An offbeat view of the news

This story was published in The Inquirer on July 1, 1984

It was somewhere between the 16,547th Whopper and 42,958th order of fries that Channel 6's Don Polec decided his destiny lay beyond the grill of a Burger King in downtown Buffalo.

As the snowdrifts mounted during that bleak winter six years ago, Polec realized that the assistant manager's job he had taken to tide him over for a few months was quickly becoming a career. And it wasn't the career for him.

Two years in the fast-food business was enough, he concluded. It was time to move on to bigger and better things. Trouble was, Polec wasn't quite sure what those bigger and better things were.

A stint as a graveyard-shift disc jockey at Buffalo's WKBW-AM during his senior year of college had convinced Polec that he and radio were not made for each other. So why not give TV a shot?

Pitching himself as a news photographer, Polec had 500 resumes printed in the form of an outlaw "Wanted" poster. Not expecting much, he sent the first six to home-town Buffalo stations.

One day later, WBKW-TV called. No openings for a news photographer, they told him, but how about doing a feature report in front of the camera? Jumping at the bait, Polec put together a tongue-in-cheek piece on horseback riding that got him a job as a features reporter in May 1977.

Polec started at a gallop. He specialized in the offbeat; nothing was too weird for him. "All they (WKBW-TV) knew was that they wanted a little yuk at the end of the newscast," he recalls, smiling at the memory. "I was more than willing to do that. I was beyond goofy. "

Not much has changed. Oh, he's cut back on some of the corn, but since Polec left Buffalo to join Channel 6 in November 1982, the essential Don Polec has stayed the same - clever, irreverent and almost always amusing.

Three times a week during the 11 p.m. Action News telecast, "Don Polec's World" delves into some of the weirdest, most unpredictable on-air stuff this side of Saturday Night Live.

A rundown of recent Polec features includes an impromptu "fashion preview" on Chestnut Street, highlighted by a couple of sleeping bums in vintage polyester slacks; a riotous piece - complete with echo-chamber sound effects - on pop culture's latest buzzword: turbo; and a pseudo-scientific examination of deja vu, in which every phrase Polec said was repeated.

"Channel 6 took a chance hiring me," says Polec, 32, now in the second year of a three-year contract. "They're a pretty conservative operation. They want to do the right thing, stay on the beam. I always get the feeling that they're sitting back in their offices gasping, 'I hope he knows what he's doing.'

"They don't tell me what to do, but they sort of give me a blank check with great reluctance. They're afraid I might go off the deep end. It took a while for them to realize I'm absolutely terrible when I get input by committee. They might as well let me fly. I know enough not to go over the edge. "

Says Alan Nesbitt, Channel 6 news director: "If you had 10 people looking at the same situation, they'd see it as 'X.' Don would see it as 'Y minus Z.' He's full of mischief. "

Polec's philosophy is simple: Don't let the reporter overshadow the story. Although he often participates in his features - he washed windows outside a high-rise building as part of a piece on a window-washer - Polec says that if his presence isn't required on camera to enhance the subject, he'd rather stay in the shadows.

"The story itself is what you want to be cute, not you," he explains. "You don't take something that's nothing and make yourself the story. That doesn't belong in a newscast. You work around the story, embellish it with humor. You should merely be the messenger, not the message. "

Polec, the only child of a machinist, grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood with dreams of becoming a disc jockey. ("I thought a job had to be 9 to 5, then you came home and drank beer, kicked the dog and went to sleep," he says. )

Accepting the fact that he would never be the star of the high school football team, he became the class clown instead. "I wanted to make the school wish they had a varsity letter for class disruption," he says, chuckling. "All they did was give letters for detention. "

After graduating from the State University of New York at Geneseo with a degree in speech communication in 1973, Polec and a buddy embarked on a "soul-searching mission," traveling cross-country in an old van. They picked up odd jobs along the way: working at a pully factory in Denver; doing construction in Britt, Iowa; joining a moving crew in Las Vegas.

Six months later, Polec & Pal came home. "I realized the Northeast was the best place in the country to live," Polec says. "Once you've seen one canyon, you've seen 'em all. " To pay the rent, he got a job as assistant manager at the local Burger King.

In real life, Polec is a low-key, introspective Regular Guy who would rather hang out with his actress wife, Ann Marie, in their new Fairmount home than make small talk at a cocktail party. His '75 MG Midget is in the shop more than it's on the road. He doesn't own a VCR. He constantly interrupts his own sentences with "You know what I'm saying? "

One of Polec's favorite activities, besides ingesting great quantities of Swiss chocolate almond ice cream, is staring into space. "I've visited seven of nine planets in the solar system," he muses. "Neptune's closed on Sundays, in case anybody's interested. "

Back on Earth, Polec's role model is Muhammad Ali because "he made his own rules and forced everybody else to live by them. He kept everyone off balance wondering if he was really what he appeared to be. "

Is Don Polec what he appears to be?

"That guy on the screen is maybe 10 percent of my personality," he says. "That funny, glib, off-the-wall 10 percent happens to make my living for me. The other 90 percent is along for the ride."