What Really Happened to Chris Ulanowski? — The Writer’s Cut

Author’s note: This story was originally published  in The (Syracuse NY) Post-Standard on May 26, 2012, headlined, “A Public Man’s Private Turmoil.” But only half the story actually made the newspaper; the other half ended up on the cutting-room floor. This is my effort to provide the entire story to those interested in what really happened to Chris Ulanowski, including WRVO’s role in the tragedy. The story as it ran in the paper appears in regular type; I have restored the cuts in bold.

     By Janet Gramza

    On the Tuesday after Memorial Day 2011, Chris Carola arrived at the Associated Press Albany office at 5:30 a.m. and began  scrolling websites to catch up on news across the state.

As he scanned Syracuse.com, the name “Chris Ulanowski” caught his eye. Ulanowski, a colleague who served on the AP Broadcasters Association board, won many AP awards in his 27 years as news director of WRVO, the National Public Radio station in Oswego.

Carola clicked on Ulanowski’s name and gasped.

“It was his obit,” Carola said. “I was just shocked.” His friend was dead at age 51.

Carola searched for tributes to Ulanowski, who received a lifetime achievement award from the Syracuse Press Club in 2008. There were none. In the days to come, Carola and others listened for any mention of the passing of a respected newsman who spent three decades on the radio.

The silence was deafening.

That’s partly because Ulanowski took his own life, and the media generally don’t report suicides. But it’s also because of the troubling way Ulanowski’s career ended less than two years before.

Ulanowski’s widow, Shelley Manley, said he stayed alive for 20 more months, but life for him really ended Sept. 8, 2009, the day he lost his job at WRVO.

Most people didn’t realize that the confident professional they heard on the air struggled for years with a severe mental illness called borderline personality disorder, which causes unstable moods, behaviors and personal relationships. One in 10 people who have it commit suicide – more than 50 times the rate in the general population – and more than half attempt suicide at least once.

Like many with his disorder, Ulanowski used alcohol and marijuana to self-medicate against crushing depression, anxiety and insecurity, his family said. In August 2009, he was charged with marijuana possession in a late-night police stop.

Although the charge was ultimately dismissed, the incident led to his firing and the sudden loss of a career that formed his very identity, friends and family said.

Overnight, Ulanowski slid from productivity and local celebrity into unemployment and a deep despair that ended last Memorial Day when he rose in the wee hours while his wife slept, went out to his barn and hanged himself.

“If he hadn’t lost his job, I think he would still be here,” Manley said. “His work was his greatest pride, the No. 1 thing in his life.”

Losing his job deeply saddened him,” said a colleague, Ken Little, a reporter at The Greenville (TN) Sun newspaper. “I think he had a lot of productive years left, had that not happened.”

Ulanowski’s family and friends say it added to the tragedy that his death went unheralded by the media he loved. Thousands of Central New Yorkers who listened to him daily for decades still don’t know what happened.

“He was an outstanding news director,” said Andy Awad of Syracuse, who interned for Ulanowski 20 years ago. “He was very, very good at what he did. But his death has been overlooked.”

Ulanowski’s family shared his story to help rectify that and to raise awareness of borderline personality disorder. People with severe mental illness often are misunderstood and their disorders overlooked with tragic results. Many are unable to accomplish as much as Ulanowski did despite what friends called his “demons.”

Ulanowski was a brilliant, driven, meticulous journalist who hid an anguished soul from everyone who didn’t know him well, his family said.

He grew up in Buffalo, the youngest child of older parents. He was 11 when his mother killed herself by swallowing drain cleaner. Chris told his wife and daughters that he was the one who found her. She died in the hospital the next day.

His mother’s cause of death was not listed as suicide because that might prevent a Catholic burial, said Ulanowski’s daughter, Lindsey Manley. “I feel he wasn’t properly allowed to grieve,” she said.

As a teen, Ulanowski immersed himself in school and the music of the Grateful Dead. He left home at 17 to study broadcast journalism at Canisius College. In 1979, at age 19, he met Shelley Manley, then a 22-year-old widow with a 4-year-old daughter.

Manley’s first husband had died shortly after their daughter, Charity Musielak, was born. Shelley and Chris bonded quickly and stayed together for 32 often stormy years. Chris raised Charity, now 37, as his own, and they had two other daughters, Lindsey and Hillary Manley, now 30 and 26.

They were unconventional people with friends from all walks of life. They followed the Grateful Dead and bought an old farmhouse on four acres in Oswego County, where they held bonfire parties, raised and trained show dogs and kept a hobby farm with goats, pigs, chickens and a huge garden. Shelley named it “The Shire” after the Hobbit land in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

When his two younger daughters were born, Ulanowski agreed to give them Shelley’s last name because it was easier to spell. But his name soon became a household word in Central New York.

After college, he worked at WBFO, the NPR station in Buffalo, where he fell in love with public radio. At 22, he landed a reporting job at WRVO and soon became its first full-time news director. He was tall, blond and charming, with a dry sense of humor and a mellow, made-for-radio voice.

Located on the SUNY Oswego campus, WRVO served as a training ground for many students. Then-station manager Bill Shigley and assistant manager John Krauss allowed Ulanowski to develop a news department with plenty of student labor.

“Chris was the cool guy who treated us as the reason the station was on a college campus,” said Tom Herling of Ulster County, one of Ulanowski’s first interns. “He felt it was there for us to learn professional skills.”

Former interns described Ulanowski as a serious, dedicated editor who demanded excellence. He hosted a weekly news show, “Talk of the Region,” reported breaking news and in-depth stories, held live panel discussions and moderated political debates, all while mentoring several students a semester.

“He was the news director, but he was always doing yeoman’s work, running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” said former intern Steve Koegel, now director of marketing and communications for Centro.

“He was never too busy to help you out. He could be writing 10 scripts and I’d be writing one, but he would stop and make sure the one I was writing was right,” Koegel said.

Ulanowski had an “old-school approach” to journalism as fair and accurate, Koegel added. Once, Koegel made a mistake in a script that was read on-air.

“I came into the station and my script was taped to the wall, bleeding red,” he said. “I went to Chris and said, ‘I get it,’ and he said, ‘Good.’”

As Ulanowski expanded WRVO’s news coverage, he gave students new to broadcasting a chance to produce in-depth features using sound.

“He was a big believer in the NPR way of telling stories on the radio to make them come alive,” said Mark Vinciguerra, a 2000 WRVO intern who is now audience development director for Hearst Newspapers.

“He was always focused on finding the right sound bite or using natural sound,” Vinciguerra said. “If you were at a plant that made machinery, he would want you to use that noise to give the flavor, to make people feel like they were there. He understood radio and its nuances.”

Ellen Sammon Harblin of New Hartford, a 1998 WRVO intern, won an AP award that year for a report on the restoration of the old Hotel Utica.

“Chris taught me that the long-form feature story was not just a way of conveying news, but an art form and a craft, one that must invoke the senses,” she said.

In the 1990s, WRVO extended its broadcast area throughout Central New York and Ulanowski honed an all-news format and focus on regional issues.

“Of the three NPR stations in Central New York, WCNY was Classical music, WAER was jazz and WRVO was the news station,” Herling said. “That was their side of the street in the public radio market for 28 years, and it was because of Chris.”

“He really brought WRVO to the next level,” said another former intern, Matt Bishop, a dispatcher with Onondaga County 911. “He knew how to organize news coverage so it was done right, and that was reflected in all the awards he won.”

The awards won by Ulanowski and his staff covered several walls at the station. There were so many, one colleague joked, that if WRVO’s lobby was a movie set, “you would have laughed at it as hysterically overdone.” Every year, when Ulanowski attended the annual AP Broadcast Awards in Saratoga Springs or Lake Placid, he brought his staff along.

“Usually, the news director accepts most of the awards,” Carola said. “Chris would bring his young staffers and send them up to collect their awards. He was always good about deflecting praise to the younger reporters.”

Barrie Gewanter, director of the Central New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Ulanowski often interviewed her for stories involving civil rights.

“I came to know Chris as a consummate professional, a journalist par excellence,” Gewanter said. “He had the ability to think on his feet and analyze on his feet. His voice was to die for, but he also had an intellect and a thoughtfulness that were remarkable … I knew if I was going to be interviewed by Chris, I had better be prepared.”

But while Ulanowski was at the top of his game at work, his personal life was another story. His wife and daughters “walked on eggshells” because his mood could instantly change from calm to furious. He grew easily annoyed and frequently abusive, “yelling, swearing, name-calling – everything short of physical violence,” Shelley said.

Ulanowski also drowned his anxieties in alcohol when off duty, and there were a few nights when he went out for drinks and didn’t come home, Shelley said. Determined to save her marriage, she researched mental illness and realized that “alcohol was not his problem, that he used it to try to deal with deeper issues,” she said. Friends advised her to leave him, but she refused to give up on him.

“We were both very stubborn,” she said. “That’s probably why we stayed together so long.”

Convinced that Chris needed treatment, Shelley persuaded him to see a doctor for his mood swings. He began taking anti-depressants, but kept drinking. He told people he suffered from depression even after learning he had a far more difficult disorder.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is one of the most complex mental illnesses to treat and has a high risk of self-harm, said psychiatrist Robert Gregory, director of the Center for Emotion and Behavior Integration at Upstate Medical University and a specialist in BPD.

Gregory did not know Ulanowski; the doctor who treated him was uncomfortable discussing her patient. Gregory agreed to talk about BPD in general. He said it is characterized by impulsiveness, destructive behavior, sudden mood swings and chronic feelings of emptiness, shame and “badness.” It is often confused with bi-polar disorder because of the mood swings, but in borderline the “episodes” of instability are more sudden, random and intense, Gregory said.

BPD got its name in the 1930s “because it was originally thought to describe the borderline between high-functioning people” with anxiety or depression and people disabled by schizophrenia and psychosis, Gregory said. “But we now know it’s a well-defined disorder in its own right.”

It affects 1 to 2 percent of the population “at any given time,” but up to 6 percent will meet the criteria at some point in their lives, Gregory said.

Experts don’t yet know what causes BPD, but studies indicate heredity and childhood trauma both play a role. Most people with BPD have “a co-occurring depressive disorder” and over two-thirds develop substance abuse problems, most commonly with alcohol, Gregory said. A significant number, mostly women, also engage in self-harm such as cutting.

Gregory said it’s not unusual for people with BPD to excel in high-powered jobs, but their illness will eventually interfere without proper treatment.

“Some people are able to function in certain areas — especially in their occupations — and hold it together reasonably well, although it does spill over at times,” Gregory said. “But they will have enormous problems when they go home. They may be consuming large quantities of alcohol, having mood swings and having trouble sustaining meaningful relationships.”

That describes Ulanowski’s adult life. In dozens of interviews, people who worked with and for him described Ulanowski as “laid back,” “mellow,” “kind,” “funny,” and above all, “professional.” People who knew him only professionally rarely saw him lose control.

Amy Cavalier of Rochester, who worked for Ulanowski from 1999 to 2003, said he was a generous mentor who “built my knowledge of radio from the ground up.”

“He taught me everything, from how to interview someone, what questions to ask, how to prepare yourself to how to be confident in an interview,” she said. “He brought me to press conferences and introduced me to people. He treated me like an equal even though I was in my early 20s. He was really eager to share his passion for his craft.”

Cavalier became a close friend who came to know Ulanowski’s tormented side.

“It was painful to see someone suffering and not know how to help them,” she said. “I know it impacted his family relationships. But work was his escape. He could focus on his work and that was something that kept him strong.”

Despite the problems in his personal life, Ulanowski couldn’t tolerate journalistic sloppiness. He could come off as a know-it-all, but that was passion talking, Shelley said. “The same things that made him a jerk made him excellent at what he did,” she said.

At his graveside service last year, Matt Bishop told a story about the time Ulanowski was doing a live interview when he realized the person running the sound board was not recording it for use in a later newscast.

“Chris asked the (interviewee) a question, the guy started to answer it and all of a sudden, Chris put the mic on mute and ran up the stairs screaming at the sound guy to start recording,” Bishop said. “Then he ran back down and continued the interview like nothing happened.”

Bishop said incidents like that might stand out in some offices, but not in the typical newsroom. “Go into any newsroom and you are going to see moody people,” he said. “It’s not like working at your local ice cream parlor.”

Other former colleagues recalled Ulanowski’s shouting matches with the late Bill Shigley over things like equipment or scheduling. But the fights were never personal, they said.

“He and Shigley clashed a lot, but Chris had the utmost respect for Shigley,” Matt Bishop said. “When Shigley was diagnosed with brain cancer, Chris treated him like a father. He would take him out in his wheelchair and bring him out to lunch.”

Shigley retired due to his cancer in 1996 and died in 1998. Ulanowski took it hard. Family and friends said he didn’t get along as well with Krauss, who succeeded Shigley as general manager.

Krauss, who retired in June 2010, declined to comment for this story, as did every other colleague who still works for WRVO or NPR. Even those who considered Ulanowski a beloved friend said their jobs prohibited them from speaking about him.

However, Krauss did prepare an extensive written summary of Ulanowski’s personnel file in the course of firing him in 2009. The documents, submitted to the state during Ulanowski’s attempt to get his job back, indicate that Krauss and WRVO were well aware of Ulanowski’s “drinking problem” for at least 10 years before they fired him.

On becoming Ulanowski’s supervisor in 1998, John Krauss noted Ulanowski’s “poor behavior while drinking on his own time” and his “party guy reputation among the area press corps.”

Krauss wrote that he worried Ulanowski might drink too much at donor events and offend potential sponsors. He handled this by trying to limit Ulanowski’s presence at WRVO events where alcohol was served. As Ulanowski’s drinking problem worsened, Krauss wrote, he was concerned that Ulanowski was damaging WRVO’s reputation by getting drunk at award dinners and flirting with female reporters. Yet WRVO never intervened or offered him treatment.

In urging WRVO to fire Ulanowski in 2009, Krauss wrote that he had overlooked Ulanowski’s “exploits” for years because he was so valuable at his job, but finally his “irresponsible behavior” made him more of a liability than an asset to the station.

Gregory said that is a typical view of people with BPD, many of whom lose their jobs as a result of their illness. The behaviors that mark the disorder are all too often seen as “exploits” rather than symptoms, and the victims are seen as irresponsible rather than mentally ill.

“This disorder has one of the biggest stigmas because it can really tick people off,” Gregory said. “That’s one reason it’s under-diagnosed.”

“People with BPD usually lose their jobs,” Gregory added. “It’s rare that they can function well over a long period of time. Eventually it catches up with them, either the drinking or the irritability. No one may understand that they have a treatable disorder; they think it’s just misbehavior. It’s more common to get fired rather than be told to go to treatment. In general, mental illness is seen as a character weakness rather than something that requires treatment.”

Ulanowski hid his disorder, but he couldn’t hide his substance abuse. The first sign of its severity came on March 20, 2004, when he was arrested for drunk driving and marijuana possession. That Saturday night, Ulanowski was involved in a loud argument in downtown Oswego. Police were called, and an officer pulled Ulanowski over as he tried to drive away. He failed a field sobriety test and a search revealed a small amount of marijuana in his pocket. He pleaded guilty to driving while ability impaired and a traffic charge. He paid a $500 fine and his license was suspended for 90 days. Although his name appeared in the police blotter, no one seemed to notice. When he got his license back, he showed it to Krauss, and that was that.

Shelley Manley said she wondered why WRVO didn’t urge her husband to get help at that point. A few years before, the station had sent another employee to a month of inpatient alcohol rehabilitation. Krauss wrote that he expected that employee, “being a recovered alcoholic,” to “monitor Ulanowski’s behavior to be sure his problem did not interfere with work.” When contacted for this story, that employee said he never felt it was his job to monitor Ulanowski’s drinking and he would not have been comfortable doing so.

Privately, Ulanowski was “really fighting” his illness,  Cavalier said. Colleagues noticed he got tipsy early on when they met for drinks. He began to show up at awards dinners “already buzzed,” a friend said. The night he accepted his 2008 Career Achievement Award from the Syracuse Press Club, friends teased him that as guest of honor, he managed to refrain from getting drunk.

His many achievements made it easier for him to deny, and others to overlook, the extent of his problems – until his second brush with the law on Aug. 5, 2009.

After a night of drinking in Fulton, a woman he knew from the bar offered him a ride home. On the way, Fulton Police officer pulled her over for erratic driving. A search of her car revealed a marijuana pipe and small bag of marijuana under the passenger seat. The woman was charged with DWI and Ulanowski was charged with marijuana possession.

Later that day, an embarrassed Ulanowski asked his bosses for a meeting, which they held two days later. He sheepishly told them about the arrest. “He wanted us to know from him before hearing it from others,” Krauss wrote.

A few days later, CNYRadio.com ran a story headlined, “Drug Charge for WRVO News Director.” The story credited “observant CNYRadio.com readers” with spotting Ulanowski’s name in the police log.

Other local papers picked up the item. Within a few weeks, the charge was dismissed and Ulanowski’s arrest record sealed. But by then the damage was done.

The 54-year-old woman who gave Ulanowski a ride that night pleaded guilty to DWI and was sentenced to a $500 fine and a one-year conditional discharge. Her name never appeared in the papers, and she kept her job.

Ulanowski lost everything.

Upon learning of the marijuana charge, Krauss told Ulanowski he needed to look into SUNY Oswego’s “drug-free” policies. Since the incident occurred off-campus and the charge was dropped, however, that did not apply. Instead, Krauss began looking into how to fire Ulanowski.

Krauss consulted with the SUNY Research Foundation, a private agency set up to administer some $1 billion in grants to support “educational research” in the SUNY system, including funding many positions at WRVO. This made Ulanowski a Research Foundation employee.

The SUNY Research Foundation and WRVO are both “at-will employers,” meaning they can fire an employee for any reason or no reason as long as they don’t discriminate. Research Foundation officials told Krauss that Ulanowski’s age and longevity put him in a protected class, so they needed to document reasons for his termination in case he sued. So Krauss began compiling a list of “concerns” from Ulanowski’s personnel file.

The list included Ulanowski’s “drinking problem,” the publicity over his arrest and what Krauss termed Ulanowski’s “possible harassment” of female interns and employees. The Research Foundation lawyers would later use Krauss’s statement to paint Ulanowski as a sexual harasser, without ever trying to verify it.

 Krauss cited undocumented rumors to substantiate his “harassment” claims. Certain “staff” had claimed Ulanowski “behaved unprofessionally” with two female interns – by calling one from a party and hugging another – but no one investigated these claims before they went into Ulanowski’s file.

Krauss also wrote that Ulanowski did not respond well to criticism, resisted supervision of his work and had increasing mood swings — all symptoms of BPD. “The entire staff is on edge whenever Ulanowski is stressed,” Krauss wrote. “Ulanowski can start his day in a good mood, a somber mood or with an agitated angry attitude.”

Meanwhile, Ulanowski had no idea his job was in jeopardy. When he found out his charge would be dismissed in exchange for community service, he joked that “he could he do it here by working without pay,” Krauss wrote.

Krauss submitted his report to SUNY officials on Aug. 25, 2009, and Ulanowski was fired Sept. 8 with a letter that said, “Dear Chris, This letter will serve to inform you that your services are no longer needed as the News Director at WRVO.”

The letter directed him to turn in “all Research Foundation and College property” including keys and employee ID. Krauss wrote that he had alerted campus police to stand by in case of “a possible issue.”

Ulanowski was floored, family and friends said. He spent the next few weeks in shock. He quit drinking cold turkey, but being sober with too much time on his hands didn’t help, his daughters said. His chances of finding a job that paid more than his unemployment was slim, especially in a recession, but he dearly missed working.

He called Gewanter at the NYCLU and asked to volunteer.

“First, I picked my jaw up off the floor,” Gewanter said. “Then I said, ‘Come on down.’”

Gewanter was amazed someone so talented would work for free. “He was fairly frank with me, that he had personal problems and this was a transition, and he said he was thinking about becoming a paralegal,” she said.

For a few months, Ulanowski volunteered weekly and Gewanter trained him in legal casework. But she soon realized “it was not about becoming a paralegal,” she said. “It was about putting his skills to use and being able to come to a place where he felt useful and valued.”

For 27 years, Ulanowski had such a place at WRVO, and without it, he felt worthless, Gewanter said. He told her he believed the station jumped at the chance to fire him because of his high salary and mental health problems.

At Gewanter’s suggestion, he tried tried to challenge his firing. He filed a discrimination complaint with the state Division of Human Rights, claiming he was fired due to age and disability.

The SUNY Research Foundation’s law firm, Bond, Schoeneck & King, fought back. It submitted a response claiming that Ulanowski was fired for “legitimate business reasons” including “repeated and persistent incidents of inappropriate behavior including sexual harassment, intoxication at work-related events, intimidation of staff, insubordination and other conduct that significantly harmed WRVO’s reputation, staff morale and the efficient operation of the station.” It cited Krauss’s “informal and third-hand reports” as evidence.

When Ulanowski read the response in January 2010, he was crushed all over again, his daughters said. The claims it made were either greatly exaggerated or “outright lies,” he told his family, but he couldn’t afford a lawyer to prove it.

In the wake of Ulanowski’s suicide, The Post-Standard tried to confirm some of Krauss’s claims, especially the sexual harassment claims, without success. Ulanowski never was the subject of a formal sexual harassment complaint and was not cited for insubordination or intimidation.

BS&K’s response based the “sexual harassment”  accusations on Krauss’s report, which cited two student interns as having been harassed by Ulanowski: Ellen Sammon in 1998 and another interm in 2006.

Krauss wrote in May 1998 that a female co-worker overheard Ulanowski call Sammon from a staff party and urge her to join them. Ulanowski was reportedly drunk and pushy toward Sammon, Krauss wrote.

When contacted about the incident this year, Ellen Sammon Harblin said it never happened. She said Ulanowski always treated her with respect, and no one ever asked her about the “inappropriate treatment” of her recorded in his personnel file.

“It angers me to think that anyone would say Chris acted unprofessionally around me,” Sammon Harblin said. “I never felt uncomfortable around him. He was such a decent guy.”

Krauss also reported two incidents involving a 2006 intern whose name he did not recall. In April 2006, Krauss wrote that Ulanowski was seen hugging the intern in the newsroom. A month later, Krauss wrote Ulanowski up for calling her at the station on his day off.

The Post-Standard was able to track down the second intern, who asked that her name not be used. She said that Ulanowski could come off as flirtatious, but he never sexually harassed her.

During her year-long volunteer internship, the former intern said she did mostly editing and didn’t work much with Ulanowski. She said she did a feature for him toward the end of the year and he called her from his home on her last day to say goodbye.

“He was a good boss,” she said. “I didn’t deal with him that much, but he gave me good feedback and it was a fun job.”

Ulanowski’s family said the discrepancies in the information his employer supplied to the state make them suspect he did have a discrimination case. But, based on the “evidence” provided, in October 2012 the state found “no probable cause” for a discrimination complaint.

A spokeswoman for DHR said Ulanowski had 30 days to appeal the ruling if he felt it was in error. But Ulanowski couldn’t afford an appeal.

“He realized there was a big mountain ahead of him and it would cost a lot to fight it and his unemployment was about to end,” Lindsey said.

Over the next few months, as his condition worsened, Ulanowski embraced the idea that he was fatally flawed and didn’t deserve another chance.

“He became convinced that he was totally rotten and had blown his life,” Shelley said.

His doctors prescribed medication to fight his depression and, later, his psychosis, but none worked, Shelley said.

Gregory said that, too, is typical of BPD. The disorder is  resistant to medications that are useful in treating depression, bi-polar and other mental illness.

Gregory said the only treatments proven to help BPD patients  involve a combination of intensive behavior therapy and psychotherapy.

One such “evidence-based” treatment, called dialectical behavior therapy, views patients with BPD as damaged and “invalidated” by their childhood experiences and tries to teach them new strategies for coping with painful emotions.

A newer evidence-based treatment, called dynamic deconstructive psychotherapy, is being used in Syracuse by Gregory and his staff with encouraging results, he said.

This treatment is based partly on neurological studies that indicate people with BPD react to painful emotions with different, more primitive parts of the brain than “normal” adults. Strong emotions trigger the brain to soothe itself with pleasure or arousal. Gregory’s treatment trains BPD patients “to connect to their experiences and with others in more open and authentic ways,” he said.

Both treatments require at least a year or two of intensive work on the patient’s part – which gets expensive. Gregory said treatment for BPD is not usually covered by insurance because it is labeled a personality disorder rather than a mental disorder, putting it in a diagnostic category with developmental disabilities that are deemed untreatable and “not billable” to health insurance.

“This is an outdated concept,” Gregory said, “since we know that this disorder does change over time and it can be treated.”

After his firing, Ulanowski did try dialectical behavior therapy at Upstate. He was willing to do the work, but couldn’t pay for it regularly. Shelley said some of his visits were covered, but not enough, and then his insurance ran out.

In early 2011, they decided their only option was for Chris to apply for Social Security Disability Insurance, which meant admitting he was too sick to work.

“We were hoping if he went on disability, he could eventually get all the medical treatment he would need to finally be able to live a normal, un-tormented life,” Shelley said.

On May 17, a judge approved Chris’s SSDI, ruling he was mentally disabled and unable to work. That should have been good news financially, but to Chris, it was “the death blow,” Shelley said.

“It just deflated him,” she said.

Shelley wishes she tried to hospitalize Chris at that point, but she didn’t want to force him and, “the truth is, we couldn’t afford it,” she said.

Although approved for SSDI, he then had a nine-month wait for Medicare coverage. He couldn’t afford treatment or hospitalization.

Tom Herling sees the lag in health care coverage as one more thing that worked against his friend.

“You would think that as soon as the government declares you disabled, that would be the day you can get medical help,” Herling said.

With hindsight, Ulanowski’s family sees the signs he planned to end his life. For weeks before, he contacted his daughters every day, repeatedly apologizing for being a bad father.

“Every day is another reminder of how I let the family down,” he wrote in an email to Lindsey.

She tried to reassure him, saying, “Actually, you were a pretty good dad,” she said. “Now I realize he was trying to say goodbye.”

He also talked about death, but Shelley thought that was because her mother had just bought cemetery plots for all her children and their spouses.

Her mom was about to enter a nursing home and learned she could legally use some of her assets to buy her children and their spouses’ burial plots and headstones.

So last spring, Shelley and Chris picked out a plot in a local cemetary and a shared headstone. Shelley wanted a star on her side, while Chris wanted a symbol of the Grateful Dead. That’s how he ended up with a dancing bear over his grave.

Shelley said having his burial arranged must have seemed like an omen to Chris. Her mom paid for their plot on Friday, May 27, and Chris killed himself two days later.

He had been having trouble sleeping, so he took to the living room couch to prevent disturbing Shelley. That Sunday night he told her he would sleep downstairs and to take the dog up with her. Sometime after midnight, he went out to the barn, climbed up on an old tractor, looped a cord around a beam and tightened it around his neck. Then he stepped off.

He left behind many friends and colleagues who wonder what they could have done to help. Gewanter called his story “a cautionary tale for employers” dealing with a long-term employee experiencing serious problems.

“Chris was a soul in torment, who had been rocked to the base of his soul by being fired,” Gewanter said. “To some, it might have been just a job. To Chris, it was fundamental to who he was as a person.”

Because of the silence surrounding his death, even a resolution by the New York State Legislature celebrating Ulanowski’s life went unreported in the media.

State senators John DeFrancisco and Patty Ritchie — who  both knew Ulanowski — co-sponsored a resolution honoring him last June 17.

“Chris Ulanowski’s many award-winning news and public affairs reports speak volumes about how he was regarded in his profession both locally and nationally,” Ritchie wrote.

His family received a copy of the resolution in the mail last summer. It prompted Lindsey to call WRVO and ask for her father’s awards. The station said she could come and pick them up. When she unpacked the boxes, there were 65 awards.

The day after he died, Chris’s family had put a short obit in The Post-Standard and posted a message to his Facebook friends, who numbered only 52. “He did his best to withdraw,” his daughter Charity explained.

They held a graveside service June 2, 2011, and a bonfire that evening, setting fire to the huge brush pile Chris had saved for a party that never came.

Two days later, at the 2011 AP Broadcast Awards in Albany on June 4, WRVO won nine first-place awards and clinched the Steve Flanders Award, given to the radio station with the most top finishes for news stories aired during the previous calendar year.

At the dinner, Chris Carola stood up and said a few words about Ulanowski. Afterward, a lot of people thanked him, he said.

In the months since his death, Shelley has received dozens of letters from people he touched. A few said they didn’t know he had died until they learned from friends on Facebook.

Lennie Tucker of Liverpool, a longtime listener who used to book a hotel room in Oswego so she could volunteer for WRVO’s week-long Fall Friendraiser, said she still can’t fathom the loss of someone she considered “the gold standard.”

“Chris was more brilliant than anybody, the best interviewer I ever heard,” Tucker said. “He was one of a kind and he did a better job than anybody else did before or since. I am dismayed that the people at the station didn’t regard him that way.”

Tucker said she felt privileged to exchange a few emails with Ulanowski as a friend. Now, she says, “I want some way to mourn this person.”

Chris Carola said the AP Broadcaster’s Association agreed there should be a lasting public acknowledgement of Ulanowski’s accomplishments. In October 2011, the 12-member board voted to name the best news story by a college radio station the Chris Ulanowski Award. It will be given at the next AP Broadcast Awards on June 2 (2112) in Saratoga Springs, Carola said.

“Ulanowski was a mentor for hundreds of student reporters who went on to professional careers after doing award-winning work at the Oswego station,” the board wrote.

Gewanter said she personally will always remember Ulanowski as “the voice of WRVO.”

“I feel that a person’s spirit persists when they are remembered, and one thing I will say is, his voice is going to resonate so long in the minds of so many Central New Yorkers that to us, he is not gone,” she said. “We miss him.”

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EPILOGUE –  by Janet

The reason this story’s original ending was cut is not just that it was too long. It’s also because WRVO changed the ending – by intervening to stop an AP award being named for Chris Ulanowski.

The first-ever Chris Ulanowski Award for best story by a college radio station was supposed to be presented at the June 2012 Associated Press Broadcast Awards in Saratoga Springs – but WRVO made sure that didn’t happen.

When WRVO Station Manager Michael Ameigh found out about the award, he asked the AP Broadcaster’s Association Board to reconsider naming it for Ulanowski.

Ameigh reportedly claimed the station had “issues” with Ulanowski that included sexual harassment and asked them to table their vote for further discussion.

Since the AP board meets only twice a year – in the fall and on the day of its spring awards banquet – Ameigh’s request prevented the board from giving a Chris Ulanowski Award in 2012.

Ulanowski’s family and friends – who had already started calling the award the “Ulie” – were crushed to learn this tribute would be taken away from him on the one-year anniversary of his death. “I can’t help but sit here and think, ‘They’re killing him all over again,’” his daughter Charity Musielak wrote in a Facebook conversation.

My editor at The Post-Standard decided to handle this by not reporting the AP Board’s vote to name the award for Chris and see what the board would decide at its June 2 meeting.

I had already sent the unedited version of my story to Chris Carola to proofread, and he agreed to make it available to members of the AP board if necessary.

My (edited) story ran on Sat., May 26, 2012, a week before the AP Broadcast Awards. Seven days later, on Sat., June 2, 2012, Chris’s family held the First Annual Chris Ulanowski Memorial Bonfire in their backyard, and those of us gathered around it awaited the fate of the “Ulie” award, which was being decided that day. Barrie Gewanter was among the guests, and she was ready to wage a petition drive if the board didn’t name the award for Chris.

Just as they lit the fire, I got an email from Carola. “The board voted to proceed with its plans to name the award after Chris U. It won’t happen for tonight’s awards, though. Unless they change their mind, the award will be given out in Chris’ name at the 2013 banquet.”

Everyone cheered at the news, but it was a bittersweet victory because WRVO had succeeded in covering up its treatment of Chris once again, just when the story about his struggle had finally come out and sympathy for his case was high. There should have been a “Ulie” award at this year’s (2102) banquet, and I hope there will be one next year and for many years to come.

As those of us around the bonfire debated the motives for WRVO’s actions, the only one that made sense is that Michael Ameigh felt it might look bad for the station if an AP award was named for someone they fired.

My question is, how can taking an honor away from a dead man make them look any better?