April 21, 2025
-Bill Crane
While recently celebrating my friend and mentor, Professor Dodie Cantrell Bickley, following a retirement celebration (effective at the end of May 2025), at the Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia, I witnessed Professor Cantrell, also selected more than once during her tenure as the best teacher and faculty member amongst Grady’s amazing team of tenured professors, adjunct & associate professors, administration and staff, be regaled by fellow faculty and the Associate Dean of the college, along with two other outstanding imminent retirees.
I first met Dodie Cantrell as a recent graduate of the University of Georgia, and Grady College of Journalism, with a degree in Telecommunications Arts (Broadcasting). I had a few internships under my belt, and some on camera experience, but I was still more or less an apprentice, in terms of skill sets for the job. News Director Tony Villasana admitted later that he in part hired me as I crewed a live-shot with him the day of my interview, wearing a three-piece suit (one of two I owned at that time), and I was spooling cable at the Macon Coliseum and handling the grunt work without issue or complaint. Lesson learned there…NO task worth doing is beneath you.
Dodie was our 6 and 11 p.m. newscast producer. She wanted strong story lead-ins for the anchors and teases for the viewers heading into breaks. She liked TIGHT writing and kept reminding us, as we had the benefit of video to help tell our stories, to drop out the long series of adjectives, SHOW viewers with the video, and explain details with your script. Learning to fit complex issues into 60 and 90 second chunks has served me well in any number of areas in later life.
I probably learned more from Dodie than any of my many other talented colleagues at WMAZ. She would not allow lazy reporting, and she had ways of rewarding those of us always giving 110 percent. This was an incredible place to launch a career, not so much a banking or savings account. I left Macon for Atlanta and a job with Secretary of State Max Cleland in 1986, but my connection too many from that newsroom has been lasting.
Decades of friendship continued. Dodie became News Director and later GM at WMAZ, when Multimedia was acquired by Gannett, Dodie was later promoted to VP/GM of the First Coast News pair of ABC/NBC affiliates in Jacksonville. From there she hosted me for several Georgia/Florida games, with some great seats and the stadium just a few hundred yards away from the secured parking lot of the stations.
Along the way I got to know her daughter, Kristy Steele, who later interned with me at the GCI Group in Atlanta, and I met her husband Randy Bickley when Dodie threw him a surprise 50th birthday party at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, and her extended family when Randy did the reverse for her later at the Warner Robins Aviation Museum. Her niece Betty Cantrell would twice compete in the Miss Georgia Pageant, I joined the family in Columbus for both competitions. She won that second round, after being first runner-up the prior year, and then on to Miss America, which Betty was crowned in 2016. Olivia got to meet Miss America when she returned home to Warner Robins, Georgia.
During the mid-2010s, Dodie, or “Cantrell” as she is most often referred to by her adoring students, joined the faculty at the Grady College, focusing her efforts on the NewSource program and building out our future multi-platform journalists.
My daughter Olivia and I had many field trips with Dodie and her grandchildren across Georgia, and with each fall and spring semester, Dodie would send an outstanding student or two my way to assist in guiding them around the Georgia Gold Dome during a legislative session, or making connections to land a tough interview, and each of those students would speak with admiration of “Cantrell” pushing them to write better, shoot better, think better…
Author, scholar, journalist, broadcast executive, professor, mother, grandmother and great friend…from my vantage point, Dodie manages to excel in each of these arenas.
You can credit Dodie, more than anyone else with the Crane patented commentary smirk, and perhaps over-used arched eyebrow…but the viewers notice, and comment –
https://www.tiktok.com/@csicrane/video/7494655605924187438
Thanks Dodie, for the memories, for the friendship and for the legacy you are leaving to journalism, to Georgia and to your many family and friends.
