WNPR radio personality Faith Middleton earned her first dollar from Jacqueline Kennedy. The future first lady offered to pay a pre-teen Middleton that dollar to watch over baby Caroline for an hour.
The job opportunity seems remarkable only in retrospect. Middleton’s mother worked for the Kennedy family back then, which meant the Middletons lived in a cottage on the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.
There was a buzz around JFK then, although he had not yet begun to run for president. But Middleton failed to grasp the significance of her situation.
“For me it was just a play assignment. I played every day with the kids,” said Middleton, whose show is broadcast nationally on WNPR five days a week.
When JFK won the presidency, Middleton’s mother was slated to work for the Kennedys in Washington, D.C., which would have meant a big move for the Middleton family. But her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer before that could happen, and the family stayed in New England.
Middleton spent a summer working as a governess for a family on the Cape. Then she got a job whipping up treats at the soda fountain at Howard Johnson’s.
“It was like ‘Cheers,’” she said. “I felt like I was entertaining.”
By the time Middleton headed off to college, her mother had passed away, an eventual casualty of her cancer. Her father died a month after that. So Middleton went to Eastern Connecticut State University on social security and a scholarship.
“I was nervous the whole time that I’d run out of money,” she recalled.
She sat one day, confiding in a friend about how she needed to find work. A woman overheard her conversation and approached her with a business card.
She worked for the Willimantic Chronicle, and she told Middleton to stop by the newspaper for an interview. Middleton assumed she’d be selling classifieds. Instead, she became the paper’s women’s editor.
Middleton had written a couple of articles for her college paper, but that was about the extent of her journalistic experience. She didn’t even know how to type.
To write her first article, she picked up a yellow note pad and started to scribble. The man she was replacing stopped her, told her she had to type the article on the typewriter, even if she didn’t know how. Just take your two index fingers, he advised, and type like that.
“To this day, I type with two fingers,” Middleton said. “And I type faster than anyone I know.”
The Willimantic Chronicle was a small paper, so Middleton said she got to do a little bit of everything.
“That was electrifying,” she recalled. “I was hooked.”
Middleton continued in print for years, testing the waters as both hard news reporter and Sunday feature writer.
“I was catching bad guys, and I realized I wasn’t happy. I just thought, ‘I don’t want to make a life doing this,’” she recalled. “I loved living life more focusing on people’s creativity, accomplishments, courage.”
Middleton landed her last print job as editor of Connecticut Magazine, which managed to keep her for three years. At the end of that time, Middleton quit and accepted a job with The Washingtonian in Washington, D.C. — and then was faced with the reality of leaving her friends and family in Connecticut.
“I chose those relationships over ambition,” she said.
Although she had no job to turn to, she told the Washingtonian she wasn’t coming.
Her unemployment didn’t last long, however. Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network called, gave her a voice test and offered her a job setting up the organization’s New Haven bureau.
Middleton has been a CPBN staple ever since. The Faith Middleton Show, which airs on WNPR, has been running for 28 years and has hosted more than 10,000 guests, both known and unknown.
“I just can’t believe how many wonderful moments there have been,” she said.
“The world is such a rich place,” she added. “You don’t run out of ideas.”
