Leaping without a net
CHICAGO LIT | After her dad Tim's death, Jenniffer Weigel searched for meaning and found it with help from Dad

November 4, 2007
BY MIKE THOMAS mthomas@suntimes.com

During the most financially successful phase of her career, in the spring of 2002, Chicago broadcaster Jenniffer Weigel bagged everything to seek happiness and harmony. She ruminates about that fateful decision and the ethereal encounters that facilitated it in her recently released book Stay Tuned: Conversations With Dad From the Other Side.

Although she'd clawed her way up from a low-paying gig at Shadow Traffic to far more lucrative posts at radio outfits and local television stations (including WBBM-Channel 2 and WGN-Channel 9), Weigel grew increasingly fed up with her beats, whether hard news that "bled and led" or fluffy filler on escaped bobcats or promotional powwows with movie stars.

The 2001 death of her father, WBBM sportscaster Tim Weigel, made her even more determined to seek out spirituality and find contentment. They'd had a distant relationship in life, and he died just as they were reconnecting.

She was physically spent, too, from workdays that began in the wee small hours, and "sick and tired of being sick and tired," says Weigel, 37. "So it was like, something had to give. And if that meant working at Starbucks, I would do it."

But leaving the fray was tough. She'd gotten used to jetting and setting in high style when interviewing celebrities and covering show business out west. The money was good, too. Ultimately, though, none of that mattered.

Starting in the mid-'90s, Weigel's work put her face-to-face with some of today's most popular spiritual gurus -- seers and sages whose purported abilities to commune with the dead and to know the past as well as the future she initially regarded with a journalist's cynicism.

After a string of CBS interviews with such psychic luminaries as Caroline Myss and James Van Praagh, however, she grew more intrigued by their messages and convinced of their gifts. Since the segments were held to about 90 seconds each, Weigel amassed a wealth of leftover footage. She even penned articles about her experiences, but there was little interest. Someday, she knew, it would come in handy.

One of her most enlightening (and jarring) encounters came not long after her father's death, when on the advice of a friend Weigel visited a Lincoln Park-based energy reader/healer named Therese Rowley. And there, at long last, she had that final conversation with Dad from the other side. Or so it seemed.

"Wow, there is a man here. Hold on," Rowley reportedly told Weigel during the session. "He's pretty young, I'd say mid-50s [Tim Weigel died at age 56]. He's jumping up and down like a jumping bean. He's really anxious to talk to you."

Weigel remained skeptical. After all, Rowley might have guessed she was Tim's daughter by the familiar last name she'd reluctantly divulged. As the 90-minute session wore on, wariness diminished.

"He's saying it's time to go," Rowley told her. "You can leave the job. You want to do different things. He knows that you only stayed this long at this job because you thought that's what he wanted you to do. Now he wants you to do what you've always wanted to do."

"But how?" Weigel wondered.

"You have to jump and the net will follow," Rowley replied, still channeling Tim.

A scary proposition indeed, and one that involved blind faith -- a relinquishing of control. Weigel liked being in control. Then again, as Van Praagh had said, following her truth was the only thing that would set her free.

So, and not blithely, that's what she did. With enough savings to "find herself" for a year, she cut bait, formed her own production company, free-lanced for ABC News' Chicago bureau, pitched pilots, did commercial and voiceover work, and created a dining show called "Taste" that airs occasionally on WMAQ-Channel 5. At some point book chapters began trickling out.

Under different circumstances, Weigel thinks her father (who in sickness sought spiritual guidance and healing through books and alternative medicine) might also have jumped ship and carved out a more edifying existence.

"Reporting on a bunch of spoiled, overpaid ass----s has really worn thin," he confided. But sportcasting gave him and his family a nice life, so that was that.

"If he had lived, I think he would have retired and then maybe written a novel or screenplays or something," she says. "But I think he was also afraid of being out of people's minds. And so I laugh now. I write this book to heal my wounds, and in the interim I've left something that for hundreds of years down the road somebody might pick up and read because they lost their dad and they're grieving. And they'll be like, 'Oh, that Tim Weigel guy, and then they'll maybe go on the Internet and do a search and find out who he is.

"So, from now until eternity, he will be remembered."

Mike Thomas is a features writer for the Sun-Times who has never communed with the dead. Unless you count some really boring interview subjects.

STAY TUNED

CONVERSATIONS WITH DAD FROM THE OTHER SIDE

By Jenniffer Weigel

Hampton Roads, 240 pages, $21.95