I was at an awards banquet recently which honored several “Women of Achievement,” and one of them was CBS Los Angeles television anchor Suzanne Rico. Rico covered the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, the war in Afghanistan and the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.
Rico had some interesting things to say about her childhood and her father. She said that the only time she ever got in trouble when she was a kid was when she was 13 and she shoplifted a bathing suit. She says that when the security guards nabbed her and were calling her house, she was praying that her mother, not her father, would answer the phone. She said her mother would take away her television and ground her. She said she did not know what her father would do.
In the end, she says, her punishment was worse than anything she could have anticipated. It was her father who answered the phone, and he came to the store to pick up Suzanne. When they were in the store and the security guard explained to him what Suzanne had done, she said his face had an expression of incredible disappointment.
He hardly said a word to her, and did not give her a punishment. She said that her father’s look of disappointment was a worse punishment than anything he or Suzanne’s mother could have given her. She said she has never forgotten it, and that it helped make her who she is.