Eric Parker had been the morning co-anchor at Channel 3, WFSB, in Connecticut for a decade when he was laid off in September.

All in all, he had been at the station for 16 years.

As it did with every other industry, COVID hit WFSB’s finances hard. Budget cuts were necessary, and several people were laid off, including Parker.

The good news for the hard-working Parker — who grew up in East Lyme and lives in Old Lyme — is that he had another career to fall back on. He had a thriving law practice.

Parker, 40, says, “I always used the joke: whenever they tell me I’m done here (at WFSB), I know where to park my car. And they did. They told me I was done, and in my head, TV was over.”

After a little time away, he realized it was OK. He had been a journalist for 20 years, and now he was a lawyer.

“I had kind of made peace with it. And then, as the world goes, the phone rang,” he recalls.

It was the station’s general manager, Dana Neves. She said Channel 3 was looking at making a change with its Sunday morning show and asked if he’d be interested.

“As we were kicking around ideas for her trying to get me to come back and do it and me trying to decide if I wanted to, we sort of together came up with it,” Parker says.

“It” is the format for “CT’21,” the Sunday morning show that Parker started hosting a month ago. Unlike so many Sunday morning programs (including Channel 3’s former offering, “Face the State”) that focus almost solely on politics, “CT’21” is much more expansive in what it covers.

On one Sunday morning, for instance, Parker discussed changes to the vaccine rollout in the state; whether a Texas-like electricity grid failure could happen here; and the Travelers Championship golf tournament.

More recently, Parker spoke with a professor about the time change and why spring ahead/fall back exists. Coming up, he’ll ask a concert promoter about what the summer concert season might look like.

Parker says the idea is to cover the subjects that people are talking about.

“My thought is just talk to smart people about interesting topics,” he says. “People are sitting at home on Sunday mornings having their coffee, and that’s what they want. That’s what we do at my house on Sunday mornings — we look at the paper and we talk about the topics and talk about what’s on the news, and I think that’s what everybody’s interested in.”

Apparently, audiences agree. The response and ratings have been quite good.

Parker has been having fun and says the show “is a really neat opportunity I was not expecting.”

Getting into law

While Parker is back being a TV journalist, he is also still working full-time as an attorney. He says that he had no dreams of being a lawyer when he was younger, although he does note that he enjoyed interning as a teenager in the law offices of Jeff and Leo McNamara in Niantic.

He only got into law originally to make himself a better reporter.

“When I started at Channel 3, they made me the investigative reporter really quickly. And I was largely unprepared. I didn’t have the chops to do it. I was trying to think of ways to get better. HR put out an email about the tuition reimbursement program. I thought, ‘What if I go to law school? That will help me be a better investigative reporter,’” he says.

WFSB approved, and Parker attended the University of Connecticut School of Law at night for four years while reporting during the day.

When all his fellow law students were taking the bar exam, he decided to do the same. He passed … and then returned to working at Channel 3.

“Right when I came back was when they made me the morning anchor (in 2010),” he says. “I resisted at first because I thought, ‘I don’t want to be an anchor. I’m a reporter. I want to be out of in the field.’ (The morning anchor job) turned out to be some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.”

It also meant he had his afternoons free, but wife Mary Kate was working during those hours at Hartford Hospital, where she was cardiac surgical program coordinator. They hadn’t had their now-9-year-old son Jack yet. So, Parker says, “It was go home and screw around (in the afternoons) or maybe I could find something to do.”

A friend of a friend introduced him to Mike Romano, an attorney who had a solo practice in Rocky Hill and at the time could have used some help from another lawyer. Parker started going in one day a week, then two days, then three. He eventually moved to full-time at the law office and switched to part-time at Channel 3. The practice eventually became Romano-Parker, and now, with Romano semi-retired, Parker is running the firm.

“Sometimes the universe has a plan,” Parker says.

Parker says the careers of a journalist and an attorney are very complementary.

“If you do journalism right, you go get the facts, and the facts are the facts. You just lay them out there,” he says. “When you’re a lawyer, you take the facts, you discard the ones that are bad for your client or you figure out a way to spin them, and you just want to tell your story for your client. So it’s a totally opposite way of looking at the world, and that was always part of why I loved having the two careers because they were such different ways of using my brain.”

Parker leaves his law office for a bit during the day on Thursdays to tape “CT’21.”

“It’s funny. It’s 10 minutes away from the station, so I jump in my car, I roll over there, put on makeup, I go on TV, I wipe the makeup off and go back to my law (office),” he says.

No longer up at 3 a.m.

Although he’s busy, his work week now is much better than it was when he was the morning anchor.

“I used to get up at 3 a.m. to be in at 4 a.m. many days, and I was still in my law office at 5:30 or 6,” he says. “My days of doing that were numbered no matter what. You can’t sustain that. Now, we tape on Thursdays, and it airs on Sundays. So I have to be there a couple hours on Thursday, and we have some planning calls during the week, but for the most part, the obligation for me is low.”

Parker tries to spend about an hour researching each of the subjects of the three “CT’21” segments for a given show.

“They don’t give me questions, there are no questions on the teleprompter. I just ask whatever I want,” he says. “Part of being able to do that is you’d better be prepared because if the interview subject says something you’ve never heard of, you’re in big trouble.”

An idyllic childhood

Parker says that East Lyme was a wonderful place to have been raised.

“I’m so lucky to have grown up there and gone to those schools,” says Parker, who is the son of Stephen and Anna Parker. “It was like a magical Americana childhood. I didn’t have a worry in the world.”

He played baseball (he’s still a huge baseball fan, with an allegiance to the Mets) and rowed on the high school crew team. English and history were his favorite subjects. He was editor of the East Lyme High School newspaper. He was senate president his senior year.

He graduated in 1998. And his senior-year superlative? “Most Likely to Change the World.”

TV news was something that fascinated Parker from a young age. His mother still has a piece of paper from his elementary school years, when he wrote that he wanted to work for Channel 3 when he grew up.

“I was always a news kid. I loved watching the local news, even when I was little,” he says.

Parker’s first vivid memories include the Challenger explosion and watching Dan Rather report on the tragedy on CBS.

“I’ve always liked journalism and liked the news. I’ve always been curious. I’ve always wanted to know about the world around me,” he says. “I’ve always been a storyteller. If people are over at the house or if I’m out with friends at the bar, I’m the one telling the stories. Whether I was talking to 40,000 households on Channel 3 or five people at my kitchen table, that’s always been what I did.”

Parker went to college for broadcast journalism, earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in 2001. He worked at NBC News in Washington, D.C., first as a production assistant and eventually as assignment desk editor and field producer.

He moved on to Dover, Delaware, where he worked as a reporter. After a couple of years there, he nabbed a job reporting at WFSB.

Lessons from umpiring

Discussing his approach to asking questions on “CT’21,” Parker references his time as an umpire. Starting when he was a teen, Parker made money by umpiring youth baseball games. (His friend’s father was the head of umpiring in Salem.) Parker continued umpiring in Baltimore when he was a student at the University of Maryland. Even during his first few years at Channel 3, he was umpiring around here.

One thing he learned: You don’t want the umpire to be remembered. In other words, do your job well and don’t blow any calls that will be what parents talk about after the game.

The same goes for “CT’21,” Parker says, in that he doesn’t want people talking about him.

“The less they talk about what I said and what I did, the better. … You want them to be talking about what the interview subject said,” he says. 

To watch

What: "CT'21"

Hosted by: Eric Parker

When: 8:30 a.m. Sundays

Where: Channel 3, WFSB