Spotlight on: Elsie Garner president CEO, WTVI Inc., Charlotte.

• Author: Parry, Amanda
• Position: Entertainment

Elsie Garner, 61, has made a career of television, yet the WTVI president and CEO spent her early years without one. The daughter of missionaries in Trujillo, Peru, she got rare glimpses of TV when the family made trips to Lima. When they returned to the U.S. when she was 12, she began a love affair with the medium that continues to this day. A month after graduating from high school in Tampa, Fla., she went to work writing press releases for WEDU, the local public station. She left a few years later when her husband took a teaching job at an international school in Bolivia. Moving back to Tampa seven years later, she took up her old job and quickly rose through the ranks. By the time she was named acting president in 2002, she had earned a bachelor's in interdisciplinary studies from the University of South Florida, raised four children and held every job at the station except for engineer. In 2003, she and her husband moved to Charlotte, where she succeeded WTVI President and CEO Hal Bouton, who retired after 20 years in the job.

When I was in sixth grade, a couple of times a week we watched a program on Japanese brush painting. The...