Contributed photo Wallace in 1999, when she worked for ESPN. (Click for larger image)

Television personality opens shop in Honesdale

By TOM KANE

HONESDALE — She says she’s tired of traveling 200,000 air miles a year, covering major sports events for network television both in Canada and the U.S. And she’s never seen a town as charming as Honesdale.

For 14 years, Sandra Neil Wallace, a native of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, has had jobs as the news reporter, news anchor and sports reporter for CTV in Canada, and, a sports reporter covering figure skating, hockey, horseracing and other sports events, first for Fox Sports and then for ESPN.

“I’ve traveled to Europe, all over Canada and the United States in my job and hardly had a weekend to myself for a number of years,” said the 37-year-old, who was married last September to Rick Wallace, senior editor of Highlights For Children magazine in Honesdale. In November she opened an antique store called Living Country Home at 515 Main Street.

Wallace started out in radio in Toronto while still a student at Ryerson Technical Institute for radio and television arts. “I started out as a boat reporter and spent a lot of time in marinas on Lake Ontario and at boat shows,” she said.

It wasn’t long until she moved to CFTO, which is part of CTV, a national network in Canada where she did the news, and then moved into the position of co-anchor for news.

Then, her career carried her to freelance at ESPN for sports reporting, specifically horseracing.

“My family had a horseracing background in Canada so I was raised with horses and horseracing,” she said.

While still in Canada, she moved to the Fox Network and was the host of its figure skating coverage. “All those events were in Europe,” Wallace said.

From Fox, the newscaster went to ESPN full-time to cover hockey, women’s basketball and the Xgames—alternative “extreme” sports like skate boarding, street luging and snow boarding.

She was the on-camera host for the PanAmerican games a few years ago.

“It’s getting easier for a woman to be a sports reporter, but you still really have to know your stuff,” she said. “There were a lot of women who paved the way for me and I’m continuing to pave the way even more.”

What drives a woman like Wallace to venture into fields dominated by males?

”What drives me is getting to the core of the subject matter, finding out what the person is all about and having it transmitted on television—that’s what excites me,” she said.

Currently, Wallace is one of the on-camera hosts of “The Travel Magazine,” used mainly by BBC TV. She’ll travel to resorts for 10 days and come back with three or four shows. “This only involves one month of the summer,” Wallace said. She did 25 shows for the network this summer.

So why Honesdale, and why a store?

“Love brought me here,” she said. “And I just love the area, too. I think you need to be from somewhere else to appreciate the charm of this area—and that includes Narrowsburg. I also love and know antiques.” Wallace has been collecting antiques ever since she was a child.

“For the first time in my life, I’m making things work for me,” she said.