The nights of capturing murder and mayhem are over for newsman and videographer Ken Herzlich
For 30 years, Ken Herzlich has been part of your television viewing, most frequently in the mornings as you’d watch the video of that fire, that crash, that murder and all those other bits of mayhem that pepper the news.
It is more than likely that Herzlich was the person who brought those images of our most sorrowful pieces of urban life to your TV set, because night after night after dark and dangerous night he has prowled the streets of this area shooting video.
He ran a company called Network Video Productions Inc. where he and colleagues were tireless in the pursuit of terrors and traumas. There are a few other people and companies in the same business. Now, his company carries on without him. As of last summer, Herzlich was done.
“For me, the time had come,” Herzlich told me. “I had finally had my fill.”
He made the news official on July 8, when he posted on Facebook, writing in part: “I am retiring from the news business.”
Hundreds of people wrote congratulating him.
What accelerated his decision was an incident on the Dan Ryan last year: “It was 3 a.m. and I was driving south and there was gunfire. The car in front of me was hit, and the driver lost control and careened into the guard rail. A bullet hit my car on the passenger side. Now, I had had close calls over the years, but this one really jarred me and made me realize that increasingly more people have no regard for human life.”
He added, “My career to that point has been about covering the worst life has to offer with shootings of children and innocent people, horrible accidents and tragic fires. Now, the crime in Chicago has risen to a new level of stupidity.”
I have known and admired and liked this man for decades, and was long after him to let me get a close look at his work. No self-promoter, he was reluctant. But my persistence paid off in 2004 when he allowed me to sit in the passenger seat of his 1997 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, filled with the crackling of 11 police and fire radios.
And through the city we roamed. Nothing very dramatic took place that night but it became part of a Tribune magazine cover story. At the time, he calculated that he had taped 4,426 stories and delivered 13,056 tapes to TV stations. Inside those numbers sit tragedy: 747 homicides, 1,352 fires, 1,018 auto accidents.
Those numbers would more than triple by the time he called it quits but as he told me, “I think people have a need to know what’s going on out here in the middle of the night. It’s news, even though most of it is not pretty, and much of it is terribly painful.”
He says that he does not miss the mayhem, but he misses the people who were part of his world, the tipsters, firefighters, police officers, IDOT workers, other reporters and some videographers.
“So many of them became my friends,” he says.
This is understandable. Herzlich is a palpably pleasant person, businesslike but never pushy.
He once summed up his method: “When I started, I was nobody. I didn’t know a soul. I was scared. I was going places I never knew existed, into some really tough neighborhoods, not knowing what to expect, what I was going to find. Plus, I didn’t have any formal affiliation with any news organization, so I always just tried to treat everybody respectfully.” He will also miss the people at the TV stations, from the desk assistants and assignment editors, producers, news directors, reporters and anchors.
And they will miss him. As Carol Marin, the esteemed TV journalist now co-director of the DePaul Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence, told me earlier this week, “Ken is genuine through and through. He is an old-school journalist in the best sense of that phrase. When I think of him, I think of all those others out there in the night like the cops, the paramedics and the firefighters, working while we are all safe at home.
“There is a certain gratification to what he did, showing us all what people need to see. But there is also a toll that he has paid. Still, he has remained a good man, an admirable man.”
Herzlich was born in Chicago and raised in Des Plaines. During his high school years, his parents divorced, and he began living with his father, a real estate broker, in an apartment in the then frenetic Rush Street area. In the late 1970s, he took three buses and a train to get to what was then Maine East High School. He had long had an interest in photography and while still in high school started a successful freelance photography business.
After high school he worked for commercial photography studios and continued his freelance work, shooting primarily for the Sears catalog.
He has been married for 33 years to a delightful woman named Karen Kaep. They met on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend. “Ken was such a warm, sensitive man,” she told me. “I fell for him the day we met.”
Other mutual friends, Wendy Frame and Chris Blackman, then producers at WMAQ-Channel 5, encouraged Herzlich’s news junkie instincts and drew him into what became his life’s work. The timing was perfect, as TV industry budget cutbacks had started to reduce the number of full-time station staffers at the same time the number of local morning news shows was increasing, adding more hours and airing morning news shows all week. Cable networks also were being born and all outlets were voracious for videos to fill their broadcast days.
Herzlich picked up a video camera and started shooting, only on weekends at first but he was soon at it six nights a week. That made for an unconventional marriage and one shadowed by worry. The couple would have dinner around 7 p.m. and spend three hours together. She would go to sleep, and he would go to work.
His wife said, “Every night I would look out the window and watch his car drive away and I would say to myself, ‘Dear God, make sure he comes home in the morning.’”
He would always come home and now he is home all the time. His wife works as a surgical coordinator for a doctor whose office is not far from their downtown apartment. They take long walks together. They see friends, sometimes for dinner. They travel, when the pandemic allows, to Greece, where five years ago they bought and renovated a home 20 miles south of Athens.
“I do miss the adrenalin rush, in part because there was no winding down. I just stopped,” he says. “Those 30 years went by in the blink of an eye but on all those nights I had the city to myself, I felt like I was part a film noir. Leaving the house and not knowing what was going to happen. There was a certain thrill in that.”
Many years ago, Herzlich was featured in a Japanese television program about the world’s most dangerous jobs. Now, there is no more danger and at night he sleeps. He says he is dealing with minor PTSD issues. “I have seen too much,” he says. “But I am still a news junkie. We have nine TV sets at home I am always watching the news.”
He says that he does not have nightmares. Instead, he says he dreams of Greece.
