Joan Klein Weidman

By 1957, she had her own five-day per week "Joan Klein Show".^[2] Her half hour show included news, weather, cooking tips, interviews, and farm reports.^[3] She interviewed well-known entertainers and guests of the time including Wendy Barrie, who was in town for summer stock theater, Eddie Bracken, Cliff Arquette, and Ann B. Davis.^[2] She worked at WGAL for 13 years and on Noonday on 8 from its inception in 1961,^[4] retiring from the show before the birth of her first child.^[5]

She performed as a pianist in the Lancaster Symphony Orchestra.^[3] In 1965, she appeared as the character Mae in a local theater production of the musical The Pajama Game. She contrasted the theater experience where one needed to project their voice and keep moving on stage with working in a television studio, where one needed to speak more quickly, sit still, and stay in frame.^[6]

She married Richard K. Weidman (who was WGAL's graphic artist and art director for 41 years) in September 1958^[2] and had two children. She is related to the Shriver family through her father Frederic Shriver Klein, who was a professor at Franklin & Marshall College.^[7]

Klein died on June 25, 2019, at the Mennonite Home in Lancaster after an illness at the age of 85.^[1]