BATON ROUGE — WBRZ is celebrating its 70th anniversary on the air with Retro Week, a look back at seven decades of covering Baton Rouge and the rest of the capital region.

Andrea Clesi, who anchored at WBRZ from 1977 to 2008, has always wanted to keep her community informed. And for 31 years, she did that.

She remembers covering education in the capital region very fondly. First, she covered the teacher strike of 1979 that shut schools down for two weeks.

“The city just stopped,” she said. “There was a lot of anxiety about what was going to happen with the schools and the teachers."

She also covered a desegregation trial in 1980.

“It involved… a remap of all the public schools in this parish, pairing and clustering the schools, bussing the students all over and it was a huge story for this community,” Clesi said. "I was a young reporter, probably 22, 23 years old. I got to cover the entire trial and I got to cover what happened as a result of the trial, which was a plan the federal judge drew up to redistrict all of the schools. It was a huge story."

Clesi said her series “Wednesday’s Child” particularly holds a special place in her heart, which worked to place foster children into loving homes.

The community she covered was also by her side for the most tragic moment of her life. In 1998, Clesi’s 18-year-old son Tony was killed in a car crash.

"Losing my child was the hardest thing I've ever gone through in my life and getting back in front of a camera after losing my child after about a four week time off was the second hardest thing,” she said.

Clesi said that the love of family and friends as well as her colleagues at WBRZ helped give her strength to tell the most important story of her life: the tragic consequences of not wearing a seat belt.

"So we started a campaign after my son's death because tragically he was not wearing a seat belt and we did a great campaign called Buckle Up For Tony,” she said. “We kinda let people know how important seat belts were and were very successful with that. I still have people come up to me and say ‘You know, I buckle up for Tony.’"

She was even recognized by President Bill Clinton for her efforts.

Now that she is retired, she said the biggest change at WBRZ is the number of leadership roles women hold at WBRZ and other newsrooms.

“After I retired from here, I went back, got my masters at LSU and I taught a class out there on LSU campus and the (Manship School of Mass Communication) was 70 percent female,” Clesi said. “So there are a lot of women interested in this industry."

Now, nearly two decades removed from WBRZ, she said she would still “like to go out and tell my stories the way I used to do.”

“But you know these days, you can do that without having to be on TV; you can do a podcast, all kinds of things,” Clesi said. “I thought about it, but I've gotten lazy and it takes a lot of work to do those things.”

Watch more of WBRZ’s celebration of 70 years of local and community-driven coverage on YouTube at the playlist below: