Cam Tran has been indulging herself, sleeping well past her 2 a.m. alarm since leaving KITV.
The former "This Morning" weather anchor worked her last on-air shift June 2 and has been preparing to leave Hawaii for her "dream job" at the new 24-hour AccuWeather Channel on cable.
"I’m a meteorologist and (AccuWeather) is a network, so I’m going from local TV to a network-scale" operation, she said.
The new job will provide her a great deal more exposure, doing weather "for the entire mainland, not just Hawaii," she said. "I’ll be able to be in millions of homes every day doing what I love," she said.
It will be more of a challenge, as there will be more severe weather to report, "things that I wouldn’t be able to do here," Tran said.
Her flight to Pennsylvania departs Monday, and in the coming week she will learn what shift she’ll be working.
Her decision to leave the station had nothing to do with the recent announcement of KITV’s sale to California-based SJL Broadcast Management.
"I actually put in my resignation before the sale announcement," she said. "AccuWeather approached me a couple months before that."
Broadcasters in mainland markets have more words and place names derived from multiple cultural and linguistic sources than we do in Hawaii, yet Hawaii place names can be challenging for on-air people who come here from the mainland.
Tran speaks Vietnamese and Chinese in addition to English, so her learning curve with local-style language was nowhere near as steep.
"I actually picked it up really fast," she said.
Her multiethnic background also allowed her to acculturate to Hawaii rapidly after arriving here three years ago, and she found a husband along the way, local boy and award-winning video journalist Rex Von Arnswaldt.
The two were married a little more than a year ago.
"I’m not born and raised here, but my husband is," she said. "Hawaii has been home to us. … People here have so much aloha. I’m going to miss that moving to the mainland, but I couldn’t say no to this amazing opportunity."
Von Arnswaldt has racked up numerous broadcast awards during his two tenures at KITV. The first was about 20 years long, while the most recent lasted about a decade. In between, he moved to Washington state for two years for a restaurant venture undertaken with friends.
Von Arnswaldt joked that he now plans to be a puka shell tour guide, a reference to the parody song by the late Rap Reiplinger done to the tune of Glen Campbell’s "Rhinestone Cowboy."
Actually, once Von Arnswaldt wraps up at KITV by the beginning of August, he will meet Tran in Pennsylvania and begin his next career as a freelance videographer, Tran said.
"Even though we’ll be in Pennsylvania, he still can come back to Hawaii" to work on freelance projects he could not do while working full time in television, she said.
Von Arnswaldt’s broadcast meteorologist wife has forewarned him about Pennsylvania’s cold winters.
Tran debuted as the weekend weather anchor and weekday reporter in May 2012. She joined KITV from WMTW-TV in Portland, Maine, owned by KITV parent company Hearst Television.
She previously worked as an anchor and reporter in Abilene and Austin, in her home state of Texas.
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On the Net:
» getaccuweather.tv
» www.accuweather.com/en/us/united-states-weather
Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.
