Pat Miles came to Minnesota in 1978. The University of Missouri grad had worked in both radio and television before coming to WCCO-TV as a reporter and weekend news anchor. A blossoming partnership with another WCCO-TV newcomer, Don Shelby, put Miles on the anchor desk for the 5:00 and 10:00 p.m. news.
Then, in 1990 she jumped channels over to KARE TV, growing beyond anchoring the news into the Pat Miles Specials that dove deep into stories of notable Minnesotans.
In 2001, Miles returned to her radio roots and began hosting a daily show on WCCO Radio from 9:00-Noon.
A 2008 inductee into the Minnesota Broadcasting Hall of Fame, Miles was beloved in the Twin Cities, a role model for female journalists, and a passionate storyteller. She’s now taking that storytelling to book form, with her new book, “Before All Is Said and Done: Practical Advice on Living and Dying Well”. The book explores Miles’ marriage, relationship, and the eventual death of her husband, Charles "Bucky" Zimmerman whom she married in 2006. Zimmerman died in 2019 of cancer.
Miles spoke to WCCO’s Drivetime with DeRusha about her career, her retirement, her marriage, and her time in the Twin Cities.
Jason DeRusha: It is so great to have Pat Miles with us here on WCCO Radio, and it's great to have you in the room!
Pat Miles: Well, nice to see you. And it's bittersweet to be here. My very last day as a broadcast journalist was standing in this room at this microphone saying, “Uh, I'm retiring, I'm getting married.” My last guest was my late husband, Bucky who we talked about, getting married, growing old together, and he had a little red suitcase delivered to the studio with the note “We're gonna travel the world together.” So Wow. Brings back so many memories.
DeRusha: You're married in 2006, and so you left here around 2005?
Miles: No, I left one month before I got married.
DeRusha: You were, and are, a trailblazer here in the Twin Cities. You had to anchor with Don Shelby and I choose those words very intentionally after working with Don for 20 years. Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine had just a wonderful story with you sort of talking through a lot of the challenges that you faced in the early years. Some of these challenges still are there for women in broadcasting and women in any business. But you were going through this stuff in the 70s?
Miles: In the 70s when, you know, my goal, I always wanted to be a journalist. I grew up and I was a teen editor in my hometown newspaper so I knew I wanted to go to journalism school. And fortunately I grew up in Missouri and the University of Missouri had a great journalism program. So I got a very great education there, but we didn't see women on TV doing local news. I think Barbara Walters was the one woman at the time that was on the Today Show.
So I kind of fell into it. It was just in the very beginning when they were starting to hire women. And my very first job was in radio. I was the news director at the radio station in Aspen. But I used to practice, you're too young to remember, but there was a woman reporter, Bettina Gregory, and I used to listen to her broadcast and I would try to talk like her, rehearse. So that was my training for broadcasting.
DeRusha: This book is so important Pat. Obviously your personal story, which I think a lot of our listeners don't know about. But you left here, your final guest was Bucky Zimmerman, you got married and you figured you had the rest of your lives together, right?
Miles: We talked about how we found each other again later in life. We had dated when we were very young. Our careers, you know, took off. We didn't stay together, but later in our lives we were both divorced and we reconnected, and of course we were going to get married and grow old together. And that was the plan. And it was going pretty smoothly until he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and lived for three months.
DeRusha: Just three months?
Miles: From start to finish it was three months. And I say in the book we were set for life, but we were not set for death. And we had a trust, we had a will. I thought things were all buttoned up and taken care of. And nothing was. Nothing. And you know, we figured we were two pretty smart people. But if you do not plan for these things when times are good, you are going to be in deep trouble when times are bad. Because when Bucky got sick, our main focus was trying to keep him well and getting him to the doctor and doing chemotherapy and not dealing with account numbers and passwords and investments and who do I talk to. And so when he died, I was in the fog of grief dealing with a lot of problems that you shouldn't be dealing with when you are in a fog. And trust me, there's not one person I talked to. And the book is really a compilation of interviews with other people who had similar situations, different circumstances obviously, but all had a story to tell about what happened to them. And then I interviewed a lot of experts about how do you avoid this? Or what do you do? And there's so many things you can do when times are good and you're healthy and you're happy. And plan for the day that that person doesn't come home. We don't want to think about that. We don't want to talk about death. We don't want to talk about dying. We don't want to plan. But the fact of the matter is, 100% of us are going to die.
DeRusha: We are messed up as a society, how afraid we are to talk about death.
Miles: Oh, I didn't want to talk about it. Bucky didn't want to talk about it, and we didn't talk about it. You don't want to deal with it. So I paid a dear price for that. But I will tell you this, following his death and going through what I went through, I am prepared to die. I'm going to leave the people that I love, with not a mess, not a basket full of problems.
DeRusha: When you talk to all of these people, what are the top three piece of advice, things they wish they had done?
Miles: Well, I think number one is we need to start talking about the fact that death is inevitable. For all of us. But I also think the reason why this book has connected is because I think there's this whole generation of baby boomers who really were starting to realize that we're probably not going to live forever. I mean, you hope you're going to live to be 104 and die in your sleep. And I hope you do. But the chances of that happening are probably not that good.
DeRusha: Well, we look at people in their 70s and they're young, they're vibrant. They're healthy.
Miles: Bucky was 72 years old. He was one of the healthiest people I knew in my life, and he used to worry about me dying. He was like, you know, your diet's not that good. You drink too much wine. And so we were kind of preparing that he was going to outlive me. So this was not something that either one of us expected to happen. And that's the whole reason I did the book. Because you don't know if you're going to come home tonight. And if you do not come home tonight, what have you left behind? Is your wife ready? Is your family ready? Do they have your account numbers? Do they have your passwords? Do they know how to get into your cell phone? Do they know about your investments? Do they know what you want in terms of burial? Are you ready for that? You don’t come home tonight are you ready?
DeRusha: We have had these conversations because of 20 years of covering people who didn't come home. So I think, are we ready? No. Are we more ready than most? Yes.
Miles: Probably. Yeah. When when Bucky got sick, we were on a cruise with my two girls and we were on a beautiful cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean. And all the photographs of that trip were on his cell phone. And I didn't know his how to get into it, his code to get into the phone. I tried four times and then you're locked out. And so all of that is gone. There are so many things, simple, simple things that you can do. I feel less afraid of death now having gone through this because I've prepared myself. And I know that when I am gone, that my kids are not going to go through the hell I went through. And it is hell. If you're not ready, it is hell. Trust me.
DeRusha: What was the most stress? I mean, obviously the grief itself. Like we have this idea that there's closure and you get over it. And of course you don't.
Miles: No, you don't. There's no timeline for this. I think the most stressful part for me was when you are grieving. And you are grieving. The more you love someone, the more you grieve that person. And having to deal with all of the other stuff, when I was just needing to grieve, it made me feel like I was insane. Like I was crazy. I found no peace. I laid awake a lot of nights thinking, what am I going to call this book? What am I going to call this book? And when I decided I'm going to call it “Before All Is Said and Done”, so that you have some planning before all is said and done. But now that I think about it, I think when all is said and done, you have some peace of mind. And that's the whole reason I wrote the book, is to help other people get to that peace of mind.
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