 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Emme Tomimbang: Making Her Mark |
| The veteran television broadcaster talks frankly about her personal life and amazing career. |
Back to School |
| Serving as teachers’ aides in the classroom,
senior volunteers are making a big difference in the lives of Hawaii’s children. |
FEATURE:
Emme Tomimbang: Making Her Mark
by Tim Ryan
On
a bone-chilling fall morning in 1989, 30-something Hawaii television
reporter Emme Tomimbang stood on the concrete steps outside the United
States Courthouse in New York City, her microphone at the ready and
a black wool scarf covering most of her pixie face. In the midst of
a crowd of jostling media, the KHON-TV reporter struggled to maintain
her coveted spot.
Facing fraud and racketeering charges, former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos was about to exit the building after the first morning of indictment proceedings. Her appearance was an international news event with fierce competition for photos and sound bites.
“I knew there were skeptics in the (KHON) newsroom about my ability to cover hard news,” says Tomimbang, who’s in her mid-50s. “I was going from features to very hard news.”
Since her mid-1970s days as KITV’s “weather girl,” Tomimbang, the daughter of Filipino immigrants, had honed her on-air appeal to become a local favorite covering soft news and light feature stories. Audiences were drawn to her camera-friendly face, sparkling eyes, broad smile and chirpy manner with a touch of vulnerability.
The Marcos story was the biggest assignment in Tomimbang’s career. “When I got pushed by those reporters and photographers, I would just say, ‘Excuse me’ and push back,” recalls the Farrington High School graduate. “My dad always told me to stick up for myself.”
 |
||
|
When Marcos scurried down the courthouse steps, it was Tomimbang’s voice that seemed to stand out among the barrage of questions fired by the other reporters. “Mrs. Marcos,” she asked, “will you tell the people of Hawaii if you are innocent or guilty of the charges?”
The former first lady stopped to look Tomimbang in the eye. “My innocence is undeniable,” she said. “Thank you very much for being respectful.”
A moment later, someone in Marcos’ entourage invited Tomimbang to the former first lady’s hotel suite for what would be an exclusive interview that would air that night on the NBC network news. “I was sooooo relieved,” Tomimbang recalls, laughing. “I didn’t know if I would get anything, but I just told myself to work hard and not be afraid.”
That philosophy has served Tomimbang well throughout her 33-year career in Hawaii as a radio personality, television journalist and producer. Tommy Tomimbang, who passed away in 1993, raised his daughter alone after his wife left the family. She says, “From the time I was three it was just my father and me, so I grew up thinking like a man because there were no female role models.”
 |
||
|
Her voice lowers to a whisper. “It was unheard of in those days for a father to have custody of a child, but in the courtroom, the judge asked me who I wanted to be with, my mother or my father. I blurted out, ‘I want to be with my dad.’” The judge awarded custody to Tomimbang’s mother, who allowed her former husband to take care of young Emme.
Tommy Tomimbang arrived in Hawaii in the 1940s from the southern Philippines. A major player in local broadcasting, he founded KISA, Hawaii’s first Filipino-language and first Filipino-owned radio station, in the 1980s (it closed a decade ago).
“He worked hard and made something of himself despite the tremendous odds against it,” Tomimbang says. “He always told me not to be afraid of the unknown, but rather to wrap my arms around it and ask, ‘Where will this take me,’ then enjoy the journey.”
When Tomimbang was 10, she got her first taste of fame. “My dad had his own Sunday radio program on KOHO, a Japanese station,” she recalls. “It was called Maligayang Araw, which means Happy Day, and he put me on the air for a half hour during his program to spin records and play DJ. My show was called Teenage Corner, and that’s how I overcame my fear of audiences.”
Tomimbang hosted the show for five years before deciding to move on and be a typical teen. “I wanted to be a cheerleader and be like my classmates, but I felt out of step,” she says. “Having a radio show made me feel older than them.”
 |
||
|
The day after she graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1973 with a degree in secondary education, however, Tomimbang was back on the air, this time at KISA. From 6 to 10 a.m. she was the Morning Girl, playing rock music from the Philippines. “I loved it,” she recalls, “and the audience loved this local girl trying to speak Filipino and joking around. I was like the Lucille Ball of radio.”
Although Tomimbang had planned to become a secondary school teacher, her gig at KISA lasted two years, during which she also served for a spell as the station’s program director making $300 per month. Then KITV hired Tomimbang as its promotions director at nearly double the salary she was earning in radio.
When KITV decided to go with an all-local news team in 1975, Tomimbang again was in the right place at the right time. She became the station’s “weather girl” even though she had almost no on-air experience and wasn’t trained in meteorology or weather reporting. “I would be getting another $200 a month so I said, ‘Sure, I can do that,’” she says.
Tomimbang got a break when she was assigned to cover the birthday celebration of a gorilla at Honolulu Zoo. “He had a breadfruit cake and threw pieces at me and I just kept talking and dodging,” she recalls. “The photographer kept taping and telling me, ‘This is good, this is good.’”
The story turned even funnier when the primate “threw his poop” at Tomimbang, who refused to give way until she finished the story, which caught the attention of viewers and KITV’s editors.
That led to her becoming the station’s go-to reporter for celebrity interviews and special event coverage. Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Muhammed Ali, Jacqueline Bisset, and Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina were among the notables she interviewed during that time.
 |
||
|
By 1985, Tomimbang was co-anchoring KITV’s 10 p.m. newscast, but, being in her mid-30s, she worried that a pink slip was looming since TV news doesn’t look kindly on aging journalists. Two years later, when she was told she would have to relinquish her anchor’s chair and once again take the mike as a reporter, she decided to leave the station.
In a matter of months, KHON hired Tomimbang as a features reporter. During her seven-year stint there, she interviewed Arnold Palmer, Sonny Bono, Jaclyn Smith and many other luminaries. She landed Robert Wagner as the first celebrity guest for KHON’s Morning News show and came up with the idea of reserving Fridays for music guests, a format that has continued until today.
“I’ve enjoyed doing stories on interesting people, places and events,” she says. “Features were not that popular 20 years ago, but they’ve now become a permanent part of all newscasts. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve played a role in encouraging that.”
In 1994, needing a change, Tomimbang left KHON to launch her own production company, EMME Inc. (Emme Tomimbang Multi-Media Enterprises). The next year, “Emme’s Island Moments,” a television magazine series featuring various aspects of local life, began airing on KHON. Segments also are part of the in-flight programming of Hawaiian Airlines and Continental Airlines.
As the writer, host and executive producer of the show, Tomimbang has spotlighted dozens of prominent kamaaina and visiting celebrities over the past decade, including Kevin Costner, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Jason Scott Lee, Jim Nabors, Rell Sunn, Nainoa Thompson, Alan Wong, Don Ho and Loyal Garner. All told, she estimates she’s produced 55 one-hour segments and 18 half-hour segments of “Emme’s Island Moments.”
Glimpses of Emme Tomimbang
|
Being her own boss, Tomimbang appreciates the freedom she has to work on projects that are closer to her heart than her pocketbook. To date this year, EMME Inc. has completed three specials—“9/11 Remembered: Five Years Past,” a stirring look at the tragedy that changed the course of world history; “Emme’s Mabuhay Moments,” highlights of her two-week trip to the Philippines in January with members of the Filipino Centennial Celebration Commission; and “Mabuhay with Aloha: The Hawaii Filipino Experience 1906-2006,” commissioned by the organization to recognize 100 years of Filipinos in Hawaii. Those who missed seeing the June airing of the two-hour documentary can catch it at the Louis Vuitton Hawaii International Film Festival, which will run October 19 through November 5 at various Honolulu venues.
Tomimbang calls “Mabuhay with Aloha” the most challenging venture of her career. “I would wake up in the middle of the night, asking myself why am I doing this and worrying about failing,” she says. “But it was very close to my heart since my father was a plantation worker and it’s about our heritage.”
She’s currently hard at work on “Emme’s Christmas Island Moments,” set to air on December 14 at 9 p.m. and Christmas Eve at 5 p.m. When she’s not filming or in the recording studio doing voice-overs, she’s spending a lot of time “sans makeup” at Home Depot, buying items for home redecorating projects. “Finally, I seem to be nesting and I love it,” she says.
Next
year, Tomimbang will celebrate 20 years of marriage to James Burns,
Chief Judge of the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals. She describes
Burns, son of former Hawaii Governor John Burns, as “a bright
man with strong values. I knew I could learn so much from him, and
he’s a guy who’s as comfortable in restaurants like Michel’s
and Alan Wong’s as he is in Zippy’s.”
One reason for the couple’s marital success is allowing each other to explore varied personal and professional interests. “I wake up now and ask myself where did the time go?” Tomimbang says. “Jim and I have always led such active, fast-paced lives. We’re ready to pull back a bit and savor our relationship and the years of good health that we have left.”
Although she has no regrets about the path she chose, she vows the next phase of her life will be “very different.” She plans to keep doing stories she really wants to do and to spend more time with Jim. “Time is more precious now than ever,” she says. “But, you know, Barbara Walters is 70 and still going strong.”