Everyone who listens to WGAC radio in the mornings knows Mary Liz Nolan as the chipper co-anchors who announces the daily news and has a punchline here and there when chatting on-air with co-anchors John Patrick and Steve Smith.
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But something you might not know is that Mary Liz Nolan was once arrested for prostitution, burglary and assaulting a police officer.
“Trouble follows me,” says Nolan. “What can I say?”
The “arrest” occurred in 1987 when Nolan was a cub reporter at The Republic newspaper in her native Columbus, Ind. The newspaper’s owner wanted her to write a story about what it was like to be arrested and go to jail.
“I thought it would be a quick thing,” she remembers. “I thought I would go in and go through the booking process and get released. Boy, was I in for a surprise.”
Only the sheriff and the newspaper owner were in on the secret, and so Nolan was treated like any other alleged criminal.
After being booked and fingerprinted, Nolan was told that the women’s section of the jail was full so she would have to be housed in the men’s section. At that point, Nolan found herself sharing a cell block with three men who were all being held for murder. One of the men would escape.
“It was crazy,” she says. “I couldn’t use the toilet because those guys could all see me through the window of the cell. So, here I am talking with these murderers, and before I know it, one of them gets loose and escapes!”
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Nolan says she didn’t find out what she was charged with until they took her to an arraignment hearing. At the hearing, she was chained to another male inmate.
“Out of all of the charges, I thought the assault charge was the funniest,” she recalls. “Here I am, 5 foot 1 inch tall, weighing 98 pounds, and I am charged with beating up a cop!”
Nolan laughs about it now, but she says the experience wasn’t very funny to her at the time. In fact, it led to the newsroom policy that she maintains to this day.
“I tell all my reporters that you can write whatever you want as long as it is the truth,” she says. “But I tell them to keep in mind that I do not have bail money!”
While Nolan started her career in newspaper reporting, she eventually found her calling in radio.
“I did get a real job once,” she says of accepting a job at a bank as an assistant marketing and communications director.
“On my first day,” she recalls, “the CEO of the bank committed suicide, and the phones were going off like crazy with media requests. I decided that job just wasn’t for me.”
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In 1995, Nolan joined the staff at WGAC. She says the Program Director Don MacNeal called her and asked her to “fill in” for two weeks after the morning news anchor quit unexpectedly. Nolan, who had just given birth to her daughter, wasn’t too keen on the idea but says she did it as a personal favor to MacNeal.
“It has been a long two weeks,” Nolan says of her now decades-long tenure at WGAC. Her children are now grown, and her husband has retired from the Navy, but Nolan soldiers on with her career as the lovable talent heard every weekday morning on Augusta’s airwaves.
While she says her great memories of being in radio news could fill a book, her most favorite memory was the time she got a chance to fly with the Blue Angels.
“It was one of those things where I said I would do it, but I really didn’t think I would pass the physical,” she recalls. “I was scared to death to get into that jet, but I was really doing it for my husband, Tom, who is retired Navy and had always wanted to ride in one of those aircraft.”
Nolan passed the physical, but at 98pounds, she was too light for the sensors in the ejection seat to recognize a person was actually sitting in the seat.
“They had me carry a roll of quarters in my pocket!” She laughs, “I was scared, but I loved it. It was a great experience, and Tom was proud of me.”
Scott Hudson is the Managing Editor of The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
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