Rick Lambert, Rest in Love

Last week the sudden deaths of two people in local news shook me. I did not know Katherine Creag personally but the tributes to her were roundly glowing and she sounded like the type of person who brought out the best in the situations she faced as a morning reporter at WNBC.

I did know Rick Lambert, a news producer at KNTV. He first helped me when anchor Raj Mathai invited me to do sports history updates on their wildly popular Sports Sunday show. I was just the new hard news/general assignment reporter and casual sports fan who got a chance to sit in and offer fun facts during a short clip on their program. Rick and another producer, Craig Fierro, made sure I knew how to pronounce any tough names, they wrote interesting copy, and they answered my questions about how big of a deal these sports factoids really were. Short answer, a big deal to sports fans and historians. We shared a love for Wing Stop and following the trials and travails of Bay Area sports during the “We Believe” years before the Warriors and Giants took home a bunch of championships.

Rick later transitioned from that role to working overnights on the weekends, both as the assignment editor and the producer of the Saturday and Sunday morning shows. He monitored breaking news and sent crews to cover whatever was happening in the Bay Area in the hours when the rest of us are soundly sleeping. Then he had to put together an hour long newscast that aired from 7-8am. These were two big jobs and it was a punishing schedule. I used to fill in as an anchor on those shows then eventually I worked with Rick for months when I anchored the Sunday morning before moving to Sunday evenings.

Looking back, Rick’s one of the people I knew and worked with from almost the start of my career at NBC Bay Area in so many iterations over a decade there. Rick was there for a lot of changes at the station, from losing our sports team to building our investigative unit. He transitioned from a sports producer to a news producer. We had the type of working relationship I think many of us do in a business like news. We work with so many people across so many platforms. Time flies by. We’re friendly and professional but everyone’s busy with their own lives and assignments so we don’t always get into deep conversations about life.

But when I got the text Rick had passed suddenly, it took me back to those years when I would walk into the newsroom at 4 or 5AM and he’d already been working since zero dark thirty. What I immediately thought of was how Rick was so kind. I could not think of a single negative thing about him. His job was bananas and he was a one man show. He did the best he could under a schedule that would wreak havoc on anyone.  

Despite the stress of those hours and basically being the Knight’s Watch of weekend morning news, Rick was never cross with me. He always had a great attitude, worked to answer questions about developing news, and he was quick with a joke or smile. Even when we were frustrated about work, maybe a PIO wasn’t responding with information or someone else had a tidbit we didn’t, Rick was kind in the way he related to everyone. Deep down genuinely kind. Sometimes, many times, people have a mean streak or an ugly part of their personality that you get a glimpse of when they’re under pressure or they take off their game face.

Reflecting on Rick, working with him, his presence in the newsroom, even when he was down about something or having a bad day, he was a rare bird. Rick was good people in a business where good people can be hard to find.  

I haven’t talked to Rick in the almost two years since I started my job at NBC News. I wish I would have told him these things out loud. I don’t think we do that enough for people around us. Tell them what we appreciate about them. Why we are so glad our paths crossed. What we admire about who they are. Why we’re thankful to know them. I hope Rick rests in love and that his family knows what a contribution he made to those around him.