DATE: Thursday, April 3, 1997               TAG: 9704030388

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell 

                                            LENGTH:   67 lines

NBC ANCHOR HOOKED ONTO NEWS AS A CAREER AT AN EARLY AGE

Globe-trotting journalist Linda Vester, who has traveled in 30 countries, is coming Friday to Hampton Roads, about which she is as curious as if it were the 31st.

When she speaks to the noon luncheon of the Women's Review at the Norfolk Airport Hilton, the gray-eyed young blonde is as eager to learn what they think as she is to impart her own ideas.

As the anchor of NBC News at Sunrise, Vester wishes to know, among other things, if they are interested in foreign news or if, as some polls suggest, viewers these days prefer a focus on their own back yards.

At 17, she was interested in foreign affairs but had no taste for diplomacy. Her father suggested she shadow some of his friends as they went about their business, starting with a TV producer in Cincinnati.

Just stay two hours and don't get in the way, her father advised.

``It hit me like a bolt of lightning,'' Vester recalled Wednesday.

``So much was happening in the newsroom. People were shouting, challenging each other in intellectual argument. The intensity of it and the fast pace just infected me.

``This is it, I thought, this is what I want to do - and I have never wanted to do anything else.''

After graduating from Boston University in 1987, she received an honors diploma from the Sorbonne in Paris and went to Cairo, Egypt, as a Fulbright Scholar in Middle East Affairs.

In her first job, in Kearney, Neb., she did everything: shooting her own stories, writing the news, editing the tape and running by hand control the TelePrompTer.

``I earned $11,000 a year and drove an orange 1977 Chevette, which I bought for $400,'' she said.

In 1989, NBC News recruited her in a program grooming its foreign correspondents.

Vester began as a researcher, then worked two years as a reporter with an NBC affiliate, WFLA-TV in Tampa, and for NBC News. She spent three months in the Persian Gulf covering Desert Storm from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Among several ever-enlarging roles, she traveled extensively while working in the network's London Bureau from 1993 to 1996.

``It meant running from airplane to airplane and not bathing for a couple of weeks at a time,'' she said.

She was among the first American correspondents to reach Rwanda's capital and report the outbreak of that country's civil war. To get into the capital, from which reporters were banned, she and her crew of three sneaked in with a Canadian military unit.

``Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans began fleeing to Zaire and then started dying in waves from cholera and dysentery,'' she said.

``Packed elbow to elbow, they held on to our legs, coughing up tapeworms, literally dying before our eyes. Bodies were stacked along the roads.

``In the morning, we had to step over the dead outside the tents. It was jarring. I came away profoundly affected. I will never understand the depth of rage between the tribes that caused that kind of inhumanity,'' she said. ``I don't understand that level of hatred.''

Vester will share insights behind the scenes of struggles journalists face, and she will invite discussion from the audience touching the trends in news coverage.

Men are invited to attend Friday's session. To reserve one of the few remaining tickets, costing $18.50, call 490-7812. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Linda Vester is coming to Norfolk Friday for a luncheon to address

the Women's Review - and to learn from its members.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu