Frustrated commuters are familiar with the deep voice of Scott Eck, who reports from the skies in the WBZ NewsRadio 1030 helicopter, describing traffic snarls during rush hour every weekday morning and afternoon.
On Wednesday morning, the 45-year-old reporter signed off using a new name: Kristen Eck.
Eck’s gender transition may have surprised listeners, but it wasn’t news to family and friends. Eck picked out her new name two years ago and began the process of transitioning a year ago, and now she’s telling the world who she really is.
“All of it’s been difficult: Hiding it, feeling ashamed, not knowing how to approach it, and how to escape what I locked myself into,” Eck said in an interview. “I suppose making that decision — yeah, we’re going to do this — it is difficult, but I’m glad I did it.”
Eck becomes one of the more prominent local public figures — and the only Boston-area broadcaster, according to one local advocate — to make the change. It comes amid increasing awareness of transgender issues, prompted in part by former Olympian Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn Jenner last year.
Throughout her childhood and teenage years, Eck said, she always had “this feeling I’d been born with the wrong body, and I’d been born a girl.”
She first felt it at age 5. As the years passed and the feelings never went away, Eck grew up “thinking I was pretty much alone.”
That changed in 1995, when Eck went online and found people in similar situations. Some of them had transitioned, and Eck decided to make the change as well.
“It made me excited about the idea. You really can do this, it is possible . . . to transition, to change yourself, to essentially complete yourself to what you’re supposed to be,” said Eck.
But at that point, Eck wasn’t ready. “I put it on hold for 20 years.”
Fast-forward to February and March of 2015. Eck was looking for a new primary care physician, and ultimately chose a doctor at Fenway Health.
This time, Eck decided it was time to move forward with the transition. Over the past year, she has been undergoing hormone therapy and counseling. She also joined a support group at Fenway Health.
“I chose the name Kristen just because I liked it. It sounded right for me,” Eck said. “Little by little, my friends and family have been moving toward calling me that.”
In many ways, life is changing for Eck. The hormone therapy has caused physical changes to her body. Meanwhile, over the past year she’s been building up her wardrobe and talking with a lot of friends and family.
“You don’t realize how many people you need to say things to until you start making a list,” she said. Eck has tried to be careful when telling people, so as “not to send them into a state of shock.”
Last Thursday, she met with Peter Casey, director of news and programming for WBZ NewsRadio, and discussed her decision to come out publicly. Together they made the decision to treat it as a news story, and on Sunday Eck was interviewed by her colleague, Laurie Kirby.
On Tuesday night, Casey sent a memo, written by Eck, informing their colleagues at WBZ of the news that was about to break.
Casey said the newsroom has been very supportive. “People have stopped me in the newsroom and commented how supportive they are about it and how the station has been for Kristen,’’ Casey said.
Casey views it this way: “Yesterday, Scott was a great traffic reporter and today, Kristen is a great traffic reporter. That’s the end of the story for me, right there.”
NLGJA, The Association of LGBT Journalists, praised Eck’s decision to come out publicly, and applauded WBZ for the way the station handled it. She is the most prominent Boston-area broadcast journalist to come out publicly as being transgender, according to Matthew Wilder, a Boston-based communications and media strategist.
Eck’s longtime friend Pete Maguire said a lot of preparation went into the announcement.
“We needed to be hush-hush and calculated because she’s a public personality,” Maguire said. “You’d expect some people to be jerks,” he said, but that hasn’t been the case. “Everybody has been nothing short of supportive, they’ve been great . . . . It’s sort of like the best-case scenario.”
In 2003, a Globe reporter described Eck as a traffic reporter “who sounds like he’s wearing Brooks Brothers, but who looks more like he’s heading to a heavy metal concert, with his shoulder-length hair and dragonfly earring.”
Thirteen years later, Eck’s voice sounds the same and her personality hasn’t changed. She loves broadcasting, and yes, she still has a penchant for dragonfly jewelry.
A native of Cape Cod, Eck grew up in Barnstable Village and was the oldest of three (she has a younger sister and brother). Her father worked as an electrical engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and her mother was a private nurse. Eck’s mother passed away in 2007; her father still lives on the Cape.
“Radio is something I fell in love with when I was 4,” said Eck.
As a young child, Eck would spent hours listening to the radio, paying special attention to Boston traffic reports.
After graduating from Barnstable High in 1988, Eck enrolled at Cape Cod Community College and started working at the college radio station. By December of that year, Eck landed a job at WOCB in West Yarmouth.
Eck started as a talk-show producer, then became a news anchor, and moved up the ranks to operations manager. From there, Eck said, “My career just sort of took off.”
Eck has been at WBZ for 19 years, spending much of her time at work in the air. Every weekday morning Eck boards the WBZ ’copter at Beverly Airport and flies over the highways of Greater Boston from 6:03 to 8:30 a.m. using a camera to zoom in to see what’s causing traffic to back up.
She repeats the process for the afternoon rush from 4 to 6 p.m.
“It’s an incredible view,” said Eck.
Emily Sweeney can be reached at esweeney@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @emilysweeney.