Beyond digging the dirt

A one-on-one with Portland's gardening columnist and radio/television host Anne Jaeger

by Jennifer Dirks

Contributing Editor

It took a brush with cancer for KOIN-TV’s Anne Jaeger, master gardener and host of the popular gardening feature “Dig It,” to learn to slow down.

“Over the past four years, she’s changed maybe more than everyone I know,” said pal Randy Querin, who co-hosted KOIN’s weekday morning show with Jaeger from 1996 to 1998.

Life is so much simpler now for Jaeger, 43. Once up at 2 a.m. to get ready to host KGW-TV’s highest-rated weekend morning show and later co-host KOIN-TV’s weekday morning, she was a perpetual perfectionist who “wanted to have her fingers in everything, always trying to make everything perfect,” Querin said.

Now she’s made a turnaround: “She’s a lot more laid back,” he said.

Jaeger sits in her new home office, looking out of the slim attic window onto the hand-toiled acre of backyard. Her cat rubs against the chair leg; her daughter’s watercolor paintings hang over her desk.

This is where she does her work now -- far removed from the frenzy of a big-city newsroom. She turns out three KOIN-TV gardening news briefs, one KPAM-Radio Saturday-morning garden show and, at most, one Portland Tribune gardening column every week. Most are written or shot from this Lake Oswego home base.

“This last year has been one of the most challenging but also the most rewarding,” Jaeger said. “I look back and think, how did this happen?”

For someone so in the public eye, Jaeger still has managed to keep much of her struggle with cancer hidden. You’d never know it from her TV shows, where she conceals her head (her hair was lost from radiation treatments) either by wearing a hat and bandanna or donning a custom-fitted and -colored blond wig.

“It’s fine that people don’t know,” Jaeger said. “Because the whole idea is, you’re looking forward, not back.”

Becoming a Survivor

In late-summer 2001, she started feeling under the weather: “I had been really, really tired, but I thought it was just because I was a single mom, with three jobs.” It was much more serious than that.

            Doctors diagnosed Jaeger with lymphoma, a form of cancer. It hadn’t reached her lymph glands yet -- the only good news in the diagnosis. Lymph glands collect and send toxins to be excreted through organs such as the kidney or liver; if the cancer had lodged there, the cancer could have infected these and other organs. Instead, the cancer lodged in her thyroid, a rarity.

“It was a good thing,” Jaeger said, “because the thyroid encased it in there and it didn’t get out.”

After months of chemotherapy, followed by six weeks of daily radiation, Jaeger is considered cured. She’ll have to wait two years to know for sure, but science gives her a 90-plus percent cure rate.

            Her hair is growing back, still patchy in places (sometimes, to amuse her daughter, she’ll rub on fake KOIN-TV tattoos). But Jaeger isn’t ready to show the masses quite yet. Even when she’d make her trips into KOIN to drop off tapes during her treatment, she always dressed up and donned her wig “to look nice,” she said.

           “In some ways I guess you might look at that and say it’s pride. I think it was a public service,” she chuckles here, pausing to run her finger down the smooth glass edge of her desk. “I really want people to know that it’s not the worst thing. It may seem like it, and there are very dark days, but there are times of such tremendous joy. If you want to know what joy is -- you get to the other side of something like this.”

Getting there

When she was sick, it was flowers that rescued her: “I wanted to think about positive things, like flowers. I needed to think about gardens and their various possibilities, to remind me about life and what’s really important,” Jaeger said. “I did a lot of mapping out my garden in my head.”

            In her garden, with takes over most of the yard, it’s all about big and bold: “If it doesn’t have a flower, I don’t want it growing in my backyard.”

            What inspired her to get into big and colorful flowers? It all started 11 years ago. Jaeger was stuck in bed for three months, pregnant with her daughter and having difficulties. “And for some reason, I picked up a gardening book and started reading it,” she said. “I read, and read, and read, and read, a lot about gardening, and really got hooked, and then I couldn’t wait to go out there and just try it.”

Her love continued after the birth. She’d attach the baby monitor to her waistband while Haleigh (pronounce Hay-Lee) was taking a nap, and head outside. “Instead of constantly doing wash and diapers and all that stuff, I would be out digging.”

A 180-degree turn

Digging in Portland soil for a TV show isn’t so far removed from Jaeger’s life growing up: “I can remember my father grew zinnias, and to this day I still grow zinnias. I think I picked it up from him.”

            She went to Portland-area Park Rose and Ridgewood elementary schools. Then on to Cedar Hills Junior High for seventh through ninth grades and then Sunset High School. Her stay at Sunset was short, only two years: “I graduated as a junior and went to U. of O.” (University of Oregon in Eugene, for non-neophytes.) “I was 16 when I graduated, and then my birthday was in the summer, so I went to college when I was 17.”

Even before graduating, she began working at the local television station, ABC-affiliate KEZI: “That was the best education I ever got.” She was an intern first, ripping scripts off the newsroom printer and running the news anchor’s teleprompter.

“I did anything that needed to be done, and then I started writing. That was the fun thing. It’s so much fun to put pictures and words and sounds together.”

She stayed at KEZI for 15 years, anchoring the news there “forever,” she said. Jaeger also took over the crime and courts beat. It was there, through an uncanny string of events, she also broke into the movie biz.

Jaeger had reported heavily on the Diane Downs murder case, the highly publicized trial of an Oregon mother accused of shooting herself and her children. Jaeger (her name was Anne Bradley then) took her footage from the story, and turned it into a documentary. The documentary fell into the hands of best-selling author Ann Rule, who was writing a book called “Small Sacrifices” on the Diane Downs case. The documentary was mentioned in the book. The book was turned into a Lifetime Movie Network film. In it, Jaeger plays herself -- a reporter covering the crime and subsequent court drama. (Jaeger still has photos of her and Farrah Fawcett, the actress playing Diane Downs in the movie).

Covering crime wasn’t all Hollywood; in many cases, it was anything but. “It takes a huge emotional toll on your psyche,” Jaeger said. “I would wake up in the morning and the radio would go on, and I would hear that the police are investigating a little boy found walking the side of the road, with his throat slashed and blood down his shirt. I’d know that was going to be my story for the day.”

Meanwhile, her psyche picked up an even greater lesson: “I think, in my soul, I was learning how to go on after something absolutely devastating happens to you or your children. Because these people show an amazing amount of strength.”

After 10 years on the crime beat though, Jaeger was “more than ready” to move on. She took at job in Portland, at NBC’s KGW-TV, as a general assignment reporter. “When I moved up here I tried to get away from that a little bit more, so for my seven years that I was at KGW I did all sorts of stuff. And that was one thing that I think was one of my strengths: I could do so many different kinds of things that there was always something for me to do. I just had to decide what was it that I wanted to do.”

            In 1997, she moved from KGW, where she had moved up to host “the highest rated weekend morning show in town; it was the only No. 1 show at Channel 8 at the time,” to KOIN Channel 6.

            “I had known her as someone who worked for the competition, and all of a sudden we had to sit down next to each other for hours a day,” Querin said. “We would sit down together at 5:30 a.m. and not get up, even to go to the bathroom, until 9 a.m. We had lots of time to get to know each other.”

            It was Querin, said Jaeger, who introduced her to what it was she really wanted to do.

Franchising herself

“We would sit there every morning and say, we cannot keep getting up at 2 o’clock in the morning,” Jaeger said of her and Querin doing KOIN’s morning show. “We’re getting too old to get up at 2 o’clock in the morning.”

            So, Querin told her about his new concept. He was going to start a franchise -- a new concept in TV, where reporters would branch off from their general assignment duties and start specializing in one particular subject. Querin later launched a home improvement specialty, which he spun into “Handy Randy” home improvement television segments and a radio show.

“And the more he talked about it,” Jaeger says, “the more I thought. ‘I’ve got to do something like that.’”

            One night, it clicked. She woke up in the middle of the night. “And I thought, ‘I’m going to do gardening.’” It was there, in the dark, when she came up with the concept of calling it ‘Dig It’ and using a 1960s children’s song by Hugh Masekela as her theme song: “I can dig it, he can dig it, she can dig it, we can dig it, they can dig it, you can dig it. Oh let’s dig it, can you dig it baby?”

She went into her boss at KOIN, and the conversation went something like this: “I’d like to start a franchise.”

“Great, what kind of a franchise, because we really want to get franchises going?”

“Gardening,” she said.

“Well, what do you know about gardening?”

“Well, I’m an award-winning crime reporter,” she said, “and I never murdered anyone.”

            So, that’s how it started. After convincing her boss that stories about gardening were so much more (“Sure, it’s about plants, but it’s really about people. It’s about how people see life, where they put plants is an expression of their souls”), KOIN went ahead and told her to give it a try.

“And they loved it,” she said.

Gardening girl

When Jaeger started doing the franchising concept, it also opened up other opportunities for her outside the newsroom. She became spokesperson for one of the Northwest’s biggest wholesalers of bedding plants, Harts Nursery & Garden Center. Now she makes “celebrity” appearances at its tradeshow booths, wears the Harts Nursery gardening vest on her show, and occasionally appears in its commercials.

            “She’s a great person,” said owner Glen Hart, calling from the nursery’s retail store in the framing community of Jefferson, Ore. “She’s perceived really well by the public, she’s really knowledgeable and bubbly. She’s just a great person.”

            Jaeger impressed him at a home and garden show about a year ago. “She was handing out her private cell phone and telephone number when customers where asking her about questions,” Hart said. “And I stood there and thought, you know, most people wouldn’t do that.”

So he signed her on -- just in time to help ease Jaeger’s transition during her illness. “Gardening and them calling me and saying, ‘Hey, we’d like to have you as our spokesperson,’ really changed my life,” Jaeger said.

And for Jaeger, always the extra-curricularist, here’s the most exciting part: The nursery is rolling out Jaeger’s own line of geraniums this spring. Called “Anne’s Choice,” the line will be sold at Wal-Mart, Bi-Mart and Rite-Aid.

“It’s got my picture on it, every single plant,” Jaeger giggles, like the schoolgirl back playing in the zinnias. “I’m going to be face down in mud, all over two states.”

Cancer help from Anne Jaeger

If you or a family member is facing cancer, Anne Jaeger offers a few ideas that may help:

          1. Hair loss -- “If you’re looking for a wig, go to Brenda Kay,” Jaeger said. Kay runs a shop in downtown Portland, at 1975 S.W. First St. “Before you lose your hair, you go in there, and she takes a look at your hair, and she can match it almost perfectly. She’s amazing.” The wigs are half synthetic and half human hair, and sell for about $300.

            2. Radiation pain relief -- Preparing to undergo radiation? To prevent burns on the outside of the body, try this tip: “I got this radiation gel from my naturopath. I put it all over the front of me, where I had the radiation, and on my neck. My front never burned, never itched, nothing.”

            The jell, which is slimy, is wiped on about one to three hours before treatment. Jaeger purchased hers from Lake Oswego naturopath Noel Peterson: “That’s [something] I wish more people knew about, because I think it would save them some pain.”

However, she didn’t think to put it on her back, and was seriously burned there. Jaeger continues, “The radiation went down my front, and you can’t see it. Nothing was burned. But my back shows exactly where the radiation went.”

            3. Accepting help -- “I realized that I’m not very good at asking for help, and that was one of cancer’s lessons to me, is that you need to ask for help,” she said. “You have to welcome the kindness of people, and appreciate it -- not just appreciate it, but welcome it and not fight it. You can’t keep saying, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ Because, really, as soon as the person leaves, you’ll be right back on your back.”

            Her mother came to run errands, baby-sit her daughter and grocery shop. “I came to realize that this was not only a blessing for me, it’s a blessing for the people around me, the people who love me, because they want to help so badly, and they feel so out of control, like there’s nothing they can do. And if they can do just a little thing to help, they feel so much better.”                                                      -- Jennifer Meacham Dirks