Bill Capo
Bill Capo is a New Orleans native, who grew up in the unique City That Care Forgot and began exploring the French Quarter as a teenager. But even at an early age, Bill was drawn to the television business. He became a regular figure at the city’s premier station. Everyone knew him, from the receptionist to the president, and he was able to watch some of America’s best reporters, anchors and hosts as they did their jobs. It was like taking a graduate course in the industry.
In college, Broadcast Journalism was his major, he became news director of the campus television station, a DJ on the university radio station, even asking tough questions of the university president.
After graduation, Bill spent forty-five years as a television news reporter. He covered breaking news, from murders to fires to floods, and of course hurricanes. He was police reporter, federal court reporter, education reporter, and did features and hard-hitting special reports, repeatedly winning awards.
Bill was best known as New Orleans’ Action Reporter, which was a people helper series where audience members asked for help with a wide spectrum of issues, from potholes to scams, hunger and homelessness, and organ transplants, and Bill would work to get them the help they deserved.
Bill was also at one point, a newscast director and technical director, producer, a fill-in anchorman, and a photographer, starting in the days when he carried a film camera in the trunk of his personal car, and had to develop the film, all the way through to the digital age. He even became a weatherman, completing meteorology courses to understand the atmosphere and forecasting (he learned how to stand in front of a blank green wall and watch himself in mirror-image on the monitor to see how the green color was replaced by the weather maps, and how to point to weather systems).
But for most of his career, he worked at two television stations located in the French Quarter. The historic center of New Orleans became Bill’s backyard, and he could often be found walking the streets lined with historic homes, seeing young men who started out playing music on street corners become legends in the city famous for jazz. Of course, he always loved the Cajun and Creole cuisine New Orleans is known for, and some of the city’s top chefs became friends.
After retiring from television news, Bill started a new career, as a tour guide for Gray Line and the Friends Of The Cabildo, explaining the history of a unique city to visitors from around the world, delighted when their mouths dropped open in surprise. And in his spare time, he wrote; magazine articles, special reports for his old station, and two novels (so far), one (‘Category 5’) about a terrible hurricane flooding New Orleans (written before Hurricane Katrina, and intended as a warning to residents that the city could flood, which it eventually did), and a suspense novel (‘Lights, Camera, Kill’) about a movie being filmed in New Orleans, and its beloved leading lady becomes the target of a homicidal maniac. His wife kids him that there is a lot of romance along with the suspense.
