Moving on, Gracefully

I’m not a huge Court TV fan, but I am a big Nancy Grace fan.

Folks who think she is as nasty as a pit bull and eats nails three times a day don’t really know what she’s the off-camera, out-of-the-court room Nancy that I’ve gotten to know since I first met her four years ago this month.

I have spent time with Nancy and her parents, Mac and Elizabeth Grace, in the south Bibb home where she grew up. Mac and Elizabeth are salt-of-the-earth folks. And Nancy has never forgotten her roots, coming home to participate and participate in a number of charitable events in her home town. I was honored when she asked me to sit with her and her family when she spoke at the Executive Forum at Mercer a few years ago.

There is news this week that Grace is leaving Court TV after a decade with the network. She has been there since its salad days.

In 1996, a magazine editor and former attorney named Stephen Brill, the founder of Court TV, took the feisty attorney to dinner and offered her a job. In the post-O.J. Simpson trial days, he "courted" her as a sparring partner with Simpson's lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, on a legal affairs show called "Cochran & Grace."

She left for New York on Jan. 6, 1997. She packed her clothes, a curling iron and $200 in savings.

The rest is history.

Nancy’s show, "Closing Arguments," is being reduced to an hour from two hours in the weekday 3-5 p.m. time slot. That probably contributed to her departure.

Her show on CNN Headline News continues to get solid ratings. I don’t know how she continued to keep the pace to do both shows for as long as she did. I'm sure doing two shows at two networks has stretched her thin.

When my family was in New York on vacation in June 2005, I called Nancy and asked if we could come by her studio to see her.

She graciously – no pun intended – invited us to the studio and arranged for our own personal tour. We got to go onto the set while she was doing her show “live.’’

If I ever have trouble remembering the date, I at least have a frame of reference for the timetable. It was only a few days before the Michael Jackson verdict, and that’s all they were talking about.

At the close of her show that day – Wednesday, June 8, 2005 – she said she had some special guests in the studio: “The Ed Grisamore family from Macon, Ga.’’

I looked over and my son Grant’s jaw had dropped to the floor. “Dad, she just said our name on national TV!”

On the coolness factor, that was about a 10.