Haverhill, Massachusetts, has changed dramatically since favorite native son Tom Bergeron moved west for the fame and bright lights of Hollywood. But, as the star of America’s Funniest Home Videos and reality-ratings juggernaut Dancing with the Stars knows, you can take the man out of the Merrimack Valley, but you can never really take the Valley out of the man.
On a hectic Saturday afternoon, Tom Bergeron is pulling the usual double double-duty, taping not one but two episodes of ABC’s long-running guilty pleasure, America’s Funniest Home Videos. Between takes, the former Haverhill resident shuffles and soft-shoes it across the giant, high-tech video screen contraption set into the floor at the heart of the cavernous AFV set. It’s necessary practice for the other high-profile gig that’s keeping Bergeron supremely busy these days, and has established his star as one of the biggest and brightest in primetime television: MC of the network’s blockbuster reality TV phenomenon, Dancing with the Stars.
With Dancing presently waltzing its way through a third season, it soon becomes clear that, in spite of the oft-clumsy persona he projects on the AFV set, Bergeron does not have two left feet.
Tom on the cover of MVM's Spring 2007 issue.
“I’ve done a lot of improv theater and mime and stuff like that, and I’m a bit of a gym rat. I love exercising, working out, and staying fit, so I’m fairly coordinated,” says Bergeron during one of those rare breaks in the schedule when the camera isn’t filming. “But dancing is a different kind of discipline. In the second season of Dancing with the Stars, I actually danced in one of the result shows. Ashly DelGrosso, one of our professional instructors, taught me the quick-step because I wanted to see what the celebrities get put through. One night during the second week of training, my wife woke me up because she thought I was having a heart attack. I was hyperventilating in my sleep, thrashing about. I woke up, smiled, and I remember this part very clearly, said, ‘I just danced all the steps!’ Turns out, I was going through every transition of the quick-step. I had been freaking out that entire week that I wouldn’t be able to find the transitions properly, so I was constantly working on it, even in my sleep, apparently.
“That’s what all the celebrities who dance on our show say, that it’s always in their heads. Emmitt Smith, the former football player, told me that everywhere he went, he was thinking about this step and that step, and damned if I wasn’t doing the same thing. I finally put the steps together and was dancing in my sleep.”
You could say that Tom Bergeron is something of a compulsive overachiever, and that he always has been. Born on May 6, 1955, Bergeron grew up in Haverhill’s Hilldale area, a block away from the public high school. His parents Ray and Kay Bergeron still live in the same house, and sister Maureen and her family have since established new roots elsewhere in the Merrimack Valley.
“There’s been a lot of change in the Haverhill landscape since I lived there,” says Bergeron. “Those little touchstone places from my childhood that I remember are largely gone. There was a little variety store that used to be in Lafayette Square where I went to build my comic book collection. I remember vividly what the place looked like. Both Lafayette Fruits and Arlington Fruits were housed in the same building, adjacent to each other. I had a quasi-job there where they would let me come in and unpack the comic books. My payment was a vanilla milkshake. They didn’t give me free comics, but I did get first grab right out of the box.”
Bergeron attended grade school at St. Joseph’s Academy, where he quickly established his reputation for being both a fastidious multi-tasker as well as the class clown.
“It was good training for what I’m doing now,” he laughs. “I was always very involved in a lot of stuff. Prior to my lapsed Catholic days, I was an altar boy and was in the Catholic Youth Organization. In high school, I went on an election-winning binge and was president of the student council, editor of the school newspaper, and on the State Advisory Board of Education, all at the same time. At one point I said to myself, ‘When are you planning to find time to do your homework?’ I then dabbled at Northern Essex Community College, and worked with a theater company for a while.”
A significant turning point in Bergeron’s career came at the age of 17, when he landed his first broadcasting job at WHAV, the local Haverhill radio station. The next was in 1980 when Bergeron transitioned over to WBZ in Boston, working both on the radio and TV with his short-lived, self-titled late night variety show, The Tom Bergeron Show.
Haverhill, Mass’s own Tom Bergeron doles out humor on ABC’s perennial laugh factory, America’s Funniest Home Videos. Photo by Kevin Harkins.
“At one point, the director of my radio show decided that we’d be broadcasting from the set of the New Hampshire Public Television Auction, Channel 11, out of the Seacoast area,” Bergeron recalls. “At the time, I was also doing this children’s show called Super Kids that ran at one in the afternoon on WBZ on Saturdays. It was in the format of the old Evening Magazine. I’d tape it during the day on a weekday, then I’d zip back to do the radio show. I ran into [local sports broadcasting legend] Bob Lobel on the auction set and I remember him saying to me, ‘Well, you’ve got your foot in the door. Now just make yourself available to do whatever they throw at you, and make yourself invaluable.’ And sure enough, that proved to be somewhat prophetic, because over the years any format they needed somebody to fill in on, I was there, willing to do it. At the time, they had this odd little format where when you hosted daytime programming, you were on for a minute or ninety seconds, fourteen times a day. I did that. I filled in on their midday talk show, People Are Talking, and eventually, I became the host of it.”
Bergeron assumed the sometimes-controversial show’s reigns from 1987 all the way through to its demise in 1993, again splitting his time between television and radio and rubbing elbows with the likes of Larry Glick and Dave Maynard at WBZ, icons he’d grown up listening to.
“It was live TV, which I love, in a major market. It ran the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime. I had everybody from Jimmy Carter to guests who thought they could talk to ghosts and everything in-between. That time was really the last gasp of great local television. Channel 4 and Channel 5 out of Boston especially were putting out excellent documentaries about regional issues. There was a lot of programming that went beyond just the local news. You don’t see that anymore. It’s all pretty much been swallowed up by corporate owners and has lost the local news focus. There aren’t shows like People Are Talking anymore. But I’ve been fortunate enough that at the times in my career when it mattered most, people took a chance on me. For my part, I was always willing to do the work and get there early and stay late, but there were really important people at each step along the way that tossed a challenge in my direction to either sink or swim with it.”
AFV’s and Dancing with the Star’s Tom Bergeron checks out the inaugural issue of Merrimack Valley Magazine. Photo by Kevin Harkins.
The most important of those people was Bergeron’s wife Lois, a former producer-director he met during his first visit to the Channel 11 auction set. The couple has been together for over twenty-five years and has two daughters, Jessica, 18, and Samantha, 16. And since moving out of Haverhill for the last time in 1977, he’s gone on to rack up a stellar resume. In addition to fill-in hosting gigs on both Good Morning America and The Early Show and guest appearances on Enterprise, the fifth live-action spin-off of Paramount’s popular Star Trek franchise, Bergeron held court from 1993–96 on the fledgling FX cable channel’s New York talk show, Breakfast Time.
“Until Dancing with the Stars came along, that show was it, because I love live TV so much. It was the most fun I ever had in television—it was like radio on TV. Highly improvisational, completely interactive, and just a great, fun time.”
Bergeron also attempted to put order to chaos five nights a week on the hilarious Whoopie Goldberg-produced version of Hollywood Squares for six years starting in 1998. Furthering his reputation as a tireless multi-tasker, he hosted Squares while also tackl
ing MC duties as Bob Saget’s replacement over at ABC’s unsinkable America’s Funniest Home Videos. Squares earned Bergeron four Daytime Emmy nominations in the Outstanding Game Show Host category; in 2000, he tied with The Price is Right’s Bob Barker and finally took home the gold.
Given its phenomenal ratings, Dancing with the Stars is sure to keep Bergeron quick-stepping across TV screens far into the foreseeable future, and he’s already signed on to continue his Master of Ceremonies role at AFV for at least two more full seasons. While Bergeron has no regrets about uprooting from this landscape of pine trees to one of distant palms, especially during the deep chill of New England winters, even so, he admits, the Valley continues to call to him.
Bergeron (second from left) gets down to funny business during an AFV pre-production meeting. Photo by Kevin Harkins.
“What I remember most about living there was the feeling of safety, and that’s a real tribute to my parents and the environment they created. It was a real sense of family. I’ve always felt very confident in the love of my family, which was particularly helpful during times when my career seemed like it was going right off the tracks. I look back on that time with warm nostalgia, not as individual memories so much as an overall feel for the time. A lot of kids grow up nowadays and they don’t feel safe, or that someone like a parent has their back. But I always knew where home was, and that’s still true.”
And with oldest daughter Jessica set to attend her freshman year of college in Boston, Bergeron expects to be visiting back east often, where his life and career started.
“Lois and I love the idea of hanging out at Legal Seafoods, catching up with old friends under the pretense of checking in on her. We have roots here. A friend of mine says it’s the dirt you came from. That’s the truth of it.”
Being Tom Bergeron:
Simon Cohen, Bergeron’s 9th Grade History Teacher: “Every year, my students voted on who was the funniest kid in their class. We called it the ‘Boob of the Year’ Award. Tom won the award in his class, hands-down. We gave him a dunce cap for the prize and he had to wear it. He was a very funny kid, and he grew up to be a very funny man.”
Tom Bergeron, on Tom Bergeron: “During my years at Haverhill High School, my dad owned a convertible. I had just gotten my license when my dad bought a new car, so he let me take the convertible out. There were a couple of cheerleaders at the high school that I really wanted to impress, but I was so painfully awkward about doing it. They were both standing beside the famous statue of ‘the Thinker’ as I drove into the school lot. There’s a little turn-around area just in front of where ‘the Thinker’ is. I had the convertible’s top down and I thought I was looking pretty cool…then I turned the corner, promptly went right up on the curve, scraped the underbelly of the car, and BAM!, came back down on the road again. I turned absolutely crimson. The two girls I was trying to impress were looking at me and, of course, one of them said, ‘Just get your license?’ After that, I gave up trying to look cool.”
Cover Feature: Tom Bergeron – Spring 2007
On a hectic Saturday afternoon, Tom Bergeron is pulling the usual double double-duty, taping not one but two episodes of ABC’s long-running guilty pleasure, America’s Funniest Home Videos. Between takes, the former Haverhill resident shuffles and soft-shoes it across the giant, high-tech video screen contraption set into the floor at the heart of the cavernous AFV set. It’s necessary practice for the other high-profile gig that’s keeping Bergeron supremely busy these days, and has established his star as one of the biggest and brightest in primetime television: MC of the network’s blockbuster reality TV phenomenon, Dancing with the Stars.
With Dancing presently waltzing its way through a third season, it soon becomes clear that, in spite of the oft-clumsy persona he projects on the AFV set, Bergeron does not have two left feet.
Tom on the cover of MVM's Spring 2007 issue.
“I’ve done a lot of improv theater and mime and stuff like that, and I’m a bit of a gym rat. I love exercising, working out, and staying fit, so I’m fairly coordinated,” says Bergeron during one of those rare breaks in the schedule when the camera isn’t filming. “But dancing is a different kind of discipline. In the second season of Dancing with the Stars, I actually danced in one of the result shows. Ashly DelGrosso, one of our professional instructors, taught me the quick-step because I wanted to see what the celebrities get put through. One night during the second week of training, my wife woke me up because she thought I was having a heart attack. I was hyperventilating in my sleep, thrashing about. I woke up, smiled, and I remember this part very clearly, said, ‘I just danced all the steps!’ Turns out, I was going through every transition of the quick-step. I had been freaking out that entire week that I wouldn’t be able to find the transitions properly, so I was constantly working on it, even in my sleep, apparently.
“That’s what all the celebrities who dance on our show say, that it’s always in their heads. Emmitt Smith, the former football player, told me that everywhere he went, he was thinking about this step and that step, and damned if I wasn’t doing the same thing. I finally put the steps together and was dancing in my sleep.”
You could say that Tom Bergeron is something of a compulsive overachiever, and that he always has been. Born on May 6, 1955, Bergeron grew up in Haverhill’s Hilldale area, a block away from the public high school. His parents Ray and Kay Bergeron still live in the same house, and sister Maureen and her family have since established new roots elsewhere in the Merrimack Valley.
“There’s been a lot of change in the Haverhill landscape since I lived there,” says Bergeron. “Those little touchstone places from my childhood that I remember are largely gone. There was a little variety store that used to be in Lafayette Square where I went to build my comic book collection. I remember vividly what the place looked like. Both Lafayette Fruits and Arlington Fruits were housed in the same building, adjacent to each other. I had a quasi-job there where they would let me come in and unpack the comic books. My payment was a vanilla milkshake. They didn’t give me free comics, but I did get first grab right out of the box.”
Bergeron attended grade school at St. Joseph’s Academy, where he quickly established his reputation for being both a fastidious multi-tasker as well as the class clown.
“It was good training for what I’m doing now,” he laughs. “I was always very involved in a lot of stuff. Prior to my lapsed Catholic days, I was an altar boy and was in the Catholic Youth Organization. In high school, I went on an election-winning binge and was president of the student council, editor of the school newspaper, and on the State Advisory Board of Education, all at the same time. At one point I said to myself, ‘When are you planning to find time to do your homework?’ I then dabbled at Northern Essex Community College, and worked with a theater company for a while.”
A significant turning point in Bergeron’s career came at the age of 17, when he landed his first broadcasting job at WHAV, the local Haverhill radio station. The next was in 1980 when Bergeron transitioned over to WBZ in Boston, working both on the radio and TV with his short-lived, self-titled late night variety show, The Tom Bergeron Show.
Haverhill, Mass’s own Tom Bergeron doles out humor on ABC’s perennial laugh factory, America’s Funniest Home Videos. Photo by Kevin Harkins.
“At one point, the director of my radio show decided that we’d be broadcasting from the set of the New Hampshire Public Television Auction, Channel 11, out of the Seacoast area,” Bergeron recalls. “At the time, I was also doing this children’s show called Super Kids that ran at one in the afternoon on WBZ on Saturdays. It was in the format of the old Evening Magazine. I’d tape it during the day on a weekday, then I’d zip back to do the radio show. I ran into [local sports broadcasting legend] Bob Lobel on the auction set and I remember him saying to me, ‘Well, you’ve got your foot in the door. Now just make yourself available to do whatever they throw at you, and make yourself invaluable.’ And sure enough, that proved to be somewhat prophetic, because over the years any format they needed somebody to fill in on, I was there, willing to do it. At the time, they had this odd little format where when you hosted daytime programming, you were on for a minute or ninety seconds, fourteen times a day. I did that. I filled in on their midday talk show, People Are Talking, and eventually, I became the host of it.”
Bergeron assumed the sometimes-controversial show’s reigns from 1987 all the way through to its demise in 1993, again splitting his time between television and radio and rubbing elbows with the likes of Larry Glick and Dave Maynard at WBZ, icons he’d grown up listening to.
“It was live TV, which I love, in a major market. It ran the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime. I had everybody from Jimmy Carter to guests who thought they could talk to ghosts and everything in-between. That time was really the last gasp of great local television. Channel 4 and Channel 5 out of Boston especially were putting out excellent documentaries about regional issues. There was a lot of programming that went beyond just the local news. You don’t see that anymore. It’s all pretty much been swallowed up by corporate owners and has lost the local news focus. There aren’t shows like People Are Talking anymore. But I’ve been fortunate enough that at the times in my career when it mattered most, people took a chance on me. For my part, I was always willing to do the work and get there early and stay late, but there were really important people at each step along the way that tossed a challenge in my direction to either sink or swim with it.”
AFV’s and Dancing with the Star’s Tom Bergeron checks out the inaugural issue of Merrimack Valley Magazine. Photo by Kevin Harkins.
The most important of those people was Bergeron’s wife Lois, a former producer-director he met during his first visit to the Channel 11 auction set. The couple has been together for over twenty-five years and has two daughters, Jessica, 18, and Samantha, 16. And since moving out of Haverhill for the last time in 1977, he’s gone on to rack up a stellar resume. In addition to fill-in hosting gigs on both Good Morning America and The Early Show and guest appearances on Enterprise, the fifth live-action spin-off of Paramount’s popular Star Trek franchise, Bergeron held court from 1993–96 on the fledgling FX cable channel’s New York talk show, Breakfast Time.
“Until Dancing with the Stars came along, that show was it, because I love live TV so much. It was the most fun I ever had in television—it was like radio on TV. Highly improvisational, completely interactive, and just a great, fun time.”
Bergeron also attempted to put order to chaos five nights a week on the hilarious Whoopie Goldberg-produced version of Hollywood Squares for six years starting in 1998. Furthering his reputation as a tireless multi-tasker, he hosted Squares while also tackl
ing MC duties as Bob Saget’s replacement over at ABC’s unsinkable America’s Funniest Home Videos. Squares earned Bergeron four Daytime Emmy nominations in the Outstanding Game Show Host category; in 2000, he tied with The Price is Right’s Bob Barker and finally took home the gold.
Given its phenomenal ratings, Dancing with the Stars is sure to keep Bergeron quick-stepping across TV screens far into the foreseeable future, and he’s already signed on to continue his Master of Ceremonies role at AFV for at least two more full seasons. While Bergeron has no regrets about uprooting from this landscape of pine trees to one of distant palms, especially during the deep chill of New England winters, even so, he admits, the Valley continues to call to him.
Bergeron (second from left) gets down to funny business during an AFV pre-production meeting. Photo by Kevin Harkins.
“What I remember most about living there was the feeling of safety, and that’s a real tribute to my parents and the environment they created. It was a real sense of family. I’ve always felt very confident in the love of my family, which was particularly helpful during times when my career seemed like it was going right off the tracks. I look back on that time with warm nostalgia, not as individual memories so much as an overall feel for the time. A lot of kids grow up nowadays and they don’t feel safe, or that someone like a parent has their back. But I always knew where home was, and that’s still true.”
And with oldest daughter Jessica set to attend her freshman year of college in Boston, Bergeron expects to be visiting back east often, where his life and career started.
“Lois and I love the idea of hanging out at Legal Seafoods, catching up with old friends under the pretense of checking in on her. We have roots here. A friend of mine says it’s the dirt you came from. That’s the truth of it.”
Being Tom Bergeron:
Simon Cohen, Bergeron’s 9th Grade History Teacher: “Every year, my students voted on who was the funniest kid in their class. We called it the ‘Boob of the Year’ Award. Tom won the award in his class, hands-down. We gave him a dunce cap for the prize and he had to wear it. He was a very funny kid, and he grew up to be a very funny man.”
Tom Bergeron, on Tom Bergeron: “During my years at Haverhill High School, my dad owned a convertible. I had just gotten my license when my dad bought a new car, so he let me take the convertible out. There were a couple of cheerleaders at the high school that I really wanted to impress, but I was so painfully awkward about doing it. They were both standing beside the famous statue of ‘the Thinker’ as I drove into the school lot. There’s a little turn-around area just in front of where ‘the Thinker’ is. I had the convertible’s top down and I thought I was looking pretty cool…then I turned the corner, promptly went right up on the curve, scraped the underbelly of the car, and BAM!, came back down on the road again. I turned absolutely crimson. The two girls I was trying to impress were looking at me and, of course, one of them said, ‘Just get your license?’ After that, I gave up trying to look cool.”