This is a first in a series of stories looking at local residents who embarked on new careers and challenges.

She’s wanted to be a storyteller since she was 11 years old.

Chrys Peterson watched former ABC newscaster Renee Poussaint while she was growing up with her mother and brother in Alexandria, Va.

She didn’t only admire Ms. Poussaint’s reporting, but also how involved she was in the community and her drive to help people.

“One of the things I admired about her is not only was she great as a reporter but she was also very involved in the community with the homeless, doing literacy projects and I just thought that was really great way to be involved and have a job in journalism,” Ms. Peterson said. “I really admired her and I thought that it would be a great tool for me.”

The former WTOL-TV, Channel 11 news anchor would spend the next several years following Ms. Poussaint’s example, especially in her adopted home of Toledo, where she’s lived since 1994.

Since she retired from her distinguished career in broadcast journalism in 2014, winning multiple awards and accolades in her 20 years at WTOL, Ms. Peterson has made a living by providing leadership training to businesses both locally and nationally through Chrys Peterson Consulting.

She’s an example of changing careers and making it work.

Ms. Peterson started her business after partnering with companies like ProMedica, first working as a marketing consultant and later doing leadership training.

She now partners with companies such as the Ken Blanchard Co. to train companies in leadership while staying heavily involved in the community through her work with several organizations such as the Ability Center, the LPGA women’s tournament, the Sylvania Chamber of Commerce, and Race for the Cure.

Origin story

Ms. Peterson started making a name for herself 30 years ago as a senior at James Madison University in Virginia, she said.

“One of the reasons that I chose James Madison was they had a student-run broadcast center. They would do weekly and daily news programs so I knew I could get some experience there,” she said. “I actually worked almost my whole senior year at WHSV. They’re in Harrisonburg. They were starting weekend news[casts] and they needed a reporter for the weekend.”

Ms. Peterson said working at a small market TV station was difficult because she had to be a one-person band, which is similar to how reporters at TV stations work today.

“I was shooting my own video; I was editing my own stories,” Ms. Peterson said.

She was the weekend reporter for that news station and was offered a job there after graduation.

After working there for a while, she decided she wanted to move to a TV station in a larger market, which she described as “how many eyeballs could potentially be watching the TV stations.”

She later moved to Scranton, Pa., to work for WNEP, a larger TV station, where she did the morning news for four years.

“It was a big jump in market size, but there was not a big city affiliated with it,” Ms. Peterson said. “It was just a very big TV market. We covered the whole upper quarter of Pennsylvania. It’s a big state, large population there.”

While at WNEP, she sent a resume tape to WTOL after hearing the station was looking for a main evening anchor.

“I sent my tape and a couple of weeks later, I got a call from CJ [Beutien] and he said, ‘I wanted to talk to you. I have your resume tape here and wanted to talk to you about a job,’” Ms. Peterson recalled.

She reluctantly admitted she didn’t know anything about Toledo when she applied for the job but fell in love with the city when the station flew her out.

She said she loved the direction then-news director Mr. Beutien and then-vice president and general manager Mel Stebbins were taking the station.

“What they were trying to do as far as getting really involved in the community and making sure we were doing our part as a community servant was very appealing to me,” Ms. Peterson said.

Ms. Peterson said she loved “every minute” of her 20 years at Channel 11, noting that the station was “just a great example of community television.”

She started working at the station in April, 1994, one month after the start of what would become her longtime co-anchor Jerry Anderson.

‘An Energy About Her’

Mr. Anderson said he first met Ms. Peterson on one of her very first days at the station while preparing for a news broadcast.

“I was kind of dabbing makeup on my face and I look and she goes, ‘Hey, Jerry, how are you,’” he said. “The fact that she took the first step… [it] just got everything started on the right foot.”

Ms. Peterson had an energy about her, he said, with it being “impossible to have a bad day at work” when he was sitting next to her.

“The thing about Chrys is, she truly has an energy about her,” Mr. Anderson said. “It sounds so cliche to talk about how she lights up a room or whatever, but she just does. She walks into a room and there is energy.”

He said it wasn't enough for Ms. Peterson to deliver the news because she wanted to do her part as a reporter.

“She was a journalist,” he said. “She very much wanted to get stories, break stories, get them right, do them right.”

‘Time to Go’

When it was time to renew her contract at Channel 11, Ms. Peterson said, she wasn’t expecting to retire.

The day she started discussing a new contract with the station’s general manager at the time, Bob Chirdon, she started thinking about all the time she had missed with her daughter, Riley Runnells.

“She was involved in theater, sports, and choir and I would rush out after the six o’clock news to watch the ending of a game or the beginning of a show,” Ms. Peterson said. “Then I’d have to leave at intermission … because I had to be back at the station to do the 11 o’clock news. I was just missing a lot of stuff with my daughter.”

She asked management if she could anchor the early morning news, but it wasn’t something they were willing to entertain.

That night, she talked to her husband, Tom Runnells, a former Major League Baseball player, about her options.

“I came home and I said, ‘I started talking about a new contract today and, for the first time, I’m not feeling great about it because of Riley,’” she recalled. “Then my husband said, ‘Then don’t sign it.’ I went to work the next day and basically said, ‘I’m leaving. I’m not signing this and I’m not signing another contract.’”

Ms. Peterson always made time for her daughter and her career, said daughter Riley Runnells, 23, who works at Adams Street Publishing. 

She said her mom showed her that a woman could be a great mother and prioritize her career at the same time.

“I always did theater growing up and I still do sometimes,” Ms. Runnells said. “I remember she would always come to every single performance…She always made it a point to come and see my show, even if she could stay for just one act and then go back to work.”

She’s now carrying on her mother’s legacy as a journalist herself, being an editor after six months on the job.

Ms. Runnells was never interested in becoming a news reporter herself until she took an intro to reporting class halfway through her freshman year at Sylvania Northview High School.

“I worked at the paper my sophomore year,” Ms. Runnells said. “Then my junior and senior year, I was the editor and chief of the newspaper. My junior and senior year really solidified [journalism] for me.”

‘What now?’

After she left WTOL, Ms. Peterson said, community residents reached out to her about various employment opportunities.

She ultimately decided to look for jobs where she could utilize her master’s degree in organizational leadership from Lourdes University, which she received in 2012.

Ms. Peterson partnered with ProMedica in multiple media ventures such as interviewing doctors in informational videos about medical breakthroughs, which are still playing in medical facilities, after former president Randy Oostra reached out to her about the opportunity, she said.

“He said, ‘We would love to have you. Let’s figure out where you might fit here and what you’d like to do and we’ll go from there,’” Ms. Peterson said.

She also held leadership training in the hospital system’s HR department, Ms. Peterson said, which led her to join the Ken Blanchard Company as a consulting partner after teaching one of their programs, teaching the variety of leadership programs they offer.

“I loved those programs so much that I was teaching with ProMedica that when the Blanchard Company asked me if I would be interested in working with them as a consulting partner and I said, ‘Absolutely,” Ms. Peterson recalled.

She’s been teaching their programs ever since, helping companies such as Libbey. 

Sarah Godwin, senior manager of talent acquisition and engagement at Libbey, said several employees have commented that Ms. Peterson has helped them become better employees for the company, and also helped them apply those lessons to their personal lives as well, which is a byproduct of Ms. Peterson’s mission. 

Considering her past and continued involvement in Toledo over the past 20 years, Ms. Peterson said she wants to be remembered as someone who cared about her community and the people in it.

“I just think if people would, when they think of me, think, ‘She really cared about this community,” Ms. Peterson said. “That’s all I would want people to think: that I care and that I do care.”

First Published December 24, 2023, 3:00 p.m.