The Bergdoll Boys

BIOGRAPHY

Timothy W. Lake is an American journalist and non-fiction writer and the author of The Bergdoll Boys, Hang on and Fly, Association Island, and Henderson Harbor.

A 45-year veteran of newspaper, radio, and television news, Tim spent 21 years as a news anchor for the CBS, then NBC-owned television station, WCAU-TV, in Philadelphia, the nation's 4th largest TV market. He was NBC 10’s primary anchor for a decade, along with Renee Chenault-Fattah. Previously, he was a news anchor for the NBC affiliate KPRC-TV in Houston, Texas, and the ratings powerhouse CBS affiliate WCSC-TV (Live 5 News) in Charleston, South Carolina. Tim finished a long career in television as a primary news anchor at ABC affiliate and Nexstar-owned WTEN-TV in New York State’s capital, Albany, where he also hosted a political talk show, Empire State Weekly, on ten television stations from New York City to Buffalo.

During this time, 2016-2022, Tim joined a highly skilled news, weather, and sports anchor team, and together, they vaulted the station to number one in the Albany market.

Tim’s TV career included exciting and critical news coverage long before reporters were inappropriately labeled with the derogatory political idiom of Fake News, either reporting or anchoring, from the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Iraq War politics at the U.S. Capitol, and The White House in Washington, multiple hurricanes, major commercial airline crashes, the 9/11 terror attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic, several national political elections, conventions, and Presidential inaugurations in Washington, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, and major sports events from Triple Crown horse racing to professional football, basketball, and World Series baseball.

In the mid-1980s, Tim was part of a small group of reporters (and engineers) who initiated back-to-back local live satellite news reporting simultaneously for multiple TV stations on the CONUS Communications Network in the United States.

Tim has anchored live remote news broadcasts from Capitol Hill, in helicopters and snowstorms, and contributed live and recorded appearances on network TV news programs for NBC, CBS, and the Oxygen channel. He has hosted multiple long-form documentaries about political, social, and entertainment events from Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, notably the Tour of the Titanic, the Barnes Foundation, Washington’s First Ladies, Cezanne and Beyond, and Longwood Gardens Christmas Celebrations.

One of Tim’s most memorable TV career moments was chatting with NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw about his The Greatest Generation nonfiction books 30 years after interviewing CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite about his nonfiction book on sailing, North by Northeast.
  
Tim has written for the Jamestown Post-Journal, The Buffalo News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Thousand Islands Life. He also landed an exclusive for The Land Report magazine with a rare tour of the fabled and historic Whitney Park in his beloved New York’s Adirondack Mountains, the hideaway retreat of the gilded-age Whitneys and Vanderbilts.  

Tim was arrested and jailed for broadcasting a news report in South Carolina, but the charges were dropped, and the court record expunged as a local prosecutor backed off his error of intruding into First Amendment rights.

Spending years researching for his historical nonfiction books, a requirement for stories not often told, Tim’s readers find incredible details and emotion in the written pages. This skill was developed over many years of working closely with highly talented local and network television photographers, producers, and editors, the experts at eliciting emotion when telling stories with video and pictures.

Tim is a multiple Emmy award-winner and was inducted into the ​Philadelphia Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2011. He is working on another book while retiring from television and splitting his time between the shores of Lake Ontario and the Finger Lakes.