She has the ability to report the latest on the recent tsunami disaster, and then effortlessly segue into a heartwarming story about a child in need of a home, with all the confidence and grace of a seasoned veteran. She is a reported favorite among deaf viewers, who say she is easy to lip read. And like the best of interviewers, she has the seemingly innate ability to not only put anyone talking to her — from a receptionist calling her down for an appointment to a retiring U.S. senator — at ease, but also make him or her feel like the most important person in the world at that moment.

Some have called her the “face of St. Louis,” and certainly her face, prominently featured on KSDK-TV billboards and posters throughout the metro area, is hard to miss. It is Karen Foss’ age, however, that has some people marveling at her. Foss is set to turn 61 this month, making her perhaps the oldest local TV news anchorwoman in the Midwest, if not the nation. She is also preparing to celebrate her 26th year on the air in St. Louis, a feat virtually unheard of in an industry that seems to be always in search of a fresh, young face — especially when it comes to women.

Foss is hardly just any TV news personality, however. Along with coanchors Mike Bush and Kelly Jackson, Foss headlines nightly newscasts that are not only No. 1 in the St. Louis market, but also are consistently rated among the top five local news programs in the country. Her work on such issues as teenage illiteracy, tobacco use, the high cost of political campaigns, crime victims and juvenile crime has earned her numerous local Emmy awards. She has been voted “Best Anchor in St. Louis” by the Riverfront Times Readership Poll for 11 years and running, and the St. Louis Journalism Review has recognized her as “Best Anchor” for the past five years. On top of her award-winning work on camera, Foss remains active in the community, promoting causes and organizations that are dear to her, such as the Salvation Army and Paraquad, which helps disabled people establish homes and jobs to become more independent.

“She’s done so much in the community that she is St. Louis,” says Bush of his coan- chor for the past two years. “She’s what St. Louis is all about: She’s generous, she’s smart, she’s got those Midwestern values. If she is the face of St. Louis, St. Louis is pretty lucky.”

Jennifer Blome, anchor of KSDK’s morning news program and 11 years Foss’ junior, describes her as a “woman’s woman.”

“She seems to be able to connect with women of all different ages and backgrounds and cultures immediately,” says Blome, who arrived at KSDK six months after Foss did. “She is a woman who knows who she is, and is comfortable with it. I think that quality is really attractive to people. Many feel like they know her, even though they’ve never met her.” To be where she is — sitting on top of more than three decades in broadcasting — has caught Foss somewhat by surprise, however.

As a young girl growing up in Kansas City, she never imagined she would one day grace the small screen.

A LATE BLOOMER

Foss didn’t begin her broadcasting career until she was in her early 30s. The only child born of a short-lived World War II marriage between her mother, Wilma, and her father, Robert Graham, Foss was raised in a working-class neighborhood in Kansas City. When she was a little girl, her mother remarried, and four siblings — two half sisters and two half brothers — followed. Her mother stayed at home, while her stepfather, Gene McFadden, was a stonemason whose work was often interrupted by weather and labor strikes.

“My life was about six square blocks where I lived, where I went to school,” Foss recalls. “We didn’t travel; we didn’t always have a car, so my world was really small.” Foss’ mother never told her about her birth father. She discovered that on her own one day when she was 7 or 8 years old and stumbled onto pages that had been torn out of her baby book. When Foss confronted her mother about the pages, her mother broke into tears. Her stepfather chastised her for upsetting her mother, and the matter was never spoken of again (though Foss did meet her birth father when she was in her 20s).

She quit school after her junior year, finishing up the last credit she needed to graduate from high school during a summer school session. She married her high school sweetheart, and, at 17, gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Kary. Two years later, a son named Scott followed.

The marriage didn’t last, and by age 26, Foss was on her own, raising her two children. Recognizing she would need a way to support her family, she enrolled in classes at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and began to pursue a degree in visual art. At the time, journalism had never crossed her mind. “When I was growing up, television news consisted of 15 minutes with some old white guy holding up newspaper photographs for the camera,” Foss says. “There was nothing like TV news as we know it today.”

Art, however, had always fascinated her. “Hallmark is located in Kansas City, and they employ a lot of artists, and I thought that was fairly realistic,” she says. “Once I got into college — I was making very good grades in art classes — but the reality [hit] that I probably couldn’t support myself and two children on what an artist could make.”

So Foss turned to filmmaking, which was offered through the university’s communications department, not the art department. “Once I got over there, I thought, This could work,” Foss recalls. “It’s a visual medium, which I enjoy manipulating and working with, and I thought, There might be something for me in television. I saw myself being a producer for Jacques Cousteau. I never dreamed about going on air at all.”

That is, until she began working with the university’s public radio station. There, a woman with whom Foss was acquainted asked her to audition for a show on the local PBS TV station. It involved interviewing people in the arts, which was right up Foss’ alley. “It would be absolutely embarrassing to see one of those today, I am sure,” Foss says. “But it was a great entrée, and it gave me a chance to try my wings doing some things that gave me courage later to break out.”

Foss’ daughter, Kary Lockwood, remembers the first time she heard Foss’ voice on the radio. She was in junior high at the time. “[We were] hearing her read the news, and my brother and I were freaking out that my mother’s voice was on the radio,” Lockwood recalls. “And then when she was on television … it was really funny to us.”

Foss started working with the CBS affiliate in Kansas City as a film editor, then as a production assistant. She says she began “getting ideas” about being a reporter “The work was so interesting. And when I would edit other reporters’ stories, I would think, Well, I could do that. I could ask those questions. I know who the movers and shakers are in this city.”

She asked one of the nation’s then-top TV consultants, who happened to be at the station at the time, what her chances were. “How old are you?” he asked. She was 32 and a recent college graduate. He told Foss that was too old.

Although she was discouraged, Foss refused to give up. She persuaded the station’s general manager to take a chance on her. Within two years, she was made anchor, and two years later, she joined the anchor desk at KSDK. The rest, as they say, is history. “I still have some notes I wrote to myself at the time, and I thought, Well, you know, maybe I could do this until I’m 42, that would be great,” Foss says. “And you know, 42 came and went, and 52 came and went, and now, my information is that I’m the oldest local anchorwoman in the country working the late news broadcast. … Which is, you know, just kind of an amazing landmark.”

TAKING ON ‘A MAN’S JOB’

Foss’ success has come at a price, however. She entered the TV news business at a time when women were rare in the newsroom. When Foss embarked on her broadcasting career in 1973, there were no women engineers or department managers. By comparison, roughly half the engineering staff and department managers at KSDK today are women.

“Today, young women come in, and I think you’ll find this in all [industries], they come in and they’re very well-educated and they just assume that, of course, they’ll be able to do anything that the men around them do,” Foss says. “That wasn’t the way,” 30 years ago. She recalls one of her first jobs as a production assistant. The hiring process came down to Foss and a 19-year-old college dropout. Foss was 31 at the time, had 14 years of work experience, was raising two children and had put herself through college. The 19-year-old had never had a paying job in his life, but his father was somehow connected to the station, Foss says. Though she got the job, not everyone welcomed her with open arms.

On her first day on the job, she asked her supervisor how many stories were on that night’s broadcast, because she was unfamiliar with the station’s news rundown. “He looked at me and he said, ‘I don’t know why they gave this man’s job to a girl anyway.’ “That was very disheartening, to know that I was working for this man who resented my very being there,” Foss says.

She responded with hard work, eventually earning the favor of every director at the station. Then she approached the station’s general manager about becoming a reporter. He relented, but warned her: “Don’t get any ideas about anchoring,” Foss recalls. “He said that it’s a fad in some parts of the country to have women anchors, but ‘there won’t be one on my station,’” Foss says, then laughs. “It wasn’t a year and a half later that I was anchoring on his station. And he was a great supporter after that.”

The climate in the newsroom in those days was far less family-friendly, Foss says. “One didn’t talk openly about having a family or children — it wasn’t considered professional.”

So Foss was on her own when it came to balancing her career with her family life. Because Foss worked nights, breakfast became the family meal of the day. After school, Lockwood and her brother were on their own, until their mother returned after the late night newscast.

“She was pretty active,” Lockwood recalls. “We had to stick to a pretty strict schedule.”

Despite the busy pace, there were some perks to having a mom in the news business, Lockwood says. “I got to meet Dorothy Hamill when she was in the Olympics. I was 12, 14, something like that. It was so exciting for me!” Foss says she was fortunate to begin her television career at a time when the industry was rapidly evolving. “I was in the right place at the right time in terms of being a woman. That’s not to say that there were some very, very difficult times in those first years — very difficult — that took a lot of determination and stamina to withstand.”

Perseverance wasn’t an option, however. “I had a brother who was injured and left a quadriplegic, and people say ‘I don’t know how he goes on.’ [But] you don’t really have a choice. You can do it with good spirit or bad spirit, but you have to move ahead. And that was how I felt about work. … I had two children to support. I needed to develop a career, and this was work that I knew I would love and I wanted to do. And so I just kept doing it.”

DECADES OF EXPERIENCE

Over the years, Foss has had the opportunity to interview many of St. Louis’ — and the nation’s — movers and shakers. She has reported on four presidential nominating conventions, shot the breeze with powerful politicians and celebrities and spent countless hours with ordinary people who have found themselves in extraordinary circumstances, including a 29-year-old special education teacher who was dying from uterine cancer. That story, one of Foss’ first, remains one the most treasured experiences of her career.

“At that time, there was no such thing as hospice … and she very much did not want to die in a hospital,” Foss recalls. “Her friends created a hospice for her and cared for her at home, and she let me come see her and talk to her like every other day.

“We talked about what this impending death meant to her. She was a teacher, and she was a teacher to the end, and she was just wonderful to talk with. After her death … I talked with her friends about what the experience had been like for them. And I put together this documentary that is still my favorite piece of work that I’ve ever done.”

Not that there have not been other notable stories and interviews. She recalls a particularly memorable interview with conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh shortly after he had begun to attract a nationwide audience. Foss says she decided to ask him whether there was any antipathy between himself and women, in light of a recent magazine poll that suggested Limbaugh had far more male than female fans.

“He opened his mouth and his producer came storming out of the control room and said, ‘Interview is over, you’re out of here,’” Foss recalls. “I thought, Here is this big media star who puts everybody on the spot, and I’ve asked him what I think is a very legit question and they won’t allow him to answer. I thought that was really peculiar.”

On a separate occasion, Foss had an opportunity to speak with former First Lady Nancy Reagan about her recently launched ‘Just Say No’ campaign. She decided to ask Reagan why she had chosen that — as opposed to any number of other causes she could have chosen — to be her issue. “I even knew what the answer would be: ‘Oh, I’ve seen my friends’ children’s lives destroyed by drugs,’” Foss says. “So I presented the question to her. … And she looked at me like a deer caught in the headlights, excused herself, went over and whispered with one of her consultants, and then came back and gave me an answer. It was the strangest thing.

“But she was one of the most composed women I have ever seen in public life,” Foss quickly adds. “I was at a political convention one time, and she was greeting the room, and all the cameras were on her, and a technician tripped and fell and pulled a cable short, which meant that she was straddling the cable. It went up in the air like 3 feet, which means her skirt was hiked up with this cable. You would have never known it to watch her face. It was like she quickly processed that no one else is seeing this and she stayed composed and pleasant.”

In the newsroom at KSDK, coworkers say Foss consistently reminds them of their duty to their viewers and the community, rejecting the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality that sometimes governs local TV news today. “She’s kind of the conscience in the newsroom,” Bush says. “When we make decisions about what to cover, she wants to know why. She’s always helping us, I think, stay on the high road and make decisions of relevance — ‘why is this important to our viewers?’ “I’m not sure that she wears a big badge that says ‘leader’ on her shirt, [but] I think everybody would consider her certainly one of the leaders, if not the leader, in the newsroom. … We all look up to her.”

Blome recalls Foss during her initial days at KSDK. She was 25; Foss was in her mid-30s. “What impressed me the most about Karen was her ability to tell a story without being biased or judgmental,” Blome says, a quality that has not changed with age. “She also treats people this way. She is not judgmental. She is not critical. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we could all do this? It’s something I work at every day.”

THE FACE OF ST. LOUIS

Despite her very public persona, Foss fiercely guards her privacy. She can’t help but be recognized almost anywhere she goes — whether it’s across town to pick up a gallon of paint or strolling along Madison Avenue in New York City.

“My daughter and I were at a museum shop in Paris, looking at little prints and a guy came up and said, ‘You’re Karen Foss,’” Foss recalls. “I feel like when I cross my threshold and go out my doors, I’m working. Because I can’t anticipate that I won’t be recognized. … You just kind of have to behave yourself everywhere you go. You just never know.” It’s a level of fame Foss doesn’t always appreciate and one that can sometimes complicate her ability to enjoy time with family or friends in public. Lockwood says sometimes she and her mother will be strolling among the booths at a flea market, and people will just follow them. Or, they might be having a serious conversation in a restaurant and someone will come over for an autograph.

Such behavior often troubled Lockwood when she was a teenager — “It’s difficult for a teenager to share their parent,” she explains — but she and other family members and friends have grown accustomed to it. “Most people are lovely, and they only want to confirm that they aren’t seeing things, that you really are who they think you are. And no one can complain about that,” Foss says. “Occasionally people are rude, and it always catches me by surprise.

And sometimes people will want to talk to you about the news business, and if I’m out having dinner with my family or at the park with my granddaughter, that’s not what I want to do at that moment.”

When she’s not working, Foss enjoys reading and collecting antiques. She loves the outdoors; every night that she’s not working, she makes a date with the sunset. Perhaps it comes from so many years of being cooped up in a windowless studio each night, she says. A few years ago, she renegotiated her contract with KSDK, switching to a four-day-aweek schedule. The shortened schedule hasn’t meant she’s doing any less work — “In four days a week I am putting in more hours than I did when I worked five days a week” — but it has allowed Foss more time to spend with her family, including her husband of 12 years, real estate agent Jim Whiteley; her grown daughter Lockwood; and her granddaughter, Lockwood’s adopted 3-year-old Chinese daughter Jia Yuan. Foss is also close with her son, who is married and lives in Germany with his wife and two children.

“We spend every weekend together and take vacations together,” says Lockwood, who lives only four blocks from Foss’ Clayton home and speaks to her mother — either by phone or e-mail — every day. “It’s nice to be with someone who’s in your groove. She helps me so much with my daughter. … She’ll play with my daughter for hours, make Play-doh, and she has a great imagination. She loves doing that.” Foss’ imagination, her sense of humor and her kindness are what sets her apart, says artist Mary Engelbreit, who became fast friends with Foss after Foss introduced herself at one of Engelbreit’s shows several years ago.

“One of the first times we met she gave me this absolutely darling embroidered apron,” Engelbreit says. “My first impression was that she’s one of the world’s nicest people, and she truly is. She’s the best kind of friend you could have.”

BLAZING A PATH

To the delight of viewers, Foss doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. She recently signed a new two-year contract with KSDK; she says she can’t see any further into the future than that. “I have no role models. I don’t know anyone else who’s done this,” Foss says. “I just don’t know when I won’t want to do this anymore. For now, I really like it.”

Lockwood says she can’t imagine her mother quitting the news business. “That’s her place. She really loves her station and loves her job,” Lockwood says. “For me, that just is so much her. I count on hearing the news from her. ... I feel comforted knowing she’s the one keeping me up to date.”

So do thousands of Foss fans in St. Louis and beyond.