Bruce Lindsay to retire from KSL-TV

SALT LAKE CITY — Bruce Lindsay was a home-movie geek growing up — and not a very good one, he admits.

Fascinated with a new gift of a wind-up movie camera, he documented the neighborhood happenings, family vacations or Boy Scout river trips and in the process stumbled into what would become a life passion — chronicling the stories in people's lives.

Lindsay, 61, announced Monday he is retiring from his news storytelling career that has spanned more than three decades at KSL-TV anchoring evening newscasts. Lindsay said he plans to stay on until June.

"What I don't plan to do is take up golf," he said. "I plan to be productively engaged in something. I will be happy to be on the day side of somewhere, something. What it is I don't know."

Lindsay said it's time for him to start spending evenings at home. The years and years of night shifts have been a challenge and presented a bit of a juggling act among he and his wife, Shari, and their six children.

It was while Lindsay was still in high school that he realized he could take his love of visually capturing stories and the craft of writing and turn them into a job in a newsroom. The ah-hah moment came, ironically, with a school visit by then-KSL anchor Dick Nourse, who regaled students with broadcast experiences in Vietnam.

"I told him I was going to have a job like his," Lindsay said. "This is someone who takes pictures, shoots films, does public speaking and writing. It all played into what I was interested in."

It would be a few short years later that Lindsay took a job at KSL as a $2-an-hour intern. After a brief stint in Los Angeles at a news station there, he returned to KSL to be Nourse's co-anchor.

His assignments have taken him to foreign countries and had him chronicling Utah's bid to land the 2002 Winter Games, stories he said he was honored to follow. Even though there have been dozens of trips to exotic locales, Lindsay said he counts among his best memories the early days he spent on the road in Utah in tucked-away corners featuring glimpses of ordinary people.

Over the years, Lindsay admits he has had to struggle with being by nature a private and rather shy person who happens to have a high-visibility public career that demands a certain level of outgoing behavior.

"When I studied journalism, I never really thought about that aspect of visibility and how it plays into your life. That was not the motivation. My bones don't resonate to that," he said. "I wanted to be a storyteller and after I got back behind the desk, a communicator."