Editor’s Note: Mary Jane Clark is a ‘New York Times’ bestselling author and former CBS News producer.

I love CBS News and I always will, no matter what it is going through right now.

I love it because the people who ran it took a chance and hired me right after college graduation. As a desk assistant on the 4 pm to midnight shift in the network headquarters on 57th Street in NYC, they paid me $117 a week, which wasn’t much even in the late 1970s. There wasn’t a single computer in the newsroom back then. The desk assistants rolled AP, UPI and Reuters wire copy and delivered it to the appropriate editors before earning the status job of doing the same for the correspondents who anchored the evening news broadcasts. That first year, I rolled copy for Walter Cronkite, Ed Bradley, Morton Dean, Bob Schieffer and Dan Rather.

I was awed, a parochial school girl who’d gone to a state university, walking (or, if on deadline, running) down the halls of the “House that Murrow Built.” CBS News was the birthplace of the first television evening news broadcast (15 minutes with Douglas Edwards). It televised the first presidential debate, where a suntanned and smooth John F. Kennedy faced a pale Richard Nixon with his five o’clock shadow. Afterwards, radio listeners thought Nixon had won, but those who watched on television picked Kennedy as the winner. So did the electorate in November. The power of television was established.

A member of the first generation to be brought up on television, I had been shaped and educated by what I had seen and heard from CBS News. “Person to Person.” “Harvest of Shame.” “The Selling of the Pentagon.” “60 Minutes” (the first of the news magazines and still the best). Four dark days full of unforgettable images of JFK’s assassination and funeral and, later, coverage of Martin Luther King’s and Bobby Kennedy’s, too. A man landing on the moon. Chappaquiddick. The Watergate hearings. And more, so much more.

This was the CBS News I had been exposed to before I even walked through the front door. Then, for almost three decades, I was paid to watch history as it was made; paid to work with talented, smart, quick-thinking people, some with the most delicious senses of humor, all committed to quality journalism. I knew I was working in rarefied air. I knew I was incredibly fortunate.

I was going to national political conventions in cities I may not have otherwise seen, watching as Pope John Paul II visited the United States (twice), standing atop press scaffolds on Governor’s Island as the most breathtaking fireworks burst over the Statue of Liberty in honor of her 100th birthday. I saw presidents and movie stars, interviewed experts in medicine, economics, science and sports. I produced obituaries on world figures and year-enders which wrapped up annual news events and, as memorable, the stories that I worked on about “regular folks” confronted with extraordinary circumstances. I learned how human beings dig in and do what they have to do when the hurricane hits or they get sick or lose their life savings, how dreams are smashed, how people go on. My job at CBS News was a continuing education.