A NY1 Anchorman Bows Out

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out what the longtime NY1 anchor Lewis Dodley plans to do when he retires at the end of the month.

Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The question for Lewis Dodley, the longtime Spectrum News NY1 anchor, was, Why now?

The word that went unsaid was “retire.” Dodley, 64, had announced on the air on Monday that he would do that at the end of the month.

“Now, because I want to do something while I still have tread on the tires, man,” he said. “I want to lose some weight. I have this crazy dental work. This is crazy because for years I’ve had this problem with these back teeth. Sometimes it affected even my speaking, but I’m one of these nose-to-the-grindstone guys — I keep going no matter what. I changed the way I spoke rather than getting dental work.”

He mentioned his daughter, Jaewon Dodley, 20, a film major at New York University, saying he wanted to help nurture her career “and not be an old man doing it.” He also talked about tackling some projects connected to Asia and particularly Korea, where his wife, Sooyeon Yoon Dodley, was born and grew up.

But there was a but.

“I don’t think I could ever get NY1 out of my system,” he said. “They offered me another contract. They said, Take six months off, come back, do some work reporting. That’s my actual strength. That’s underutilized here because the way we have things set up, I’m the anchor. There’s a lot of work from the ground up that I have to do every day. There’s no time for the stuff I really love.”