Remembering pioneering New York anchor Pat Harper

Patricia "Pat" Harper disappeared on or about March 29, 1991.

Not exactly disappeared — her family and friends knew where one of New York's best-known TV anchors was. But as far as viewers were concerned, she had vanished.

One spring night she said "good night, Chuck," to Chuck Scarborough, her co-anchor on WNBC/4's 6 p.m.news. The next night she was gone. Not a word of explanation from the station. Just another face in place of where Harper's had reliably been for six years.

Harper, 56 at the time, would never appear on a New York TV news broadcast again. This pioneering anchor — once in line for the historic role at "Today" that would ultimately go to Barbara Walters — was gone forever.

What happened, in part, is the usual story, of contract disputes, and faithless executives. (The short version: Ch. 4 wanted a younger anchor.)

What became of her is more interesting. With a you-can-take-this-job-and-shove-it brio and spirit of adventure unique to Harper, she decamped for a wild mountain redoubt in Spain's Andalusia region — to a so-called casa cueva, or cave house, above the village of Capileira. She'd live there, on the side of a remote mountain, the rest of her life.

Loath to draw attention to herself, Harper gave few interviews, and never spoke publicly about the break with Ch. 4. She was intensely private for someone so public. In her best-known story, a sweeps feature from 1987, she dressed as a homeless person, or "bag lady," in the argot of the day, and slept on the streets for a week. No one recognized her.

"I don't think she was married to the glamour of all that," says her former daughter-in-law, and close friend, Rosario DeBrun, who lives in Madrid. "That was my impression. She loved her job — don't get me wrong — but that allowed her to do what she really wanted to do," which was apparently to distance herself from the madding crowd. Harper lived for a time in Maine with her second husband, Joe Harper, and had a retreat deep in the Catskills.

But her heart was in Spain, says DeBrun. Harper loved the people of Spain and loved being there "every minute." Fluent in Spanish, she worked there for seven years in between stateside gigs as a professional photographer and also "bummed around Europe" — her words — with her three children.

Harper had a gimlet-eyed view of TV news. "I had the good fortune of getting into the business when the men who were in the business were trying to put women into positions, newswise, they had never been before," she once recalled in a rare interview. For example, she was sent to cover the Selma-to-Montgomery marches in 1965 "for dramatic effect," she said. "'Let's put Pat somewhere where people would say, my God, you're putting that young girl out in the middle of all that trouble!' All for effect."

Born in New York in 1935, she was adopted by Rose and Dr. Anthony C. Cipollaro, a prominent Manhattan dermatologist. She was later a Bonwit Teller model, then went into acting which she said "was the one thing I always knew I could do well." Acting, she said, lead to TV news. Starting in 1959, she was a reporter in Chicago and Philadelphia, finally returning to New York in the early '70s. In 1975 on WPIX/11, she made history — New York TV's first female anchor, paired with husband Joe (they would divorce during their time together on air; he died in 1983), later Steve Bosh. After another first, as co-anchor of nationally syndicated news show "Independent Network News," on WPIX/11, she joined Ch. 4 in 1985.

The run at Ch. 4 was a success until it wasn't. The "Bag Lady" series was to become one of the most memorable sweeps stories in New York TV history — landing her one of eight Emmys — but she largely dismissed it. "I found I couldn't learn what it was really like to be without a home," she told a reporter. "Not while I have a key in my pocket that fits a door somewhere."

DeBrun recalled that one day in the spring of 1994, "she was up in the hills, and wasn't feeling quite right, then made a doctor's appointment," but decided to hold off, instead scheduling an appointment a few days later. She was stricken by a fatal heart attack that weekend. Harper was 59.

In that rare interview, Harper summed up her life philosophy this way: "You can make it through anything once you set your mind to it. Always look for something good to happen, and it always does. I'm basically optimistic."