Larry Elliston
Channel 13's 'Down Home'
Feature Man
by Tony Zappone
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Larry Elliston |
Larry Elliston always had a fascination with story telling and television. When Elliston merged those two interests, news history was made at WTVT with his award winning travel adventures down the back roads of Florida.
Though he’s been in television more than 32 years, Larry’s got big
plans for the future and is still a man to keep an eye out for when it comes to
ground-breaking television fare. BIG 13 takes a look at the man who set out to
carve his own little corner of the TV world.
Larry Elliston, who arrived on the Tampa Bay broadcast scene New Years Day, 1970, was a free spirit from day one. One of his first WFLA assignments was to cover a fatal airplane crash. The blood and guts stuff that was fodder for big ratings was nothing he wanted to have a part of.
| "I saw death that day and didn’t want to go there,”
Elliston says. “Seeing
the first dead person in my life on my very first day on the job made me
realize I had to move my TV work experience in a much different
direction. The kind of stuff the assignment editors liked was the gory
front page sort of stories. But
I realized early on that if there was a front page there also had to be
a back page just as important and that’s where I wanted my part of TV
to be.”
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