THE ALAN KRASHESKY STORY YOU WON’T HEAR AT 10
At precisely 4 o’clock, Alan Krashesky arrives, as he does each weekday afternoon, in the makeup room of ABC 7 Eyewitness News. In this squat cubby adjoining the station’s ground-level State Street television studio, he completes his transformation from mere human to radiant newsman, the primary anchor of three of Chicago’s top-rated evening newscasts, the trusted, abiding, affable, and telegenic source of the day’s most essential information in the nation’s third-largest market.
Krashesky’s ascent to the heights of Chicago anchordom has been — much like the man himself — steady, unassuming, and patient. So you’re forgiven if it seems rather improbable that in the history of the city’s television news only a select few boldface names have had an on-air career as long as Krashesky’s. Even fewer can lay claim to as lengthy a run on a single station: He’s been a constant on ABC-7 for 37 years. (The only more stable presence among active Chicago TV news figures is weather god Tom Skilling, whose forecasts have appeared on WGN since 1978.)
“Alan is the last great news anchor in Chicago,” longtime local media reporter Robert Feder says. “But we don’t think of him the same way that we think of some of his flashier predecessors in the business. Bill Kurtis and Walter Jacobson and the great anchors of their era, they wore their celebrity on their sleeves. They were in the news as much for what they did outside of the newsroom as for what they did inside it. Alan’s never done that. He’s kept his head down and done his work.”
True to form, on this day Krashesky has his head down, his mind on work. “I know this makeup stop may seem a little unusual,” he says apologetically in his preternatural broadcast-ready baritone, which adds gravitas to even the most run-of-the-mill statements. “But when you do it every doggone day, it’s like brushing your teeth.” Chalk it up to his unfailingly courtly comportment, his lifelong Christian faith, or some deep-seated fear of accidentally blurting out an obscenity live on Disney-owned airwaves, but the 58-year-old steers clear of all vulgarisms, even in casual conversation. He opts instead for neutered, 1950s-ish expressions and intensifiers such as “doggone,” “gosh,” and “holy cow,” all uttered without a hint of irony.
“What the heck is going on?” Krashesky exclaims, his features hardening into an expression of concern and incredulity, the very same one he displays on the air when reacting to a particularly grim report. A television set is always within eyeshot at the station, and the one hanging above the vanity mirror in the makeup room carries the 4 p.m. newscast, which he anchored before his 2016 promotion to the top job: anchoring the 5 and 10 p.m. broadcasts, as well as the 6 o’clock he already helmed. Onscreen, Krashesky’s replacement, Rob Elgas, brings word of the mysterious deaths of a handful of vacationers at a resort in the Dominican Republic. The story grabs Krashesky’s attention, as he’s an avid world traveler; just two days earlier, in fact, he’d returned to work after a multicity jaunt across Italy with his wife of 37 years and their three adult children (and one son-in-law), and ABC has dispatched him to Rome to cover the papal beat so many times that he’s become friendly with a waiter at a little café that serves his favorite rigatoni. “What is it? Poisoning from beverages? Gosh, and it happened so fast — as fast as a cyanide killing or something like that. It’s like, holy cow!”
He flips up the crisp white collar of his dress shirt and drapes his tie around his neck. The light blue of the silk matches his wide-set eyes and the polished face of the cufflinks that secure his French cuffs, monogrammed with his initials. He knots his tie and slides the vise-tight fist of fabric toward his throat until it docks seamlessly against the top button of his shirt. Just then a diminutive woman named Alx (pronounced like Alex), the lively makeup artist on duty this afternoon, calls out from the other side of the wall: “Alan, I’m ready for you!”
“Alx works magic,” Krashesky says, flashing his white enamel as he takes a seat in the salon-style chair. She wraps a black nylon cape around him to
