GREEN BAY – Rachel Manek gets recognized all the time when she’s out and about in northeast Wisconsin, but maybe not as much as her “Good Day Wisconsin” co-anchor Pete Petoniak.
“He’s like a rock star,” she said. “People love their weather and they love their Pete Petoniak. ‘How’s Pete? Oh, you’re, uh (snaps her fingers in rapid succession), you’re on that show, I know you, I watch you every morning … with Pete.’”
Don’t let her fool you. As Manek celebrates 30 years at WLUK-TV (Fox 11), she’s one of the local market’s most popular personalities.
Viewers know her for 22 years alongside Petoniak, director of meteorology, on the “Good Day Wisconsin” morning show, but her career at the station has been filled with memorable adventures away from the anchor desk, too.
She once put on a metal chainmail dive suit to feed sharks while reporting from the Bahamas. She was on the set of “Melrose Place” and “Party of Five” during a media junket to Los Angeles. She had LASIK eye surgery on live TV.
For years, she was out at NEW Zoo & Adventure Park in Suamico every Wednesday for a segment with then-director Neil Anderson and animal guests. She has hosted charity events for the American Heart Association, Muscular Dystrophy Association, IndUS of the Fox Valley (she is half Indian) and others.
She spent a week in Dallas doing live segments ahead of the Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl XLV win. To her own surprise, that was her riding the 443-foot London Eye to give viewers a bird’s-eye view of the city during coverage of the Packers game in England in 2022.
“I’m braver in front of a camera than I am in regular life,” she said.
Manek, born in Chicago and raised in Appleton, has come a long ways from those early days when she would get so nervous during live shots she says her knees would literally knock.
She came to WLUK in 1994 after a year and a half in Wausau and started as a dayside reporter who also worked weekends. When the station switched from an NBC to a Fox affiliate a year or so later, she became the first reporter for its new 9 p.m. newscast.
Then one day news director Juli Buehler pulled her into her office. They had an opening on the morning show and wanted to know if she was interested.
She wasn’t.
It was a completely opposite schedule from what she was used to, but a couple of former colleagues who had gone on to morning programs in bigger markets encouraged her to think about it. Given her personality — a self-described people person — they thought she might like it.
“And they were right,” she said.
The move to mornings turned out to be the best thing that happened to her.
Rachel Manek, second from left, hosted WLUK’s “The Better Half,” a weekly statewide morning show that debuted in 2012 and ran for several seasons. It featured the wives and girlfriends of Green Bay Packers players as co-hosts. Manek is shown chatting up, from left, Courtney Finley, Lindsey Kuhn and Geeta Bishop.
It’s to bed by 8 p.m. and up at 2:45 a.m., give or take the snooze button
As the morning show’s roving reporter all those years ago, it was her job to get out in the community each day. She would be at the EAA AirVenture grounds in Oshkosh early in the morning, before the crowds showed up, to talk with pilots and campers who had slept under their planes the night before. She was at the opening of Green Bay Botanical Garden in 1996 and the first Farmers Market on Broadway in 2003, and now marvels at how much both have grown.
“I loved it. I got to go to new restaurants, check out shops, go to events and see behind the scenes,” she said. “I’ve had FOMO (fear of missing out) before there was FOMO. And now I get to know everything with this job.”
Her first big coup was getting an interview with Packers defensive end Reggie White and his wife, Sarah, at their Reggie White’s All-Pro Shop in Green Bay the morning after the Packers won the NFC championship game to go to the Super Bowl. It was Manek and national ABC juggernaut “Good Morning America” who were there.
She remembers a lot of those live segments as “a little goofy and silly.” That was partly by design, but they also taught her how to think on her feet and prepare her for what would come next: anchoring.
Manek would occasionally fill in for Petoniak’s “Good Day Wisconsin” co-anchor, Amy Hanten, when she was on vacation. When Hanten wanted to focus more on cooking segments (and eventually got her own show), Manek slid into the “Good Day Wisconsin” morning chair in 2002 and has been there ever since.
More: After 33 years at WLUK-TV, ‘Living’ host and cook Amy Hanten is leaving the station
More: After 30 years at WBAY-TV, Jeff Alexander is leaving the anchor desk but not his ‘Small Towns’ stories
As the news cycle and media industry have dramatically changed, so has the thinking about morning shows. There was a time when people dismissed them as fluff, Manek said, but now, in addition to lighter local features, they’ve also become a first source for breaking news overnight.
“Morning shows became more the go-to. You didn’t have to wait until the 5 o’clock news to get your news. You could get your news out the door as you’re getting ready to go to work and school,” Manek said. “In my opinion, morning news is where it’s at.”
It’s a balancing act to deliver difficult news stories and the excitement of the weekend Packers game alongside one another. It takes confidence to correctly pronounce names from world and national news and means slipping in a post on Facebook during commercial breaks. It’s fast-paced, challenging and a learning experience every day.
“If we didn’t like what we were doing, we wouldn’t do it. It’s not easy. It’s a lot of live,” Manek said. “You have to be ‘on’ every morning. We’re mostly all ‘on’ anyway with our personalities, but people have a bad day once in awhile, but you can’t let that show.”
Gone are the days of only being able to do live segments from within the reach of the broadcast tower in Ledgeview. They can go anywhere with a good signal now and talk to people from all over the world via Skype and Zoom. As much fun as it was to have a kiddie pool in the studio filled with postcards mailed in by viewers for the latest contest, there’s something to be said for the convenience of electronic entries.
“Good Day Wisconsin” has expanded over the decades, from 5 to 8 a.m., then 5 to 9 a.m. and now 4:30 to 9 a.m. Manek is at the studio by 3:45 a.m. for the daily meeting, which means her alarm goes off at 2:45 a.m. That’s enough time to hit the snooze button a couple of times and “jump out of bed at 3:03.”
Bedtime is 8 p.m.; asleep by 9 p.m.
“Good Day Wisconsin” co-anchor Rachel Manek grew up in Appleton and has been at WLUK since 1994. Her alarm goes off at 2:45 a.m. each weekday. She’s in studio by 3:45 a.m. and on the air at 4:30 a.m.
She feels the love for ‘Good Day Wisconsin’ out in the community
Even before she went to Valparaiso University in Indiana, Manek knew she wanted to be in broadcast journalism.
“I liked the idea of TV but I couldn’t act, and I liked to write,” she said.
What she didn’t see coming was where her career path would take her. After coming to Green Bay from short stints in Quincy, Illinois, and Wausau out of college, she envisioned where her next stops would be.
“Milwaukee, Chicago, ‘Good Morning America,’” she said. “Until I had kids and I was real happy to stay.”
She and her husband, John, a former WLUK television photographer she met while working in Wausau, are the parents of two daughters. She can rattle off a whole list of things she loves about living and raising a family in Green Bay and Wisconsin.
“The niceness. It’s comfortable. It’s growing. There were hardly any restaurants when I came to town and now look at it,” she said. “I’m a Packers fan. That helps. I love Door County. I love the lakeshore. It’s like home.”
There’s a family feel among the “Good Day Wisconsin” team, too, and Manek thinks that goes a long way in the show’s enduring popularity.
“People can tell we really like each other, and we’re not faking it,” she said. “Pete tells bad jokes, and we love that about him. (Co-anchor) Emily (Deem) cooks breakfast for me every morning. We use Amy’s kitchen. She makes me breakfast, and I do the dishes.
“We are together more than we are with our spouses a lot of times,” Manek said. “It would be hard if we didn’t like each other, I think.”
She’s grateful for the warm reception “Good Day Wisconsin” gets out in the community and on social media, a platform not always known for being a kind place.
“You can’t go anywhere without people asking about Pete. Kids love Pete, and now kids are grown up and their kids love Pete. I feel the love for ‘Good Day Wisconsin’ in the community,” she said.
“People are nice to us. There’s a lot of not-so-nice stuff said on the internet about a lot of people,” she said. “I would say we’re pretty lucky around here.”
It’s such a good gig that Manek said she feels bad for anybody who has been waiting for her chair to open up in hopes of getting the job.
“I do plan to retire at some point. Not another 30 years. In my mind, more than four,” she said. “In four years, I’ll be 60. Will the community still want to turn their TVs on and see my face in four years? I hope so.”
Manek has been at WLUK six months longer than Petoniak, who will hit his 30-year milestone next year. Does she ever remind him that she has a few months on him?
“All the time,” she says, laughing.
Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or [email protected]. Follow her on X @KendraMeinert.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: ‘Good Day Wisconsin’ anchor Rachel Manek celebrates 30 years at WLUK
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