“I think it was time for me,” Collins said in an interview Wednesday. “I had a good run. I don’t know many 76-year-old street reporters. Do you?”
Never an anchor, Collins was a throwback to an earlier era of local TV journalism in which reporters – often newspaper expats – were hired more for their local knowledge, contacts and writing ability than for polished presentation and telegenic looks.
Collins stood out for his storytelling chops, his looks and his memorable delivery, which were full of jaw-dropping stops and starts. Diminutive and bespectacled with a ruddy face, he usually prowled the area’s crime scenes in baggy khaki pants and sneakers, his hair a little too scruffy. He almost always appeared on camera wearing a hat, usually a wool newsboy or baseball cap. In winter, he added a V-neck sweater, a fleece jacket and a long scarf.
His wife, he once said, told him he looked like a man who dressed in black.
Collins took viewers to back alleys and parlors, where distraught relatives and witnesses shared emotional reactions to tragic events. He told stories of many of the city’s major crimes and traumas, from Mayor Marion Barry’s 1990 drug arrest (Collins obtained a tape of the arrest in a downtown hotel room) to the disappearance of Chandra Levy in 2001, to the Washington sniper case the following year. His shoe leather reporting has won him 13 local Emmy awards.
He also dressed up as a bunch of grapes while interviewing a high school student who had been suspended for disrupting a school event while wearing a banana suit.
“I believe television is intimate and emotional,” Collins said Wednesday. “If I do a good job, I will let you feel something. You will be happy, sad, indignant, but I want to leave you something.
While Collins was best known to Washington-area viewers, he enjoyed a few nationally acclaimed moments. Comedian John Oliver has repeatedly highlighted his work on Oliver’s HBO program, framing clips of Collins like “Local News Beat Poetry.”
Oliver presented Collins’ report of a local woman whose car had been spray painted, “Mike is a cheater” – presumably by a jealous vandal who got the wrong owner.
Collins ended his report memorably: “Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike. Do you see what you have done? he tsk-tsked. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you are. But you may want to start changing your habits.
He then paused and nodded, striking an almost prayerful pose, before adding, “Or change your name.”
A self-tuned music video of the monologue later went viral.
Collins grew up in Washington, learning its neighborhoods by accompanying her physician father on house calls. He spent most of his life in the region, with the exception of four years as a student at Notre-Dame, a stint in the army, including as an assistant to a surgeon at the Vietnam, and three years in the early 1980s as a reporter for a Chicago station. , WLS.
He began his television career at Channel 9 in 1973 after working as a reporter for the former Washington Daily News. He then worked for Channel 7, before landing at NBC4 in 1986.
“Pat went from silly class clown stories, to warm and fuzzy features, to scary crime stories, all in the same week,” said Tom Sherwood, a former NBC4 reporter. “Somehow he didn’t lose his credibility, just boosted it.”
Sherwood recalled that when he joined the Washington Post station in 1989, Collins gave him a little advice: Stop asking complicated questions on television. “He said ‘why’ and ‘what happened’ were two simple questions that would get anyone talking,” he said. “People have definitely spoken to Pat.”
Former NBC4 anchor Doreen Gentzler, who worked with Collins for 33 years, said: “There’s no one else on local TV who can do what he does. He’s an old-school journalist working on the sources he’s collected over the decades. It’s the journalist who gets the scoop before the competition, gets it right the first time, and stays in the story until the end.
Collins is the third personality to leave NBC4 in the past year. Longtime journalist and presenter Wendy Rieger retired at the end of last year before succumbing to a brain tumour. And Gentzler retired just before Thanksgiving, ending a streak in which the station consistently topped local charts.
Collins said he plans to spend more time with his family in retirement, which includes his wife, two adult children (a third child, Michael, died last year of cancer) and five little ones. -children.
“I like to say I had the best job in Washington,” Collins said Wednesday, “and I didn’t have to win an election to get it.”
