After nearly a half-century on Jacksonville television, one of the city’s most recognizable faces is stepping out of the klieg lights, away from the teleprompter and from behind the anchor desk.
Tom Wills, who’s marking his 49th year at News4Jax (WJXT TV-4), is retiring, the anchor announced during Thursday's 6 p.m. newscast. His final day on-air will be May 31.
Wills joined WJXT in 1975, first as a reporter and then thelongest-serving news anchor in the station’s 74-year history.
His planned exit is the fourth notable departure from the station in less than a year.
On May 31, 2023, Mary Baer—Wills’s co-anchor for 20 years — left the station along with chief meteorologist John Gaughan. Each had been with WJXT since 1992.
And just last month, reporter/anchor Vic Micolucci left the station to take on a new position at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
More on Tom Wills:Longtime TV news anchor announces retirement from Jacksonville's WJXT/Channel 4
For decades, Wills was part of the longest-running newscast team in Jacksonville history that included co-anchors Baer and Deborah Gianoulis, sports anchor Sam Kouvaris and chief meteorologist George Winterling, who, until Wills, held the station’s title of longest-serving on-air personality at 47 years, from 1962 to 2009, when he moved into semi-retirement.(Winterling died in June 2023.)
Gianoulis left the station in 2003 after 25 years; Kouvaris left in 2018 after 37 years.
Wills, a Pittsburgh native, came to Jacksonville in the mid-1970s from Washington, D.C.
He’s delivered the news of the city’s brightest — and darkest — moments.
Following the Oct. 20, 1977, plane crash that killed four members of Jacksonville’s Lynyrd Skynyrd, including lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, Wills reported from the crash site, a remote, wooded area in southern Mississippi.
Behind the anchor desk, he also reported on other tragedies, including the Jan. 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the murders of Jacksonville children like Maddie Clifton, Somer Thompson and others.
But he also shared the news in November 1993 of the NFL’s decision to award the city the Jacksonville Jaguars and, in February 2005, Super Bowl XXXIX, two of the biggest moments in the city’s history.
He also led the station’s coverage of hurricanes, including giving an impassioned plea in October 2016 for residents to heed the city’s warnings about the approaching Hurricane Matthew.
“I want to talk to you people for just a minute,” Wills began. “Not as Tom the newsman.”
“We’ve been together for 40 years, you and I,” he said to viewers. “It’s time to take precautions. It’s time to protect yourself. This is not going to be like anything we’ve seen before. … We’re in for a terrible, terrible experience. So please do whatever is necessary to protect yourself and your family.”
It was a rare instance when Wills broke from his stoic news anchor role.
“Lots and lots and lots of people evacuated because of what he said,” then-WJXT vice president and general manager Bob Ellis told the Jacksonville Daily Record. “It was a moment that this television station will be proud of for years to come.”
Throughout his career, Wills has been recognized for his work at the station, including the duPont-Columbia Award in 1985 for his investigative report, “The Smell of Money,” on Jacksonville’s air quality and again in 1988 for “The Deadly Drive Home,” a look at deadly traffic accidents in Jacksonville attributed to the placement of utility poles too close to roadways.
In 2015, News4Jax celebrated Wills’ 40 anniversary at the station with a TV special that began with an important message from Ellis: “We ought to get this out there right away, quickly and definitively: Tom Wills is not going anywhere.”
During the hourlong tribute, other anchors, past and present, honored their colleague.
“If I had to describe Tom Wills in one word, I would say ‘thorough’,” former WJXT anchor Rob Sweeting said. Otherssuggested “honest,” “fair,” “humble,” “inspiring,” “kind” and “genuine.”
“Tom loves the news business," Gianoulis said at the time. "He loves the community. He loves his colleagues. He loves his rhythm and his routine and the comfortable nature of knowing that every single day I’m going to be talking to these folks at these prescribed hours. And it just suits him so well. I think there are very few people, frankly, that can stick with anything that long and still love it. That’s the beauty of Tom. He still loves it.”
“He’s a newsman at heart. He’s not interested in being a star. He’s not worried about the title of anchorman. ... He just really likes being a newsman,” Kouvaris said.
The late Mayor Jake Godbold added his praise for Wills, too.
“He found a home here when he got here ... We fell in love with him, he fell in love with us. It’s been a perfect marriage,” Godbold said.
Over the last 30 years, anchors have come and gone at the city’s other TV news stations, where only a handful — notably First Coast News anchor Jeannie Blaylock and chief meteorologist Tim Deegan and Action News Jax anchor Phil Amato and sports anchor Dan Hicken — have enjoyed longevity approaching that of Wills.
“No one is irreplaceable. ... There are exceptions,” Gianoulis said in WJXT’s 2015 special on Wills. “There will never be another Tom."
