DALLAS — It’s tough to fathom WFAA without Production Operations Manager Jerry Cadigan, the longest-tenured employee in the history of the station.
For more than half a century now, no one’s had to.
But now his beloved family, his proud friends and his admiring colleagues will be forced to reckon with that seemingly impossible thought.
On Saturday, July 6, Cadigan passed away while visiting family in St. Louis. According to his daughter Kathleen Howard, his last moments were spent enjoying his beloved pastime of doting on his grandsons.
“He passed without pain and surrounded by love,” Howard said.
He was 72 years old.
It seems unlikely that WFAA – or any Dallas outlet, frankly – has seen, or ever will see again, another employee so in love with, so passionate about, so committed to the advancement of media in this city.
Cadigan was a Dallasite through and through. He graduated from Bishop Lynch High School and Southern Methodist University. Even as a young child, he would tell his friends that he dreamed of working at WFAA and helping tell the stories of his city.
As a boy, Cadigan would stare at the WFAA broadcast antenna on the southern edge of Downtown Dallas while visiting his father’s work at the Sears, Roebuck & Co. warehouse on Lamar Street in The Cedars. As he grew older, he’d walk from that building — now the South Side on Lamar lofts — to attend tapings of the “American Bandstand”-inspired live teen dance show “Sumpin’ Else” hosted by legendary Dallas radio personality Ron Chapman at the WFAA studios.
When he was 12, Cadigan visited his grandfather, a nightwatchman at the Statler Hilton hotel on the opposite end of downtown, while President John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was being held at the old Dallas police station — now UNT Dallas’ College of Law — a mere block away. Cadigan saw the men working television cables outside of the jail, helping capture live footage of a global news event, and decided that was how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
And that’s what he did.
After interning at WFAA while studying at SMU, Cadigan formally joined the station’s staff as a full-fledged employee on June 4, 1973. He’d never work full-time for another employer again.
He started as a member of the floor crew, helping execute the technological aspects of WFAA’s live broadcasts. From there, he grew into a director, where he was tasked with shaping the visual appearance of those newscasts. Later, he was promoted to the title of Chief Director, where he helmed not just the news broadcasts, but also the station’s special programming and even its commercial production. Over the years, as the responsibilities of his work changed with the technology of the day, he was given the last title he’d ever professionally bear, Production Operations Manager.
It’s doubtful there was a major Dallas news story or large-scale WFAA production of the last five decades that Cadigan didn’t somehow touch.
Among many other WFAA projects, he was among the team behind the newsmagazine show “PM Magazine”; an integral part of the 21-year run of the children’s show “Peppermint Place”; a direct contributor to WFAA’s live New Year’s Eve broadcast “Big D NYE”; on the team that launched the lifestyle program “Good Morning Texas”; and a vital cog in the WFAA’s live coverage of our local sports teams’ Super Bowl, Stanley Cup, NBA Finals and World Series championship parades.
Perhaps most notably, in 1998, Cadigan was at the center of WFAA becoming the first television station in American to broadcast a local news program in high-definition on a VHF signal. Later, in 2007, he helped WFAA become the first Dallas-Fort Worth station to regularly broadcast all of its programs in HD.
“A lot of stuff at WFAA, it may have happened without Jerry — but not the same way,” said Dave Muscari, Cadigan’s close friend and WFAA’s former Vice President of Product Development. “He loved the station with all his heart. It was the only place he ever wanted to work.”
Last year, as Cadigan celebrated his 50th year at WFAA, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson issued a special proclamation in his honor.
"It is Jerry Cadigan's outstanding commitment to broadcast media in the City of Dallas, inside and outside of the television studio, that makes him such a celebrated and integral member of our society," Johnson wrote.
As much as he loved his work, Cadigan also very much loved his coworkers — as they did him. His colleagues will remember his as “a beacon of institutional knowledge”, “an esteemed role model”, the “kindest person [they] have ever known” and “the soul of WFAA.”
“The pride he had for the station and for all of us was beyond reproach,” WFAA Vice President and Station Manager Carolyn Mungo said. “Anyone who met him knew that. Anyone who worked with him felt that. It’s going to take time to grieve this unimaginable loss. This television station won’t be the same without him.”
In 2018, tragedy befell Cadigan’s family as his 26-year-old son Trevor, who was following his father’s footsteps and embarking on his own career in media, was among five people killed in a helicopter crash in New York City.
Prior to his visit to St. Louis this past weekend, Cadigan had spent the last few weeks of his life in New York City courts, fighting for justice surrounding his son’s death.
“We are comforted believing that he was greeted with the happiest reunion with Trevor,” Cadigan’s daughter Kathleen said in the wake of her father’s passing.
Cadigan is survived by his daughter, his former wife, his two sisters, his brother and his two grandchildren — plus a third who is on the way.
His family will release details regarding a memorial for Cadigan at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that those wishing to celebrate Cadigan’s life text “Cadigan” to 41444 to make a donation to the Trevor Cadigan Memorial Scholarship Fund for Broadcast Journalism students at Bishop Lynch High School.
