My mom likes to say I’ve been covering news since the day I was born—longer if you count my time in utero. The day she went into labor, my parents were in Hollywood covering a shooting, a mugging gone wrong. There was no question my mom would join my dad at the scene, even if she was nine days overdue. They were a husband-and-wife reporting team, the founders of the Los Angeles News Service, so she grabbed her 17-pound tape deck, and off we went. Eighteen hours later the Tur family had another journalist in the world, though it would be more than 18 years before I knew it.
Looking back after more than a decade in live television, I suppose my career choice was inevitable. The sound of the police and fire scanner, which my parents relied on for stories, was my music box and my bedtime story. My mom says it’s the reason my first word was hot and, only half-jokingly, that my second and third were smoke and showing.
My parents got ahead in the news business with wits, guts, and a creative interpretation of “fair game.” They leased their first helicopter in 1985, when KTLA news crews were on strike. Maybe the crews had good grievances, maybe not. Either way, my parents ignored the strike and went to work. They had a one-year-old at home (me) and another kid on the way.
After a few months with KTLA, they also had $30,000. With that down payment, plus a good sales pitch, my dad convinced Bell Helicopters to lease him a $250,000 chopper. TV news would never be the same.
Bob and Marika Tur were not the first to use a helicopter, but they were the first to do something memorable with one. My dad didn’t have his license yet when they got their first big scoop: Sean Penn and Madonna’s 1985 wedding on the coast of Malibu. He hired a pilot to hover 150 feet off the bluff, so close that Madonna flipped him the finger. He sold the pictures for six figures.
Soon they had settled into a routine: Dad flying, Mom on camera. She was fearless. She’d hang out over the skids, hundreds of feet in the air, a 30-pound Betacam on her shoulder. They couldn’t send the videos live, so they flew tapes from station to station, dropping them from the copter down to the roof where a producer waited. To keep the tapes from breaking on impact, my mom wrapped them in anything she had on hand, usually clothing. On busy days it wasn’t unusual for her to get back to the hangar in her underwear.
Meanwhile, my dad filed live radio reports, his hands on the controls and his eyes on the news unfolding below him. When I was five, he started asking me to work up my own live reports. In one, I tell the story of an imaginary fire in San Diego that ended with all my friends and me having a party at McDonald’s. And you know what? I wasn’t so bad. My mom and dad were “helicopter parents,” literally. Meaning, I didn’t have a nanny, so I went up in the helicopter. My entire early childhood education consisted of tagging along while they reported on car accidents, multiple-alarm fires, and shootouts.
