unljnews

By JOEL GEHRINGER
J Alumni News staff

Roger Fransecky and Nancy Foreman

If there’s such a thing as love at first sight, Roger Fransecky found it.

Watching television one day in 1977, the consultant and University of Cincinnati psychology professor caught a glimpse of local television personality and 1963 UNL graduate Nancy Foreman on her monthly interview program “In Person.”

“I saw her on television, and I did something I had never done in my life, before or since: I went ‘Wow! Who is that?’” Fransecky said. “I looked at this woman who was a remarkable professional, and she jumped through the screen. It was like, ‘Whoa!’”

Wrestling with his thoughts for a few days, Fransecky finally worked up the nerve to call the station manager, a friend and business associate, and asked to meet Nancy. The manager, however, had a better idea. Because Fransecky had his own TV experience with “Sesame Street” and “The Phil Donohue Show,” among others, why not have Foreman interview Fransecky for her program?

Fransecky obliged, and when he walked into the station for his interview, he knew he’d met his match.

“It was the interview that never ended,” he said.

‘Make every moment count’

On Aug. 8, 2008, Fransecky, now founder and CEO of The Apogee Group, a global leadership company, called his wife Nancy Foreman from the Denver airport to let her know he was on his way back into Omaha, where the couple had moved in 2003.

When he arrived home, he found Nancy collapsed on the floor; she had suffered a split aorta. That call from Denver had been their last conversation.

“Everybody was just shocked — totally shocked,” said family friend Judy Haecker. “She seemed like such a vibrant person, and we had seen them not that long before. There was just never any real warning.”

Devastated by the loss of Nancy after 30 years together, Fransecky wrote an article called “The Last Time” for his company’s monthly newsletter, distributed to about 10,000 subscribers.

“It’s important to take something from this terrifying loss:  Make every moment count,” Fransecky wrote. “You never know when that is the last time. Stay conscious and present in your life. Savor your days and moments. I remember both.”

The response, Fransecky said, was incredible.

“It opened up tear ducts and some touching communications that were amazing,” he said. “It became part of my healing.”

Yet Fransecky still suffered. He wasn’t sure how to properly keep Nancy’s memory alive.

“One of the things I struggled with was how do I properly honor her?” he said. “She was honestly the most remarkable person I’ve ever known.”

Working with the University of Nebraska Foundation, Fransecky decided to honor Nancy’s life by setting up a scholarship for students in UNL’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications, Nancy’s alma mater.

“It’s a simple story,” Fransecky said. “Husband adores wife. Wife dies suddenly. No chance to say goodbye. So what do you do? You find ways of expressing the energy and fullness of her life. And this was one way to do it.”

From Albion to New York  City

While rushing Chi Omega at UNL in the late ’50s, Liz Liakos remembers being immediately drawn to recent transfer student and education major Nancy Foreman.

“We instantly became friends because she was very outgoing and friendly,” Liakos said.

A native of Columbus, Liakos had much in common with Foreman, who was born and raised in Albion and spent two years at Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., before returning to her home state for her final two years of college.

“She was enamored of her major and her sorority,” Liakos said. “She just liked everything about the university.”

Foreman seemed to have a similar affect on her other classmates, Fransecky said, and soon enough, someone had entered her in a campus beauty pageant.

“The sorority put her up for a contest, which she did not want to do, and she won,” he said, “and then they put her up for Miss Nebraska, which she did not want to do, and she won.”

Foreman went on to represent Nebraska in the 1961 Miss American pageant. She didn’t win, but it garnered her much attention.

As a student, Foreman landed jobs on local television as a journalist and personality. After graduating from UNL in 1963, Foreman worked as a teacher for a while before continuing in television, first on “In Person” in Cincinnati, where she met Fransecky, then as co-host of “AM Buffalo” in Buffalo, N.Y.

During Foreman’s tenure, “AM Buffalo” became one of the nation’s first hit morning shows, and she caught the eye of NBC executives in New York, who hired Foreman as the first lifestyle correspondent for “The Today Show.”

In 1981, Foreman began an eight-year run on the show with another “Today Show” newcomer — Willard Scott. Fransecky said Foreman had free rein to cover whatever interested her, whether it was fashion in Paris or dolphin communication in Hawaii.

“There were two qualities that made her remarkable, and I think they’re very Nebraskan,” Fransecky said. “One is hard work. She outworked everybody. When she did a story she probably did three times the amount of research she needed to. And before she went on the air, she rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. She took her work very seriously.

“The other quality was that she was very serious about truthfulness and integrity, and, God knows I can tell you as her husband, telling it like it is. That’s very Nebraskan. It made her a very good journalist.”

Foreman also became a spokesperson for American Express and wrote a book, “Bound for Success,” in 1985. But in 1989, at the end of Foreman’s “Today Show” run, Fransecky said the two felt “burned out.” He had been busy as well, in education, television and consulting, and they needed a break.

“To say we were busy would be an understatement,” he said.

The couple moved to a home in Florida and then made their way to Los Angeles and Denver before finally ending up back in New York. By that time, Roger had started The Apogee Group, and Foreman had been doing presentations for businesses on the topics in her book — written and oral communication and how to use them to reach one’s goals. But the two once again realized they didn’t want to grow old in New York City.

Strangely enough, it was on a business trip to Foreman’s native Nebraska that Fransecky finally found a place for them.

“I called Nancy in New York and said, ‘There’s a lot of things going on here,’” Fransecky said, noting that Foreman was surprised at how taken he was by her home state.

In 2003, the couple moved to Omaha and reconnected with many of Foreman’s college classmates.

“She had a lot of good friends from Chi Omega, and guess what? They married a lot of good men,” Fransecky said. “So we had this great network of people.”

Among the network were George and Judy Haecker and John and Liz Liakos, two couples with whom the Franseckys became close.

“(Roger and Nancy) were very close as a couple, just like friends would be,” Judy Haecker said. “They enjoyed each other’s company a lot. They loved to dance. They even got us started in a dance class that we took together.”

Liz Liakos said after reconnecting with the couple, she saw how well they fit together.

“They were the ultimate married couple,” she said. “They were totally devoted to each other. They did everything together while still being individuals.”

Students are already benefitting from scholarship funds

In the spring of 2009, two UNL CoJMC students became the first recipients of awards from the Nancy Foreman Scholarship Fund.

The fund, started with $25,000 from Fransecky and soon grew to roughly $65,000 and counting with donations from friends and clients wishing to honor Nancy. It will soon be used to award another round of scholarships.

Fransecky said he hopes to see the scholarship grow.

“I want to get it to a place where it is a serious scholarship that really helps someone,” he said. “It has turned out to be a very powerful device. But for me at a very personal level, it was just one of the ways to keep her memory alive.”

Fransecky said he thinks Foreman — “a very modest and shy person for the public life she led” — would be pleased but uncomfortable having her name on such an award. But Fransecky stressed the importance of remembering her “profound professionalism and ethic of hard work.”

Liakos agreed, noting that if the scholarship helps an up-and-coming journalist to develop the skills Foreman embodied, it would be hard to find a better tribute.

“It was her life,” Liakos said. “It was certainly her career, so that would be the perfect tribute to her. I can’t think of anything better.”