Steve Bousquet is flanked by Frank Coletta, left, and Art Lake on the Newswatch 10 set in 1979.

Photo courtesy Steve Bousquet

When I got to Rhode Island in 1978, Steve Bousquet was one of the marquee names at Channel 10 News.

A few years later, he was gone, headed for a TV station in Miami. But in one sense, he’s never left: A native Rhode Islander, graduate of Chariho High School and the University of Rhode Island, he still comes back two or three times a year to visit his big brother, cartoonist Don Bousquet, in Wakefield, as well as other relatives scattered around the state.

Steve has long since changed his journalistic medium, from a TV camera to a newspaper reporter’s notebook and tape recorder. After 17 years with the Miami Herald, he moved in 2001 to the St. Petersburg Times, where he’s the Florida paper’s state-capital bureau chief in Tallahassee.

But — mild-mannered, gray-haired and still trim at 54 — he’s easily recognizable as the young man who broke in at Channel 10 the same week in 1977 as Meredith Vieira.

And, like his older brother, he’s a storyteller, one I was glad to finally meet recently when he stopped by our bureau in Wakefield for a chat.

WORKING AT Channel 10, Bousquet is saying, was “a great experience. It broadened my horizons. I was a South County kid; I hadn’t been out of state very much. Channel 10 had a deep bench of great reporters who really helped me.”

Bill Northup and Jim Taricani were two of them. Sara Wye and John Sweeney were also at the station, along with Vieira, now co-host of NBC’s Today show.

And then there was Jack Kavanagh, at the center of some of Bousquet’s most vivid memories.

In Florida, he says, he has lived through hurricanes, “but there is not much that equals the Blizzard of ’78. That was the kind of week that leaves an indelible impression for the rest of your life.”

Channel 10 had just acquired the state’s first camera vehicle for remote live shots, a boxy white truck called NewsCam 10. Bousquet and the late cameraman Eddie English were driving on Allens Avenue when a call came over their two-way radio: “Bousquet. Get back immediately. We need that truck.”

Kavanagh and news director Steve Caminis commandeered the camera truck and got it to the State House, just in time to beat the snow.

“That truck became a lifeline between state government and the people of Rhode Island,” Bousquet says, recalling how Kavanagh and Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy kept the state informed as the snow fell, and then as the dig-out began. But not without a little internal jockeying among his fellow Channel 10 reporters, who approached management full of concern for their colleague.

“ ‘Jack looks tired. Jack looks worn out,’ ” Bousquet recalled them saying. “And Jack, to his great credit, wouldn’t move. ‘No, I’m fine.’ ”

STEVE, the third-oldest of the seven Bousquet children (Don, the next oldest, is six years Steve’s senior, “something he hates to be reminded of,” says Steve), had gotten to Channel 10 by a circuitous route. But the news was always in his blood.

The family moved from Pawtucket to Richmond when Steve was 3, and as a boy he delivered The Westerly Sun. “Main Street in Carolina, that was my domain.”

His late mother, Eleanor, a URI employee — she took photos for student IDs for a decade — and member of the Chariho School Committee, loved to read The Evening Bulletin, former sister paper to The Journal.

“This may sound corny, but it’s absolutely true,” Bousquet says. “We were closely connected to the news. I learned to read by reading the South County Log in The Bulletin. ‘Brush fire. 2:09 p.m. in Shannock.’ That was interesting to me.”

At Chariho High, he was editor of the yearbook, and played baseball, basketball and soccer, though “I spent most of my formative years sitting on the bench.” His first taste of published writing was “a screed attacking the [school] administration for its ‘no-touch policy’ ” between boys and girls in the school. Though Bousquet concedes that the school looked “like the Westerly Drive-In on Saturday night,” he thought the policy absurd, and said so — a piece that drew a reprimand from the principal.

“I was called into Principal Francis Pellegrino’s office,” Bousquet recalls, as though it were yesterday. “I was supposed to start as a pitcher against East Providence.”

Pellegrino, he says, told him, “You know what, young man? You’re not going to that ballgame.”

It was a big disappointment, Bousquet remembers. “I was a relief pitcher, and didn’t get to start very often.”

BUT THE SCHOOL also carried the seeds of his journalistic success, courtesy of its legendary baseball coach, Henry “Skip” Kenyon, who told him, “Bousquet, keep the book” — the games’ scorebook.

“Skip Kenyon had a lot to do with whetting my appetite for journalism,” Bousquet says. The young pitcher had to summon up his courage after the game to go ask questions of the other team, so he could send scores and other information to The Journal and The Sun. (The experience taught him an early lesson in media economics, he notes; The Sun paid $2 a game, “and they wanted everything,” all sorts of details and names, while all Dick Lee at the much larger Journal wanted was the line score, and he paid $5.)

In the summer after Bousquet graduated from Chariho, his mother insisted he get a job, and the unemployment office in Westerly found him a place as a bellhop at the old Ocean House hotel in Watch Hill. Working odd shifts, and living at the hotel, “I found myself with lots of time, and wide-awake at night.” So he would go hang out in the control room of Westerly radio station WERI, which ended up paying him $5 a week as a stringer covering Chariho news.

Bousquet got to the University of Rhode Island in the fall of 1971, and became involved with the student-run radio station, WRIU-FM, “vastly smaller than it is now, a little tiny 10-watt radio station.” He did the news, which led to a $2-an-hour opening at WKFD in Wickford, which billed itself as “The Radio Lighthouse.”

The job was open, Bousquet notes, because “a young guy named Frank Coletta was going back to Emerson College, was going back to school.” Coletta, of course, went on to become the longtime anchor of Channel 10’s morning Sunrise program.

WKFD, BOUSQUET SAYS, was “a local station that functioned like a newspaper.” He read obituaries on the air, covered a scandal at the North Kingstown Police Department and went to meetings of the North Kingstown Town Council and School Committee, where his colleagues included The Journal’s Gerry Goldstein and Bob Stickler, and North Kingstown Standard-Times editor Rudi Hempe, “puffing on his pipe.”

He also covered meetings in Newport, because “the station was in Wickford, but pretended to be in the middle of Narragansett Bay” to appeal to rich Newport advertisers. It was in Newport, where he brought in a big, bulky tape recorder to capture the meetings, that a city solicitor once told him tape recorders were banned; only paper-and-cardboard notebooks were allowed.

“That seems improbable today, when everything is electronic, and so much is live and on the Internet,” Bousquet says. But it took Caminis, his boss when he later worked at Channel 10, to challenge a similar ban by the Richmond Town Council and establish the principle that cameras and recorders were permitted at public meetings.

Bousquet worked 40 hours a week at WKFD, and threw in a stint at WARV in Apponaug, doing six-hour record shows on Sunday afternoons. It was a rock station then, in 1974-75.

“I would put on a long 45, like Harry Chapin’s ‘Taxi,’ ” Bousquet recalls, “and race next door to the Steak ’n’ Shake to get a sandwich.”

All the while, he was carrying a full course load at URI, where the late Wilbur Doctor, longtime chairman of the Journalism Department, was one of his mentors. Doctor thought that Bousquet’s determination to work in radio and television was “a big mistake.”

So Doctor got him an internship on the copy desk at The Journal. But soon, The Journal launched an all-news radio station, WEAN, and Bousquet, still enamored of broadcasting, landed a job there. Then, after a little more than a year, he got the chance to move to Channel 10.

BOUSQUET HAS FOND memories of the station, then on the fifth floor of the now-vanished downtown Providence department store run by the Outlet Company, which owned it.

“We had to climb into elevators, on deadline, with little old ladies who were looking for Housewares,” he recalls.

During the Blizzard of ’78, the store’s bedding department became a dormitory, not just for station and store employees, but for other refugees from the storm. To help pass the time, the station showed films from its library, beamed against a wall.

“So you’re lying there,” Bousquet remembers, “and watching The Sons of Katie Elder, a John Wayne movie.”

Though he respected the station’s work, he felt that South County got short shrift there, and argued to get more stories from the region on the air. One result was his five-part series on “The Selling of South County,” focusing on the subdividing of lots in towns including Richmond and North Kingstown.

But with his mother active both in the Chariho School Committee and in URI affairs, including her union, he had to stay away from those subjects, which limited him. And then there are other oddities of working on TV in Rhode Island.

People who knew his family and didn’t like a story would ask, “What would your mother think?”

Those who didn’t know the Bousquets — or weren’t sure if they did — weren’t shy, either. “I still tell a story about walking into Apex in Pawtucket, and a woman said, ‘Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me. 10 or 12?’ I said, ‘10,’ and she said, ‘Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me. News or sports?’ ”

Sitting down in a restaurant, he would hear stories about colleagues and competitors — which one had had too much to drink, or was rude to a waitress. “And I thought, ‘Uh-oh. Uh-oh.’

“You’re on display all the time. Rhode Island’s a fishbowl. It really is.”

HE DECIDED it was time to try to move to a bigger market, spurred on also by seeing the departure of colleagues including Vieira, who caught on with WCBS-TV. “I’m not going places,” he thought; he wanted to turn that around.

He sent tapes all over the country. But it was Caminis, his old boss at Channel 10, now in Miami, who asked him to come down to WPLG, the Washington Post-owned station whose call letters recalled the Post’s former publisher, Philip L. Graham.

Bousquet was sent to establish a bureau in Fort Lauderdale. The county he was to cover, Broward County, “was bigger than Rhode Island.” And, he says, it was “the antithesis of Rhode Island.”

“Here, everyone knows everyone, has shared experience. And down there, it’s an extremely mobile, transient place.”

Regularly, he traveled from place to place in a helicopter, not something he’d had to do in little Rhode Island. And he had taken four years of Spanish at Chariho High, thinking there would not be much practical use for it. Now, in Miami, he was relying on that limited Spanish.

He worked with a lot of reporters who went on to the networks. And he had great respect for Caminis, “a terrific guy who had old-fashioned news values.”

But, he says, “it rankled me as a TV reporter, doing derivative reporting” that merely turned the morning’s newspaper stories into “two-minute movies for the 6 o’clock news.” And always there was “that voice of Wilbur Doctor I could not get out of my head: ‘You should be writing.’ ”

So, after four years with WPLG in Broward County — a long time to have one job in TV — he switched mediums and joined the Miami Herald, covering the state government and legislature in Tallahassee.

He had covered the Rhode Island General Assembly for Channel 10, but, he notes, “dense policy discussion of lawmaking doesn’t translate well visually.”

Now, back in the newspaper world, he could do the kind of work he really wanted to do.

THAT WAS 24 years ago, and Bousquet is still enjoying covering the Florida legislature. He also writes a weekly column for the St. Petersburg Times, where he moved for the chance to work with a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Lucy Morgan, at a paper with “an unequaled reputation for covering state government … in Florida.”

“I like walking around with a notebook and tape recorder,” he says. “That’s my life.”

But he does return to Rhode Island, usually for a week in the summer with his New Jersey-born wife, Nancy, and their children, 13-year-old Chris and 19-year-old Steve Jr. And maybe another there’s another trip here or there, like a pair of recent January visits when Chris saw snow — and big storms, at that — for the first time.

“The connection you have to Rhode Island — it’s grown more distant, but for me, it’s basically intact,” Steve says. “I think because this state is such a close-knit place.”

His father, Don Bousquet Sr. — “retired from a whole bunch of things,” including 15 years as a custodian at URI — still lives in Charlestown. Other Bousquets, too, are nearby.

And there are other attractions.

“One of the reasons I like to visit,” Steve says, “is that a lot of the stuff I remember from the ’50s and ’60s is still pretty much intact here.”

He remembers driving near Narragansett Town Beach as a boy with his aunt, Virginia Partington, head nurse of the town schools, and telling her, “I want to go under the ‘go-under’ ” — the road-spanning arch at The Towers. It’s still one of his favorite spots.

There are changes, too, of course. Bousquet remembers the Industrial National Bank and Adams Drug in Wakefield, the old Benny’s in the Quo Vadis Shopping Center, the old Stop & Shop where he worked while going to URI. Where Tim Hortons is now in town, in the early ’70s was an Eddy Arnold’s, one of an “ill-fated string of KFC-like chicken restaurants,” where Bousquet worked in the early 1970s.“These are the days of the Arab oil embargo and odd-even gas rationing,” Steve says. “Don sold me a gas-guzzling 1964 Ford Galaxie, which I drove when I was at URI. Not much has changed, I guess.”

SIX YEARS WAS a big gap when the brothers were growing up. Don joined the Navy right out of high school; when Steve was heading for college, Don was wooing his wife, Laura; when Don was starting his cartooning career, Steve was heading off to Florida.

Over the years, though, the brothers have grown closer, Steve says. Steve sometimes suggests cartoon ideas to Don, though Don “has a very strong sense of what’s funny, and it’s not always what I think is funny.” And when they get together now, they get along “pretty well.”

“He beats me terribly at poker,” Steve says. “What the general public maybe doesn’t know about Don is, he’s a fanatically good and very competitive card player.”

There’s another difference, too, Steve says, from their relationship in the old days.

Back then, Rhode Islanders would see big brother Don and say, “Aren’t you the brother of that guy on TV?”

Now, when they see Steve, they say, “Aren’t you the brother of the cartoonist?”

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s regional editor for South County.

arosenbe@projo.com