A longtime ABC30 news anchor is retiring in June. She’s starting her own business

After close to 40 years in television news, Liz Harrison is leaving her spot at ABC30 Action News.

Harrison made the announcement in a video on social media Monday.

In the video, which was recorded without makeup but with a digital filter that gave her a black hat and sun glasses, Harrison said she wasn’t going to ABC7 in Los Angeles, as some viewers had suggested, but she would be leaving the station June 12.

“I am dropping the mic,” she said.

“I have had the most incredible career at ABC30 over the years. I started back in 1982. I looked like I was probably 12 years old,” she said.

“It’s a miracle they kept me that long.”

Aside from the eight years she left the station to raise her three children, Harrison has been a steady face on the ABC30 news desks. She has anchored almost every newscast (she can currently be seen Midday from 11 a.m. to noon and at 4 p.m.) and reported on everything from consumer products to health and medicine. In 2010, she won an Emmy Award for a report on military training for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I’m not retiring-retiring. You know me: I can’t do that,” Harrison said in the video.

For the past few years, Harrison has been studying under best-selling author and leadership coach John Maxwell and plans to start her own business, doing leadership coaching for businesses and individuals in the Fresno area.

She will also get back to “that book I’ve been working on for more than 10 years,” Harrison said Tuesday in a phone interview with The Bee. The book is a chronicle of a journalist living a personal life while in the public eye.

“I don’t hide what’s going on,” she said, whether that was her battle with breast cancer — she was forced to wear a wig while her hair grew out following chemotherapy — or her son’s run-in with law enforcement. He was arrested and later pleaded guilty to robbing three people at gunpoint in 2010.

That experience, and her experiences visiting her son in prison, was the worst of her life, “even worse than the breast cancer,” Harrison said.

Early on in her career, Harrison realized that her viewers considered her as family. She remembers being pregnant with her first son and how people would often come up and touch her stomach; how when she was pregnant with her daughter, a viewer had called the station to ask about the pregnancy, well before she had even told anyone at work.

Harrison wants to leave the news business at the top of her game, she said, and has been planning the leave for almost a year.

“I don’t want to be in this profession longer than I should,” she said.

“There is no good time to retire, but there’s a right time,” Harrison said, quoting former Fresno police chief Jerry Dyer on his own retirement.

“I believe it’s the right time for me.”

This story was originally published May 12, 2020 at 11:02 AM.