Ann Curry, '78, news anchor of the NBC Today Show, was presented with the 2003 UO Pioneer Award at a May 10 gala event at the Portland Downtown Marriott. More than 300 people attended the event, which raised about $25,000 for the Pioneer Award Presidential Scholarship Fund. Now valued at more than $500,000, the fund provides full-tuition scholarships for five students each year. Also attending the event were Curry's father, Bob Curry; her husband, Brian Ross, CAS '86; her daughter, McKenzie, and son, Walker; and her sister, Lola Amacher of Eugene. In addition to tributes by UO President Dave Frohnmayer, Dean Tim Gleason and several longtime Oregon friends, the evening program included filmed testimonials from many of Curry's television colleagues, including Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker from the Today Show; comedian Bill Cosby; Tom Brokaw, anchor of the NBC Nightly News; Walter Cronkite, retired anchor of the CBS Evening News; and Deborah Roberts, a correspondent for ABC's 20/20. Photo: James McCormick

Looking at her circumstances growing up, no one would have predicted that Ann Curry would become an award-winning television journalist, news anchor of the most popular morning show in the country and one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People.”

Born in Guam to an American career Navy man and a Japanese rice farmer’s daughter, Curry and her family moved so often that she never attended one school for more than two years. Finally settling in Ashland, the family had grown to include five children and survived on little money. For Ann, because of the family’s financial situation, college seemed “an impossible dream.”

But, with her parents’ encouragement, her own determination, some small scholarships, many part-time and summer jobs, and the support of professors who believed in her, Curry obtained her UO journalism degree in 1978. She got a job as a television reporter at a small station in Medford, advanced rapidly through reporting and anchoring jobs in Portland, Los Angeles and Chicago, and, in 1997, was named news anchor of the NBC Today Show.

Along the way, she became a role model for women and people of color in broadcast journalism.

Curry was honored with the UO’s 2003 Pioneer Award at the annual Pioneer Award Gala May 10 at the Portland Marriott Downtown. Inaugurated in 1979, the UO Pioneer Award is presented to alumni and others who have become leaders and risktakers in their fields.

“Ann Curry embodies the highest standards of journalism in this country,” says UO President Dave Frohnmayer. “Her credibility, her ethics, her enthusiasm and compassion have made her one of the most respected news anchors in the business. And her warmth, humility and sense of humor have made her one of the best liked. Ann’s tenacity and courage in overcoming the obstacles in her way are an inspiration to young people around the world.”

Curry remembers as a child not seeing anyone on TV “who looked like me,” she told Turnto10.com, a website for the NBC affiliate in Providence, R.I., in a recent interview. “The women who were on television, and the men, were all Caucasians. Most of them were blond. I didn’t even think there was a place for me.”

What made the difference for her was a college education. “Universities even out the playing field so someone like me can compete,” she says.

But getting to that level playing field wasn’t easy. Curry knew that if she wanted to attend college, she would have to pay for it herself. “I got some small scholarships, and I worked every workstudy job I could get,” she remembers. “I worked every summer. I scrubbed bathrooms in Lake Tahoe as a maid at Harrah’s. I worked in bookstores. I worked in Portland in a cooking store. I did everything I could to raise money for college because it seemed worth it.”

“I chose the University of Oregon because I wanted to be a journalist and it had a good J-school—one of the top ten in the country,” she says.

But, once she got to campus, she was scared to death she wouldn’t succeed. “It was a tremendous stretch for anyone in my family to go to college. As a result, my confidence level as a student was very low.

“At the University of Oregon, there were two professors who made a huge impact on my life—Roy Paul Nelson and Ken Metzler,” says Curry. “Ken Metzler gave me what I needed. He made me feel as though I could do anything, that I was a good student, and that my dreams, if I worked hard, would come true. He was a very strict teacher in the sense that he demanded a great deal from the students. But he was also very easy with encouragement and compliments, and he made me want to work really hard, and then he made me feel good for doing that. And I will never forget how much he shaped my future.

She particularly remembers a class of Metzler’s where she came up with a good answer to a question. “The next day he showed up with a gift for me that I still have today. It’s this little piece of metal type and it says “Honoring Ann Curry, Genius. J321, 1977,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I don’t think I’m a genius, but he made me feel like one, and by making me feel like one, it helped me get to where I am today, because it helped me believe in myself.”

The interviewing skills she learned from Ken Metzler, her willingness to learn and her wideranging interests have made Curry a versatile journalist, able to score an exclusive interview with the McCaughey septuplets family in Iowa on one day and report on the war in Serbia the next. As a reporter for KCBS in Los Angeles, she earned one Emmy Award for her live coverage of the October 1987 Los Angeles earthquake and another for coverage of a gas pipeline explosion in San Bernardino. She has won four Golden Mike awards and an NAACP award for excellence in reporting.

“I try to do stories that make a difference—stories that affect the way people think, stories that people need to hear—and usually what drives me is to do stories about people who have no voice, people who have no political power, people who are overlooked by society,” says Curry. “I report on real people and many have suffered greatly,” Curry told TV Guide in a 2002 article on the fiftieth anniversary of the Today Show. “If there is a prejudice I bring to a story, it is this: I want you to care.”

Curry was inducted into the UO School of Journalism and Communication Hall of Achievement in 2002. The same year, she funded the Ann Curry Scholarship for SOJC Broadcasting Students.

When Curry isn’t working, she spends time with her family, husband Brian Ross, CAS ’86, a software executive, and their children, daughter McKenzie and son Walker. After her sister Jean was diagnosed with breast cancer and her mother died of gallbladder cancer, both in the late 1990s, Curry joined the Susan B. Komen Foundation’s fight against breast cancer. She has reported extensively on breast cancer for Today and has helped out with public service announcements and fundraising events.

But the primary message of Ann Curry’s life and work is to reach for your dreams, no matter where you start and how many problems you encounter. “When I stop and think about it, it just seems amazing to me,” she says. “I’m the oldest of five children in a family that had barely enough to live on month to month, much less to send a daughter to college. I’m from a family where the mother spoke another language as a first language and who felt ostracized and had difficulties in this country. I grew up in the small town of Ashland, Oregon, and from there—through the University of Oregon—I reached the Big Apple, the big time, the brass ring, in the sense that I can have power in shaping the future, the way people think about the facts of the world.

When Curry talks to young people, as she did on the girlpower.gov website recently, she says this: “Along the way, someone will tell you that you can’t do something or be who you want to be. When that happens, remember to think, ‘Oh yeah, watch me.’ I did and I showed ‘em. I bet you will, too.”