You Don’t Always Know Why, with Kathy Fernandez Blunt
Above: Photo of Kathy on a trip to Bermuda
Kathy Fernandez Blunt (Kathy) knows how to live life. She’s a beloved regular at Myrtle who loves to shares stories about her years as an Emmy-nominated news producer, touring tennis player, mother, and of travels around the world. Born in North Carolina, Kathy spend her teen years in NYC before following love to East Providence. Once in the Ocean State, she studied at Bryant and Brown, taking up admin jobs at school and Trinity Rep. Kathy’s a naturally curious “in the mix” type person; that energy got her looped in with WSBE-TV as a producer and panelist for a public affairs show which in turn, lead to further education at the Northeast School of Broadcasting in Boston. During that same period she’d started a gig at WJAR Radio (NBC), proved her chops, and became the first Black woman there to hold the position of Weekend News Reporter.
Family connections then brought Kathy to D.C. where she served as host, producer, and writer for a number of critically acclaimed programs including Eye on Washington (WDCA) and Black Reflections. In addition, Kathy’s found time to raise a family, own multiple video rental stores, support organizations like Black Miss America and the United Negro College Fund, and sneak in a little mountain climbing, too. We recently visited Kathy’s home in East Providence, turned a recorder on, and asked her to share whatever she felt like sharing. What follows are excerpts from that conversation, edited down for this format. Kathy’s currently at work on her full life story.
The Well (TW): Kathy where do you want to sit?
Kathy Fernandez Blunt (Kathy): I'm cooking Portuguese meal, Cachupa. It’s like the Cape Verdean Munchupa. Would you like a glass of wine or something?
TW: Yeah, sure. Sure, thank you.
Kathy: You saw the pictures of my daughter, Pam? She looks very much like her mama, I mean her daddy. [Showing photos] This is my husband at a play at Trinity Rep. It was a Shakespearean play. You know I started in Trinity?
TW: Tell me about that.
Kathy: Well first I was a file clerk at Admiral TV. Somebody told me to check out Brown—it was Christine Hathaway, who was Secretary to the Librarian—she told me take a couple of courses there at night and blah, blah, blah. Someone spotted me somewhere and whatever I was doing, they thought I should go to Trinity. This is when they were in the Trinity Church. I started out as an assistant. What do you call it?
TW: A stage manager?
Kathy: No, no. It was…Executive Assistant. I was also in charge at times...at night, you know when the play is playing. Adrian Hall was the artistic director, and he wanted to know if I wanted to be his and Marion Simon’s assistant. I knew all the actors. So when we went to Edinburgh, I had to get all their birth certificates so I could get them their passports. I don't know if you remember the actor Richard Kneeland? He said, “Kathy, if you tell my age, I’ll have to kill you.” Everybody wanted to play young roles. I said, “Richard, please, I've kept all the secrets.”
TW: Where are you at in life right now? There’s a lot of boxes around here.
Kathy: Well, I'm very befuddled. Is that a word, still? Yeah, my grandma used to use that word. [Someday] this house will be sold. I have my name in at a couple of really nice senior living places. I have property in North Carolina but I don't want to move there. I’ve been away from there since I was 12; I had moved to NYC after my mother passed.
Above: Kathy getting reading to head out to work at WJAR in 1973
TW: So, just no connection there anymore.
Kathy: Yes, all my doctors and other people are in Rhode Island. I go to visit but wouldn’t want to stay. You know, my niece was killed in the World Trade Center and she was a wonderful, gorgeous child who was living with my brother in both NYC and North Carolina.
TW: On 9/11?
Kathy: Second building. I was at the foot doctors when the first [plane] hit Building One. Everybody was like, “What?” They were telling the people in Building Two, which was where my niece was, “Oh, stay put, it's an accident.” Well, then they said, “You've got to get out,” but it was too late. They couldn't use the elevator and they all burned up. I was living in Maryland at the time and I went to be with my brother in Brooklyn, which is where they all lived, and we had to go and bring identification and stuff. Ten years later they found her torso and they shipped it to our home at our church in North Carolina. So I mean, I don't want to go back there. I love it there when I visit, but I don't think I can live there.
[A beeping sound is heard from the kitchen]
Kathy: That's my pot. I don't wanna burn it... We have to cook it in different parts, because you've got pig feet, which are very tough to cook, so you cook that all by itself. And then we've got spare ribs and and then it's beans, all kinds of different beans and kale.
TW: How long have you been in this house? And how’d you end up here?
Kathy: Well, I only lived in this house since 2003. [Years before,] I met a guy in New York and we got married, and so I had to come up to East Providence, which was like…I couldn't just like, walk down the street and go to Broadway anymore. I couldn’t just take a bus or you know, but I got used to it. He’s Spanish and Native, but had been adopted by a Cape Verdean family. My grandmother’s Native, too. So anyway, he passed away and that's a long story. I remarried about five years later. I had bought a house on Lancaster Street in Providence. Do you know Lancaster Street? Yeah, Raymond Patriarca.
Above: Kathy at WDCA in Washtington, DC.
TW: The mob boss?
Kathy: Nice man, my height. Had a black poodle. When he walked the dog there was a goon on each end of the street just in case somebody wanted to pop. I did the story when I was at WJAR.
TW: You did a story when he died, or something else?
Kathy: When Bobo Marrapese supposedly killed Dickie Callei. The story was that Raymond had it done by Bobo when Raymond was away in jail, but there was never any proof of it. You know that scene in the Godfather, in the restaurant?
TW: I’ve actually never seen The Godfather.
Kathy: That's a scene that they supposedly stole from us. One version of the story was that in Johnston, Bobo and Raymond had told everybody to go to the restaurant. That was when the telephones were around from the bar. They were all sitting there drinking and the bartender said, “Dickie, you have a phone call.” So Dickie gets up, goes around the corner and a couple of guys went with him to the phone...when the guys were all gone Dickie was there with 37 stab wounds or something crazy like that. I'm working on this story, I'm new! I’d just graduated from Northeast School of Broadcasting.
TW: How did it get assigned to you? I feels like an intense gig.
Kathy: I had never covered anything like this. The station said, “Kathy, you've got to go.” Knowing what had happened and being new to the industry, it was very intimidating. So my first, my first real gig for TV, yeah. I was the Weekend Reporter.
I had to talk to the cops. The police called and told us where the killers had dumped Callie's body, it was in the Rehoboth area. The police took the body to the morgue, whatever the cops did. I was asking my bosses, “Well, what are we going to do? Take pictures of it?” He said, “Yeah, because you're going to see blood everywhere.” So I said, “Ooh, this is exciting.” It was during the time when we had one color camera and one black and white, and if you wanted to see red blood...use the color camera! The cameraman was a sweetheart. So we were going. A cop said “It's down there, it's a one-way road on the left-hand side.”
Above: Kathy’s press pass from the mid 1970s.
TW: This is not sounding particularly safe.
Kathy: It's one way in and one way out. We're driving along and I'm like, “Oh, my god, we're not alone.” We see this car following us, a yellow Volkswagen, unmarked, and we have the WJAR News Watch 10 logo on our car...everybody knew who we were. So I'm thinking, and the car is coming behind us, and I said to my driver, “You know, I think we should just pull over and let them get ahead of us. Either that or they're going to kill us.” They pulled up next to us and it turned out they were from the Taunton Gazette.
TW: They scooped you on the story?
Kathy: I don’t know, since they were from a different station. But they’d gone ahead and said they couldn't find it. We drove maybe a quarter of a mile further and there it was. We got out and took pictures and it looked to me, it looked like they buried him in his car. I mean, this was a huge spot that they put him in. So we got back and we did the story and you know, I couldn't tell all that. I just said, “Blah, blah, blah...the police called and said yada, yada had been killed.” There was no clue that it was Raymond Patriarca doing until later—I knew some of the gangsters; I was all over Federal Hill so I knew everybody there.
TW: You knew them through reporting or socially.
Kathy: Socially, yeah. Mostly reporting, though, and the thing about it...on the news, you only got a minute and a half tops. Most of the time it's a half, but this was a minute. I managed to get through it and I ended with you know, “Call the police,” and I gave the police number if you want to know more.
Above: Kathy at the Washington Emmy Awards
TW: I think I have this right, you were the first Black female news reporter at WJAR?
Kathy: They had a couple of Black people working as photographers. I forget, but yeah. I'm in contact with them now—they just had their 75th anniversary about four months ago and they omitted me. I have a lot of pictures, but the people there now, I think the only one that's there now that was there during my time is Barbara Morse Silva. The guy that has a Sunday show said to me, “Kathy, you need to call her,” so I called, and she hasn't called me back. It's been four months. I don't want anything, but I want to know why they left me out.
TW: It's a fairly important distinction.
Kathy: Yeah, absolutely, and you'd think they would be proud of having the first woman of color as a local news reporter.
TW: Well, maybe someone will read this and reach out! What are some other memorable stories that you covered?
Speaker: Okay, we got a call from the police, who said a woman had been murdered by her husband in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Johnston. So the news desk said, “Kathy, you're going to have to go to Kentucky Fried and interview the people there, because somebody was murdered.”
So I got there and I saw Donald, my friend who owned it, and he felt really bad. He said couple had separated—the husband and wife, and he didn't want to let her go. She worked there and he drove up in the parking lot...as she was getting out the door, her husband went over and said, “Come with me,” and this is what they all told me. She said no, so he put her in the car, drove about a quarter of a mile.
I got all these pictures, beautiful pictures from Kentucky Fried. He shot her first, in the car, and then he shot himself. His car veered off the road into somebody's property with trees. When I got there, the cops came over and said “You don't want to take any pictures of the interior of that car,” and I was like, “Why?” He said we could go up there and take pictures outside the car, but nothing inside, out of respect for her, and him too I guess. That was pretty sad. I mean, the Bobo story was scary, but this was sad. To know that could happen to somebody.
TW: I would describe you as an upbeat person, and I'm curious how you compartmentalize seeing things like that—does it get to you?
Kathy: I'm not sure. It was very sad, and the policeman told me not to look inside. But you know, here I am being a nosy new reporter, whatever. I wished I hadn't, but it's in my mind. Compartmentalizing something like that, I don't know how I did it—just being a new reporter and getting out of broadcasting school...trying to show that I learned something and putting it in the right place. The who, what, when, where, whatever. You don't always know why.
Above: Kathy’s graduation photo, Washington Irving High School, NYC, 1954.
TW: What your overall sense of Rhode Island was during your time as a reporter. Like a big picture understanding of the state, maybe?
Kathy: Yeah. Well, my brother had come up from New York to visit and he said, “Oh wow, look at this little place. I saw a sign that said Welcome to Rhode Island and a block later it said Come Back Again! God, he was so funny! But my feelings...I just had no intention of doing anything except maybe getting a job, because my daughter was born when....Oh, okay, before. That was when I did the Emmett Till story. [content warning: graphic images of violence].
TW: Actually let’s maybe switch and follow that—you started talking about it the first time we met.
Kathy: Emmett was killed in 1955. We, I mean, my husband was Roland Fernandez, we were traveling from New York all across the country selling magazines like Look, Life, and Readers’ Digest. We’d been to New Orleans during Mardi Gras and there was a famous restaurant at the time called Buster Holmes in New Orleans that said they had the best ribs in the South.
TW: I think every place in the South makes that claim.
Kathy: It's true! I make my own barbecue sauce. I learned from my grandpa. So we were doing this in 1956 and got to Money, Mississippi. And so my husband, a big tall white guy and me, a cute little brown girl or whatever, had to stop in Money, Mississippi, which we didn't know, we just were stopping along the way. We stayed in every white hotel because they couldn't turn down this white man. [The staff would think] “She looks like she could be Puerto Rican, or Mexican. At least she's not a nigger.”
So we stopped to get a Coke or something and walked in the door and we just looked around, there's nobody there except two guys against the wall on the right, and then the guy behind the counter. And so he looked at us, like I guess they never saw a biracial couple before. We went up to the counter and the guys were still staring, these two guys. The reason we went there is because the sign said “Bryant Convenience” and well, Bryant is my family name.
Now, we didn't have a camera, we never took pictures of anything. I would be filthy rich if I had done that. Whatever. So the guy at the counter said, “I'm going to wait on you kids, but you've got to leave as soon as you can,” and my husband's like, “Why? This is America.” And he says, “See those two guys against the wall? That's Roy Bryant and his brother.” We knew about Emmett Till, how he had been killed by them.
TW: They were just hanging out?
Kathy: Did they ever serve any time in jail? I don't think they served any time. Bryan’ts wife had told her husband that these young black boys—I'm sure she said the N-word—came into the store and they were flirting with her. That's what she told her husband. And her husband got furious. So they went a couple of days later into this boy's Uncle Moses' house. He was visiting from Chicago. So Mr. Roy and his brother knocked on Uncle Moses' door and said, “Where's the boy from Chicago? We need him.” This is what was reported to us later by the person that was there. They pushed Uncle Moses out of the way, went and grabbed Emmett out of bed, broke every bone in his body and dropped him into the Tallahatchie River or whatever it is down there in Mississippi. Later when the undertaker was going to seal the casket his mother said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Leave my boy just the way he is. I want the world to see this.” They had a picture of him in the casket in Jet magazine and it showed him in the casket. It was really sad, she was leaning over him kind of, and so the world saw.
TW: When you were in the store, you didn’t recognize them initially?
Kathy: No, okay. No, no, I didn't. I only knew their names. I don't think they had pictures out at the time. His wife only recently died and she said she lied, trying to make her husband jealous. They found papers in the sheriff's office downstairs saying that she should have been put in jail. But anyway, we got through that. I mean, we drove on and we stopped in New Orleans, we stopped in Texas, we stopped everywhere, from New York to Rhode Island.
TW: In that climate, going door to as a biracial couple…that’s very high risk.
Kathy: I was such a cute, adorable thing. I had long, beautiful hair and a cute little brown color, and my husband was white. He was so handsome. So when I rang the doorbell, if an older man answered….they saw me like, “Da-da-da-Da!” I was in. I mean, we were the best sellers.
Above: Clipping from TV and Entertainment Magazine, November 1978.
TW: Let’s leave Rhode Island for now and go on to your next chapter.
Kathy: Yeah. Get out of here, get out of here. My husband at the time, his brother was Roger Blunt. He's still alive in D.C., and that's how we went to D.C. in the first place. He offered my husband a nice job in landscaping. We got down there and found a beautiful apartment and I had to make sure the kids got to school, pick them up. All that. My former boss from WJAR, Arthur Alpert, he caught up with me and said, “You want a job?” I said, “Doing what?” He said you know, reporting and whatever at Channel 5, which is now Fox, but at that time it was something else. I forget what..I don't know, but now, it's Fox. Hmmm. Metromedia. My boss there, Hal Levinson said, “I'm going to have you produce Black News,” which was before...what's it called now? BET? Black Entertainment Television or whatever.
TW: What was Black News like and what else was going on at the station?
Kathy: I worked with Maury Povich, his show Panorama was the noon talk show. One of the first in the country, I believe. Delores Handy was my main reporter (at Black Reflections) and she was something else. I had to write the stories for the teleprompter so that my anchors, Delores Handy and James Adams...you know teleprompters work. She never liked the way I wrote stories, so we were always at odds. Oh and Al Roker, remember him? Al came from um, Washington State or maybe up there, Portland Oregon—one of those places way up there. He was funny, he was hilarious! Al was very kind, he had a big party at his house in VA when he was picked for the job of weatherman in NYC.
Speaker: It’s a really specific skill, speech writing. How do you make it feel natural, or how do you work with the anchors’ own personalities?
Kathy: Oh, we were like oil and water. The producer is in charge, but Delores was the big-time anchor somewhere in the south. Beautiful girl and very smart. Very, very smart, and she thinks I'm “merely the producer.” Well what do we do as producers? We research, we read every newspaper, we decide what's important in our area. Delores once said to me, “You're not smart enough to write for me,” and all the newsroom heard it—all the reporters and the boss, Hal, came out asking what was going on. I just said, “Dolores, f-you!” because I don’t cuss, and figured maybe she would understand. The whole newsroom started laughing.
The thing was, I was not really clever enough to deal with these people. You know, I was happy to do my job and try to do the best I could and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We later renamed Black News to Black Reflections, and Washington DC is three-quarters black. So I had no problem finding stories. I was able to do my job and ignore all the extra crap.
Speaker: You have this really linear and logical way of working. Very head-down.
Kathy: I had no choice. I had to separate the crap. And I was never in fear of anything because I knew I could go to my news director. I would pick what was important and what I thought the viewer thought was important. You were really the eyes of the viewer when you're doing television, writing for television. I was very friendly and very nice, always smiling, and I remember whenever I went to interview people, they were very happy to see me because they were like, “Oh, she's going to tell the story correctly.” You know when I graduated broadcasting school in Boston there were thirty-three men and just two of us girls. Two. You had to prove yourself.
Above: Kathy’s winning doubles team from 1994. Note, this photo was edited to remove a sticker.
Speaker: Would you describe yourself as a competitive person?
Kathy: Oh no, no, no. Just driven. In tennis, for example, very few people are negative in tennis. I've got pictures of us in D.C., Houston, LA. We played in Boston.
TW: Who is the us/we here?
Kathy: The USTA Intersectional. We were the Mid-Atlantic team which included D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Okay, it's not like Serena and Chrissy Evert, they're like 6 and up, their rankings. The Intersectionals were mostly ranked 2–5, and in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. That's the age group. We had the number one player. Her name was Margaret Russo, number one player in DC, in the mid-Atlantic. She was Australian and played when she was younger—against Martina Navratilova, with Chrissy Evert...all the big, big biggies and she won quite a few matches. Her husband was a big tennis teacher at the Fairfax Racquet Club. He was the best teacher.
TW: So you got into this in D.C.?
Kathy: Nope, I got into it in Rhode Island when I was married to Gerald (Blunt), because he was a big athlete. He was the Big Guy from East Providence High and wherever. When we got down to Washington a friend said, “Kathy, you want to go and play some tennis?” I ended up playing the Turkey Thicket. It was where everybody played after work. They had tennis clubs all over the place. So everybody took an interest in me because I was so nice to get along with. I didn't talk about anybody, I didn't, you know—nothing. So one of the guys, his name was Ted Utkins, and he used to love to play with me when we played mixed doubles. I was not good, but he knew I could learn. So he said to me, “Kathy, there's a tennis club in Bethesda, Maryland. It's an indoor club. It's two courts. It’s $10 an hour.” I had my little Thunderbird so I was free, could drive everywhere.
So once a week I went. I learned how to serve, I learned how to drop shot, I learned how to lob, I learned how to volley, and I got pretty good. That's when I started doing tournaments I played the first tournament against the number one seed and she beat me so bad. I was embarrassed. I went back to my practice.
At the time, Pauline Betz Addie was a big star down in the Mid-Atlantic. She played Wimbledon, she played all over and she used to practice with us. Pauline taught us how to drop shot and lob and we used to get frustrated because she would drop shot you, lob over your head...you have run back, run, run. And when we got that, she was very proud of us. We traveled as the senior league. We met people all over the place and everybody was so friendly. That’s when I had my video stores, so I could take a week every month and travel to play, no matter where I was. New Orleans, wherever...my husband, also. We had two stores. I ran one and he ran the other. The video stores were in D.C. Yeah, in Silver Spring and Rockville, Maryland.
TW: Any particular matches that stand out?
Kathy: So we were in Boston and Margaret [Russo] lost a match. I was playing doubles at that time. Never did she lose a match, no matter where we were. She's walking off the court and doesn't look right. And I said, “Margaret, what can I do for you, darling? You want some water?” She said she wanted to go and lay down. She went to bed and we all went downstairs, had a good time in the hotel, blah, blah, blah. This was the night before we were to leave and come to Philly, I guess, and same thing in Philly. She wasn't feeling well; lost her match. She was our number one player. We got to D.C. and she didn't play...she was taken to the hospital and she was diagnosed with whatever that thing is that you die and there's no return. What was it? It wasn't a heart attack, but it's kind of like that.
Speaker: A stroke?
Kathy: It wasn't a stroke...whatever it was. But she had that, and she died. I mean everybody was so sad, and her husband...Her husband was Gene Russo, a great tennis teacher at Fairfax Racquet Club there in VA.
Above: A photo of Kathy at one of her video stores in Maryland.
TW: So what got you into video store ownership?
Kathy: What got me into it? Let me think...one was being sold, in Silver Spring. The guy who owned it gave us such an unbelievable price because he wanted it to stay there. Then we bought one in Rockville the same way. Then Blockbuster came along and ruined everybody. So then we had to end up selling ours. There was a young boy who worked for me. Freddy Tello. You can look that up, I'm sure you'll find him. T-e-l-l-o. He was from Nicaragua. I think it was Nicaragua. Nice, sweet boy.
TW: What made you think of Freddy?
Kathy: He became friends with two really bad boys. They were all rich in this little town. Every once in a while we would see these boys come to pick up Freddy at the store. They were his best friends, good friends. I got the article somewhere, they of course interviewed me because he worked for me. I forget what the headline was, but the headline was like “Spanish,” or wherever he was from, “Boy Killed in Rockville.” Right near where the store was. They lived in this particular little area and a woman saw two boys driving a wheelbarrow with a hump in it, and that was Freddy.
They decapitated him. What happened was, supposedly, he was flirting with one of their girlfriends—plus being a Spanish kid and not being big time in Rockville—so they killed him. They took him to one of those vacant houses and they had a saw [content warning: graphic descriptions of violence] and they decapitated him, cut off his arms and legs, head, whatever, and I mean I was almost vomiting thinking about it. You know, I wasn't working for TV, I had my video stores and that was it…
[Kathy gets a text message]
Kathy: …and so...Oh. Somebody's asking me to marry him.
TW: You’re getting proposals texts?
Kathy: Just one! Yes, so...that story. I've got all those articles upstairs, I'm packing stuff away and I don't know where anything is. But that was the most traumatic thing I remember down there. And then finally we got divorced and sold the house.
Above: Kathy posing with her bicycle, 1983.
TW: Well that brings us back to East Providence, to your home just down the block from Myrtle. We don't always ask people specifically about the bar, but you are a beloved regular... What does the spot mean to you?
Kathy: They had their anniversary just over a month ago. I mean, there's other taverns and bars but it's a unique kind of place. There’s Robbie, and Melissa who works there. I mean, I walk in and it's like I'm in Hollywood—I'm a movie star! And I come up with stuff that's interesting that Natalie [Myrtle’s co-owner] likes. I feel like I’ve talked so much about myself here, but I do really want to say how wonderful and exciting Myrtle has been; what a nice addition to the neighborhood it is. The beautiful atmosphere, all the different music, everyone there is terrific.
[Kathy is now looking through a box of papers]
When my daughter was in town, we did a review. My daughter Pam’s a singer, she lives in Chicago and I’m a poet. I thought, what if we do a thingy with her, me doing poems and her singing, you know? Natalie said, “You know what? That would be great and I can play the piano to your poems.” It was so much fun. She's such a good piano player, Natalie. Such a good piano player. When I was being dramatic, she'd do the piano all dramatic. Why can't I find it? The one I wanted to show you? Oh, here it is. Yeah, this is what I came up with.
TW: Were you doing poetry from a young age?
Kathy: No, no. Most of these poems are written from familiarity with people that I met in life. Like when my good friend passed away, I wrote a poem. He was head of the NAACP in East Providence and we became real friends, I mean good, good friends. What was his name? George Lima. And this [holding a paper] is the one that Natalie fell in love with. I was just sitting around thinking, you know, I needed to start writing some stuff.
TW: Could I ask you to read it?
Kathy: You want me to read it? Yeah, okay, my eyes are terrible. Oh, you know, Natalie is one of my favorite people. She's just a fabulous person. Isn't that weird, because I've only known her for a year? Okay, you want me to read this yeah?
What do you think?
When you hear a baby cry
When you see a bird fly
Do you get a tear in your eye?
Or…
Do you wish you could cry like a baby?
Do you wish you could fly like a bird?
Or…
Do you just wake up!
Bonus Documents
When asked for photos to go along with this interview, Kathy gave us a neon green shopping bag full of treasures. Below are some of our favorite finds; you can click them to enlarge.
