlotte she can find.
This story was originally published May 4, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Maureen O’Boyle will leave WBTV in July. Here’s what she’s thinking about doing next.."
