Reporting live from the mouth of a dinosaur at African Safari Wildlife Park in Port Clinton, hanging out in the escape rooms of Trapped Toledo, or sharing a shake with Grimace for the McDonald’s mascot’s birthday, Ethan Watts can usually be found all over northwest Ohio.
Toledo TV viewers may have missed the morning antics and local reporting of the 13abc multimedia journalist, but he’s back on the air now after a 13-month deployment with the Ohio Army National Guard.
Mr. Watts, 24, is a broadcast journalist. But before he started working in television first in Bowling Green and then in Toledo, he was a military man. He enlisted in the National Guard at just 17 years old.
“I grew up in a pretty big family, four kids, two parents,” he said. “We had more than some, but not a lot. [When I was] about 14 years old, our parents sat us down and said ‘You’re on your own for college.’”
He and his siblings got jobs, he said. “So I’ve always worked.”
He was so young when he enlisted that he said his parents had to come with him to sign a waiver attesting it was OK with them for him to join up.