Andy Artis

Andy Artis is gone.  You can read about Andy on the wsbtv.com website.   It spotlights his time on the Assignment Desk.  But my fond memories of this courageous, sometime stubborn, man are the years we spent as partners in the northwest mobile bureau.  We went where the news took us whatever hour of the day.   Sometimes we were driving dangerously at high rates of speed as we chased law enforcement officers chasing the bad guys.  We were like the stage coach teams of the movies.  I’d drive.  Andy’s shotgun was his camera.   We dealt with the early inconsistences of tranmitting stories via the sparse cell towers.  They would often drop signals in the middle of a transmission.    I’d sometimes get frustrated and want to drive the story back to the station.   Andy would wait for me to cool down… and finally get most of our stories back via the relatively new technology.   Andy earned my admiration in many ways, not the least of which is how he handled discrimination against him.  For instance,   I remember driving to interview a man in north Georgia.   His home had black jockey figures on the front lawn.  Andy was out of the truck first.   The man we were coming to see saw me trailing behind, and attempted to ignore Andy and walk right past him.   But Andy literally grabbed his hand as he passed him, and said, “I’m Andy Artis…”.  He was proud of who he was as we were proud of him. Andy and I would sometimes make presentations to civic clubs as a team.  He loved to tell about photographers’ indispensable role in covering news for television.  I remember when Andy was struggling with the decision on whether to move from photographer to the assignment desk.  He saw the assignment desk as a path to becoming a news director  He almost didn’t accept the assignment job because it meant the loss of overtime and less pay.    But he wanted badly to  one day be a news director, so he left  for the news assignment desk, with an agreement that he would shoot for other departments at WSB to make up for his loss of income from overtime.  As you will read and hear on the wsbtv.com site, he excelled on the assignment desk too.