Joan Lunden is one of those people who within minutes of seeing you immediately connects with you like a long, lost friend. She proved just that time and time again on Friday, April 19, at the Legacy of Love Luncheon for the Women’s Auxiliary to Children’s Medical Center Plano‘s sold-out fundraiser at the Renaissance Dallas at Plano Legacy West Hotel.
While she got to do one-on-ones in the VIP reception, the crowd including Calvert Collins-Bratton and Heather Lothes gathered in the ballroom for the luncheon and program.
After a welcome by Luncheon Co-Chairs Amanda Konersmann and Justine Sweeney and Women’s Auxiliary President Diane Hopson, Children’s Medical Center Foundation President Brent Christopher thanked the guests for their support and introduced a video.
But each encounter with the former Good Morning America host showed no doubt that the feeling was genuine.
It was during her chat with emcee Chuck Steelman that the luncheon crowd felt Joan’s spontaneity and down-to-earth personality.
Going over her childhood, she told how she had idolized her father, Dr. Erle Blunden, who was a doctor and a founder of the hospital in their California hometown. Even as a youngster she would accompany him on his rounds, where she appreciated his compassion. For instance, despite his being a cancer surgeon, there was a patient in the hospital whose life depended upon vascular surgery.
Despite her respect for her father’s career, she realized the scalpels, surgeries and blood were not her future, but neither was journalism. It hadn’t been offered in school and it was a time when women were rarely covering news, especially on TV. Dr. Blunden flew to Houston for a three-day stewardship with renowned surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey. Returning to Sacramento, he operated on the patient and saved his life.
It was returning from a speaking engagement in Los Angeles when his plane crashed in a storm. killing him. He was 51 and Joan was just 13.
Following her father’s sudden death, Joan’s widowed mother, Gladyce Blunden, carried on raising Joan and her brother and continued on in her husband’s footsteps to manage the hospital. Joan admitted that it wasn’t until she turned 40 that she truly appreciated what her mother had gone through at 41.
It was over dinner one night when a family friend, who was an ad salesman in the local NBC affiliate in Sacramento, suggested that after graduation she should consider television new. It was in the mid-1970s when the women’s movement was pushing for more opportunities for women in all sectors. The FCC was pressuring all the local stations to hire more women. Instead of blowing it off, she got up the next morning and made a cold call to the news director at the station. An audition resulted, and the news director said there was promise but there were no openings. As she was leaving the station, she was being followed by the weatherman. He told her how stations across the country were hiring “weather girls,” and he asked if she would be interested. She said, “Okay!” He told her to show up the next morning at 5:30. That was the beginning of her early morning career. But she was working behind the scenes for the first six months. When the weatherman went to the higher-ups and said he wanted to put her on air, they said, “We’re not ready for a weather girl yet.” But a few days later he called in sick and called Joan to say she “was on today.” A few months later she became the consumer reporter and eventually an anchor.
As for Joan’s “pioneering” in the world of network broadcasting, Joan recalled that she hadn’t been a “bra burner.” Rather when the opportunity arose, she accepted the prospects and learned how to do it, from weather girl to the first woman on a national program to be pregnant and, later, bring her baby to work.
But she admitted that she was not loved in that Sacramento newsroom with 12 men “who had worked hard in radio stations to get themselves there. And here they hired this blonde girl, who had never been in the business before? I understand the resentment, but you have to persevere.”
In recent years, she has been the mother of seven, beat breast cancer, authored a number of books, been onstage with her former Co-Host Charlie Gibson for “Love Letters” and was in the process of writing her autobiography that is scheduled to be released in April 2025.
Even when Chuck had the Children’s Health’s three patients ambassadors (Amelia, Drew and Kadence) join them on the couch for an unbridled Q&A, Joan spontaneously and playfully engaged with the kids, talking about super powers they would like to have.