CNN nearly stole her from Charlotte. But she stayed, for love — for the rest of her life

Janet Volz became one of the first female news anchors in Charlotte in 1977, and was a household name among Channel 3 viewers within a few short years.

In the second half of 1980, however, she was presented with what was potentially a pretty sweet opportunity to leave: The 30-year-old WBTV star found herself being courted by then-upstart 24-hour-news-channel CNN, which wanted to make her an even bigger star ... but would need her to move to Atlanta.

And she didn’t love the idea of leaving. Because, around the same time, she was also being courted by a Charlotte architect who had proposed to her barely six weeks after they met.

Ultimately, Bill England won out over Ted Turner; Janet Volz became Janet England in December 1980; and despite a hot, fast start that some might have been skeptical of, their sons say the pair was virtually inseparable for more than 42 years — right up until Janet died early last Saturday morning, after a yearslong battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

A revered former broadcaster for both WBTV and WSOC, she was 72.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, raised in Marion and Roanoke, Virginia, and schooled in communications at James Madison University, England launched her journalism career in 1973 at a Roanoke TV station.

She was young (just 22) and in the minority (the only female reporter on staff), but she wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself. When management instructed her to wear a cocktail dress to a party that clients would be attending, she balked. “How am I supposed to be perceived as credible?,” England remembered thinking, in a 2005 interview with The Charlotte Observer.

England wound up with a black mark in her personnel file. She left not long after, for a job at a station in Richmond, Virginia.

But she headed one state south in 1977, and Charlotte is where she made a name for herself — initially by co-anchoring opposite WBTV legends like Doug Mayes (who died in 2015) and Bob Inman, who this week called England “a stickler for getting things right.”

“Just because somebody handed her a piece of paper that had a news story on it,” Inman said, “didn’t mean that she wasn’t gonna go back and question the reporter about what they had done.”

The night she went into labor while on-air

Charlotte is also where England hung her hat, permanently, after meeting Bill England in August 1980 on a blind date that got off to an unusual start:

When she opened her front door to greet him upon his arrival to pick her up, Bill was standing next to a stroller with an 18-month-old child in it. “And she said, ‘There something I need to know here?’” Bill recalled this week. (Turns out he had a good excuse; he had been babysitting for the couple that had set them up, and they were running late getting back to spell him before his date.)

Bill recalled being “a little starstruck” at first, and that their courtship was as unusual as their first meeting. “I would have to go to bed,” he said, “then wake back up and pick her up after she was done with the 11 o’clock news for our dates.”

They were married before the end of the year. Just over nine months later ...

“I was anchoring a newscast with her,” recalled Mark Garrison, today a reporter for Charlotte radio station WBT, “and she looked at me during one of the film stories that was on and said, ‘I think I’m labor.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa. Really?’ At that time, my wife Becky and I had two kids; and Janet said, ‘I’m think I’m gonna call Becky.’ So, from the set, she called my wife and was like, ‘OK, here’s what I’m feeling,’ and my wife was like, ‘Yup, you’re in labor.’

“But Janet troopered through that newscast, through the pain, and when the newscast was over she left,” Garrison said, laughing, “and went and had a baby” — Brett, the oldest of their two sons. Their second, Chandler, arrived six years after that.

By then, Janet had made the jump over to WSOC, where she was re-teamed with Mayes and also went on to become the first face of “Family Focus,” a segment related to family and childhood development that was designed to tie into community-service projects.

Sheila Knox — who photographed, edited and produced the segment from inception until they both left the station in 1993 — said England’s favorite “Family Focus” story of all time was one that connected them to a young girl of 6 or 7 years old whose playroom was a crawlspace under the house with dirt for floors. The girl told England she’d never had a baby doll.

“Of course, Janet and I heard that and it was like, ‘Well, she’s gonna have a baby doll,’” Knox recalled. ”Janet went live that night with the story, and by the next day, we had vans full of baby dolls, of furniture, of so much donated from the viewers” that several other families benefited.

“Family Focus” lives on at Channel 9 to this day.

In 1993, England left the station — and the TV business, entirely — to put more focus on her own family. First she took a less-time-consuming and less-energy-draining job as director of communications for a medical group in Matthews so she could be more present for her sons; then she semi-retired in 1999 to help care for her aging parents.

‘Mom would bring it right up and address it’

She remained a familiar face around town, though. She told the Observer in 2002 that she still was stopped occasionally in the grocery store by locals who told her how much they enjoyed her presence on TV, even though she hadn’t been on-air in nearly a decade.

She also remained vocal about making sure people remembered her former industry’s sexist past. She frequently would share stories in speeches and retrospective interviews about being told by consultants during her broadcasting career to wear padded bras, or to act “subserviently” toward male counterparts; and how some male co-anchors sat on phone books during newscasts to compensate for her 5-foot-10 frame.

And she remained a stickler for getting things right. For not just signing off everything handed to her.

For example: Her friend Larry Farber, a veteran booking agent who co-founded uptown club Middle C Jazz, recalled a time when he asked England to give him feedback on a speech he’d spent months working on — one he was to deliver as president of Temple Beth El on Rosh Hashanah.

“We went up to her little library and I took my speech out, and ... I just knew it was the best speech I’d ever written,” Farber recalled. After he read it to her, “she looked at me and she said, ‘Larry, we’re gonna start over.’ My heart dropped. She took it, she tore it up. ... But she did that because she loved me, because she cared, and because she knew her stuff.”

The retooled speech she coaxed out of him, he said, was better than his original in every way.

“Mom was fearless,” England’s younger son Chandler explained. “She was not gonna be one that would sit back in a crowd and allow something that she did not believe in go forward. I’m sure there’s a lot of things in our lives where you may be with a group of friends, or in audience, and someone says something that you don’t believe in, but you remain quiet — whereas Mom would bring it right up and address it. And I think ... it wasn’t to just obliterate someone for saying something. I think she was trying to be constructive and productive, and not let it just go untouched.”

Her family said she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 6½ years ago, that her condition began worsening about two or three years ago, and that she “took a sharp turn last Thanksgiving.” In recent months, her son Brett said, “her symptoms became uncontrollable, and we just couldn’t catch up.”

It’s of course been an immensely sad time for Bill. But he’s been able to smile quite a bit too in the days since Janet’s passing.

“When I read these notes — these real nice notes from everybody, about everything she got accomplished in her life ... I was just proud all over again,” said the man who, 42 years ago, managed to keep Janet England in Charlotte and away from CNN.

“It’s been wonderful.”