Mark Ockerbloom anchored the news at Boston 25 for 22 years. He signed off on May 15th, closing out 40 years in broadcasting, and by the time he sat down with me he had been out 109 days and had stopped counting in days.
His father, Dick Ockerbloom, started at the Boston Globe as a clerk out of Northeastern’s co-op program and rose to president — the business side, the part that paid for the newsroom. So Mark grew up watching one media business get built, then spent his own career watching another one come apart. I wanted to know what four decades of that looked like from the chair.
We cover the Boston Marathon bombing and the week that followed, taking a job in Oklahoma City two weeks after the Murrah Building came down, the Merrimack Valley gas explosions, the move from sportscaster to news anchor, sitting beside Maria Stephanos and then Vanessa Welch, five Emmys and a Silver Circle he insists belong to the whole staff, Bobby Orr and the only autograph he ever asked for, and what a closet full of unworn suits looks like a hundred days into whatever this is.
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Stay wicked, Boston.
