NEEDHAM — In his corner office at WCVB-TV, Peter Mehegan is packing up. Small red and yellow buoys poke out of the top of a box on his desk, a reminder of his love of the water.
“I guess I’m sort of a salty dog,” he explains.
The box sits next to the manual Royal typewriter, which still works fine when Mehegan pecks away at it, using only his index fingers.
For 23 years, Mehegan has co-hosted Chronicle, the manual typewriter of TV — basic, unflashy, old-fashioned storytelling. He has watched with some disdain as the TV news business has changed around him and Chronicle, replacing substance with flash.
His 63rd birthday in April was “one of the catalysts,” that led to his decision to retire, Mehegan says.
The station prepared “a terrific” contract, “but I just had to ask myself, do I want to sign another contract?
“This is really about getting the feeling of trying to reinvent myself a bit,” says Mehegan with a smile. “But I don’t know what that is yet. Maybe a year from now, I’ll have a clue.”
He wants to travel, perhaps live abroad for a year. There’s the “pipe dream” of restoring and living in the abandoned stone cottage once owned by the grandmother of his wife of 40 years, Julianne, in County Cork, Ireland. He’d love to see opera in Italy, and there are more Graham Greene books to be read.
And you won’t miss him if he doesn’t completely go away: It won’t be long before he saddles up in the 1969 Chevy Impala 327 V-8 and drives up to Maine to produce four more road-trip segments over the coming year.
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“When he told me, I was in tears,” says Mary Richardson by phone. Mehegan’s Chronicle co-host for nearly 21 years compared the feeling to “a death in the family.”
“Mary and I respect each other as people and journalists,” says Mehegan. “We have very similar backgrounds and similar values. We’re both news people. We’re genuinely good friends, and the rapport you see on the air is not forced. We see each other socially.”
“We’re sort of the mom and pop of local TV,” says Richardson. “He’s sort of like my big brother. This is the kind of guy you’d like to sit down and have a cup of coffee with and talk to for a while. He’s just what you see on TV. He’s a gentlemanly individual, a true renaissance man.”
“Almost daily,” says Mehegan, “people come up to me who think they know me. I tell them, ‘You do know me, but sadly I don’t know you.’
“They talk to me like I’m an intimate, which is very flattering. People consider me a friend, and I have a responsibility when I meet people to respect that. The best advice in the world, which I give to young reporters, is, you’ve got to be yourself. The audience will see right through it if you’re not.”
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“And I’ve been here since,” says Mehegan. “When I came over, they were all over the place, and it was getting bad reviews. So they completely changed the format and identity of the program, hardening it to a single theme.”
Since the change, Chronicle has become “a classic magazine,” he says.
“When I talk to young producers, I use the old National Geographic magazine as a model. They go into a place, and they always get the amazing photos, but they always get the story, too.
“I have a news background, and I always want to know what the story is wherever we go. If you go to a small town in Vermont, it’s not enough to meet the candymaker and the local dairy farmer. Especially, if you find out they’re laying off teachers there.”
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He has watched the news business change “dramatically, in the length and kind of stories we cover.”
“There’s now an intense competition,” he says. “When there were three TV stations in Boston, they all could be successful. And I remember when we’d lead newscasts with stories on the state budget, which would never happen today. The consultants, who have their hooks in this business, seem to believe people don’t care about politics. I don’t believe that’s true. This is Boston, where politics and the Red Sox were considered the city’s two religions.”
Now, cable TV and the Internet compete for news, and there is what Mehegan calls “that damn clicker.”
“The idea now is to keep people watching so they can be measured. I lament the loss of what I call serious, thoughtful journalism in Boston.”
“They’ve left us alone, mainly because we’ve been successful. And we’re living proof that you can succeed in Boston doing good journalism. … I always thought people would stay tuned to strong journalism. And I still do. Maybe I’m crazy.”
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Mehegan is proudly Boston-rooted, the son of a merchant seaman born in Dorchester.
When he was 9, he got into a rock fight with some neighborhood kids.
“When I got home, I was bleeding. I’d been hit in the head. My dad said, ‘That’s it.’ A week later, we were off to Scituate.”
As an 18-year-old education major at Northeastern, his first co-op job was as a copy boy at the daily Boston Traveller newspaper.
He ran out for coffee for the grizzled guys in the slot, squiring reporters around in his Ford Falcon, changing ribbons in the wire room.
“It just blew me away,” he says. “I was this small-town kid thrown into all of that. I loved it.”
He transferred to Boston University’s School of Communications, where he did news on the school’s radio station, WBUR.
He worked at radio station WMEX, raising at 4 a.m., on Beacon Hill, where he lived with his grandmother, and ran across town to the radio studio each morning. He wrote news from 5 to 9 a.m., then went to college classes.
“It was an incredible experience, the daily grind of getting the news out.”
After graduating in 1964 with a degree in communications, Mehegan worked at WNAC, where he wrote and delivered a 15-minute hourly newscast and eventually got his “big break.”
“I got fired,” he says with a chuckle. “They went rock in 1967 and wiped out the newsroom. So I was out the door.”
In the fall of 1967, he began 14 years as a WBZ-TV reporter and “loved every minute. I was young and gung-ho and it was a terrific time.”
With four young daughters at home.
He followed Pope John Paul II around the country on his first U.S. visit in he fall of 1979, covered busing in Boston, the civil-rights movement, presidential primaries, the Pentagon Papers, antiwar protests. In 1980, he won an Emmy for coverage of nuclear-power protests in Seabrook, N.H.
While he was at WBZ, NBC came calling with an offer to make Mehegan a network correspondent.
“I had four children. I loved what I did and was making more money than I dreamed of. And I saw the life network correspondents led. The marriages that crumbled, the living out of a suitcase. The lifestyle was not for me. I wanted to be home with the kids at night.”
Eventually, Mehegan sought a chance to do more anchoring, and in 1981, he was hired at WCVB-TV.
“I’d done some weekend anchoring at WBZ, but I felt I had the potential to do more. And soon after I got here, that worked, to my surprise.”
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It was a Chronicle brainstorming session that produced the famous Chevy segments, when a producer asked, “Is there anything you want to do?”
“Yeah,” Mehegan told them. “There’s a car in the weeds in my back yard that belonged to my wife’s aunt.”
Thus were born Mehegan’s trademark “This Old Chevy” treks to Maine. The Impala took him up the back roads, streams and mountains of Maine, where he wrote for TV untold small-town stories.
“We’ll do four half-hours a year with the Chevy, take the car to Maine,” Mehegan says.
His work for Chronicle has taken him across the globe, and into his own soul.
“Maybe my favorite is finding my great-grandfather’s baptismal record in a church in County Cork in Ireland. On camera. It was a streak of luck, really, with the cameras rolling. I was going through the old ledger from 1857 and saw his name in longhand.”
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Mehegan wants to exit “before my false teeth fall out on the set.”
“I don’t feel like I’m getting long in the teeth,” says Mehegan. “I still think I’m young, but the aging process is a funny thing. I want to try some new things. And I delight in spending time with my grandsons. I took them fishing the other day, and they were catching crabs. To them, it might as well have been 30-pound bass.”
The station asked if he’d like a special tribute, but Mehegan declined.
“I want to keep it simple. That’s not who I am. Besides, I’m not going away completely.”
“Peter’s leaving will be a large change and adjustment for all of us,” says Richardson. “There’s some comfort in knowing he’ll be back in his car.
“And we’ll keep the light burning in the window. He knows that.”
David Perry’s e-mail address is dperry@lowellsun.com.
