| Leaning back in an armchair, in faded jeans and cowboy boots, Ed Joyce looks as relaxed as any Santa Ynez rancher. His mountaintop home commands an impressive vista of the surrounding Santa Ynez Mountains and Santa Rosa Hills, and he gazes out over his property with patient wisdom of a man who has spent his entire life working the land, who can spot a lame horse or a sick cow a mile away, who can calculate next year's rainfall, and gauge tomorrow's weather by looking at the morning sky.
But Joyce and his wife Maureen have only been Valley residents since 1988, when they moved west from New York. While Joyce has significant expertise in navigating rough terrain, he honed his skills over the past forty years in a metaphoric wilderness, at CBS News, where he was named president in 1983.
How did the former president of a network news corporation make the transition to Valley rancher?
Both Joyce and his wife settled into the local lifestyle as if they were born and raised here, and Joyce justifies his affinity for country living with ranching life, citing a childhood on an Arizona cattle ranch.
Born in Phoenix in 1932, to a cattle rancher father who ran a dude ranch, his first memories are of horses, barns and stalls. "When the depression came along," Joyce recalls, "suddenly there weren't many dudes, and business was down."
His father went to work as a grazing superintendent for the depression era CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), and later for the Bureau of Reclamation, and the family moved frequently around the Pacific northwest; "Washington, Idaho, Utah, you name it, I lived there at one time or another."
Joyce ended up in New York for his senior year of high school. His father's serious heart problem motivated Joyce senior to move back east, where he had extensive family. The move was fortuitous; stage-struck at age 17, Joyce got a part in an off-Broadway play, "Lead Kindly Light," where he met Maureen, a member of the theater company currently serving as prop mistress. He played a teenaged beggar, cured by a miracle and his performance was noted in at least one review.
"We both thought we were actors, but Ed was good," Maureen Joyce recalls. "I was just playing around." They married the same year they met, and attended the University of Wyoming together. There, Joyce broke into the broadcasting industry. While still a student, he got a summer job as announcer-floor sweeper at radio station KODI in Cody.
The skills that Joyce learned in the small Cody, Wyoming station served him well, and inspired him to pursue a career in radio. After a brief hiatus in New York, where the Joyce's daughter Brenda was born in 1951, he was hired by WKTV in Utica. From there he went to WRGB-TV in Schenectady where son, Randall, was born three years later. The General Electric-owned station used the Schenectady operation as a venue to showcase their new equipment.
"There were few better places for a young man looking to hone his craft," says Joyce, who was able to do a little bit of everything; in a given day, he might write copy for the eleven o'clock news, emcee a children's show, produce a live music program, and fill in for the announcer. He moved up the ladder to the CBS-owned WBBM-AM radio in Chicago, forging his initial relationship with the network rapport that would blossom as he worked his way to the top. Joyce became an award-winning reporter/producer for WCBS-AM in New York, before serving as Director of News and Public Affairs during the evolution of the station's all-news format.
Joyce and his colleagues not only had a new format in which to present the news, he also had plenty of newsworthy events to report in the late 60's and early 70's; Joyce won three awards for his coverage of Ted Kennedy's Chappaquiddick incident, and was responsible for covering the Apollo moon flights and the elections when he became Executive Producer of Special Events for Radio at CBS News in 1970. He moved that year to television, becoming Director of News for WCBS-TV. From there, he became vice president and finally president of News for CBS News.
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How did Joyce get from the top of the ladder at CBS News, to the top of a mountain in Santa Ynez Valley? He had resigned from his post and written a book about his time at CBS titled "Prime Times, Bad Times" (Doubleday). Ed and Maureen Joyce were in Los Angeles, completing a national book tour, and decided to visit their friends, Ralph Story, a former anchorman at CBS TV in Los Angeles and his wife Diana, in Los Olivos. "The Valley was stunning to us," Joyce recalls, "not just because Maureen and I were both horse people, but because there is something truly extraordinary about this place." The couple returned home to Connecticut and put their house up for sale."A few months later," says Joyce, "we were Valley people."
Maureen Joyce had learned to ride as a young teenager in New York City and both she and her husband welcomed the chance to have horses in their lives again. "Horses were part of the equation when we decided to move out west," says Joyce, "but we had no idea of the full pleasure that awaited us in this Valley. It's the most embracing, welcoming place in the world." His wife agrees; "we have more friends here than we ever did, and our social life is so busy, we could be out every night."
Welcoming it is, but the Valley is also quiet compared to the news bureau at New York's CBS headquarters. Yet Joyce doesn't find that life has slowed down in the least.
He became a member, and then president of the Solvang Breakfast Rotary, his backcountry horseback rides into the San Rafael Mountains with Erling Pohls dovetailed into an involvement with the Santa Barbara Trailriders. He participated in seminars that Dr. Louis Netzer held at Sidestreet Café, and is still called upon to write articles for the Washington Journalism Review, TV Guide, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, as well as scholarly publications for Johns Hopkins University and other institutions.
"I'm so immersed in Valley life, gathering cattle on neighboring ranches, and in community work, that it seems there's always something to do," says Joyce, who served on the board of the Santa Ynez Valley Historical Society and helped to bring the Vaquero Show, an annual three day event featuring saddle makers and silversmiths from all over the west, to town.
In the Joyce home, the news is almost always turned on. Joyce likes to keep up to date on the way the media is delivering the news.
"Magazine format shows are the moneymakers for the networks," he observes. "NBC's Today Show is an economic presence in a way that was not the case fifteen years ago. It's the single biggest moneymaker for the network. The evening news broadcast is no longer as important as it once was."
The Joyce's follow all the news networks but especially CBS, because their son Randall is an award-winning producer for 60 Minutes Two. He has covered the fighting in Kosovo, elephant riots in South Africa, and the war in Afghanistan from the front lines. He's now in Yemen, "and of course we worry," says his mother, "but we've had so much support from people in the Valley. Father Stacy put our son on his prayer list. When he came home for Christmas, we had a dozen friends who'd been praying for him and who wanted to meet him."
The Joyce's daughter Brenda, her husband Tom Hauser and their daughters Christina, 18 and Leslie Maureen, 15, love to visit the Valley.
"The first time Christina came to visit us here, she went home to Connecticut and began to take riding lessons," says Joyce. "Now she's an excellent rider, and I can take her out on the most challenging ridge trails."
New York still appeals to the Joyce's for seasonal visits, but for the most part, they're content on their mountain ranch, with their three whippets, and their Quarterhorses, Ellie, a snafflebit finalist, and Rocky, a ranch horse from Oregon. "Five days of the week, I'm out riding, doing horse things," says Joyce. "My business cards say 'Saddle Bum.' I'm so busy doing things, I don't know how I ever had time for a job."
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