What most people don't know about Hank Phillippi Ryan: As a result of a summer job at the Dairy Queen, she can make an ice cream cone with a curl on the top. She was vice-president of the Midwest chapter of the National Beatles Fan Club, and figured she would one day marry George. Or Paul. Or John. When she was ten, her career ambition was to be Nancy Drew.

But that's not how it turned out. Yet.

Right now, she's on the air at Boston's NBC affiliate where she's been working to break big stories for the past 22+ years. So far, so good. Along with 26 EMMYs, she has won dozens of other regional, national, and international honors for what the news releases call her "hard-hitting investigations."

She's also proud of her 10 or so Edward R. Murrow Awards for reporting and writing, her top award from the National Association of Science Writers, and her prestigious Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. She's also proud that her consumer investigative reporting has changed laws and changed lives.

In 1969, she and her best friend got summer jobs as proofreaders, and wound up reading the entire Indiana Code of Laws out loud. Including punctuation.

Since then, she's been a radio reporter, a legislative aide in the US Senate, and in a two-year stint in Rolling Stone Magazine's Washington Bureau, worked on the political column "Capitol Chatter" and organized presidential campaign coverage for Hunter S. Thompson.

She began her TV career in 1975, anchoring and reporting the news for TV stations in Indianapolis and then Atlanta. She's battled her way through hurricanes, floods and blizzards, wired herself with hidden cameras, chased criminals, and confronted corrupt politicians-as well as covering national political conventions, the NBA playoffs, and the Super Bowl; and interviewing newsmakers from Prince Charles to President Jimmy Carter to Warren Beatty to Muhammad Ali.

Outside her TV career, she is on the Board of Directors of New England Sisters in Crime, and also of the New England Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. She's also vice-president of the board of a professional Boston theater company where she founded the Lyric's "First Curtain" program - to provide the full theater experience for underprivileged students. First Curtain has already provided hundreds of free tickets and theater education scholarships.

She lives in the Boston area with her husband, a nationally renowned civil rights and criminal defense attorney. As you can imagine, it's pretty handy to have a legal expert on call at all hours.

Sunday, March 4, 2010

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