Sylvia and Jon met at the Cook County Jail in Chicago, August 13th, 1992. International drug dealer Ergodan Kurap had just escaped from the maximum security cell block. 

Working as reporters for competing television news operations, Jon and Sylvia were sent to find out exactly what happened. 

Today, neither remembers much about the escape, other than that Kurap got out disguised as a janitor or laundryman. After their stories were filed and their live shots had beamed into homes across Chicagoland, Jon and Sylvia met. They looked into each others' eyes, and never saw the world the same way again. 

They call Pine, Arizona, USA, their home base these days. You can safely assume they're off galavanting somewhere else on the planet, but they do check their e-mail if the local natives are friendly and let them use their computer. Contact them at jonsylvia@duncanson.com

SYLVIA  

Two days before she left Chicago television in August 1997, Sylvia got a call from an assistant to Tom Brokaw at NBC News in New York. Brokaw wanted to include a profile of Sylvia in a book he was writing about the future faces of television news. "Sorry, I just quit television news", she said. She then put on her beat-up clothes and headed to Belmont Harbor to varnish the boat. 

Sylvia spent five years working as a television journalist in Chicago. She anchored the weekend news shows at Fox, as well as reported news stories on the streets in and around the city. Prior to that, she worked at both WBBM-TV, the CBS-owned station, and WMAQ-TV, the NBC-owned station. 

She began her journalism career in Washington, D.C. as an associate producer at WRC, the NBC-owned station in the nation's capital. Sylvia, however, wanted to be a reporter. So she, like most young reporters, started at a small station in a small market, getting her first chance in El Paso, Texas. Soon she moved on to a reporting job in Dallas. After two years there, she headed for Chicago. 

Sylvia speaks Spanish fluently. She has never met a stray animal she didn't want to bring home. 

JON

While not as often quoted as, say, "give me liberty or give me death", Jon has attempted to ride the above statement to fame and fortune far longer than is reasonably sensible or, truth be told, possible. With that statement, made to a Rolling Stone reporter shortly before his arrest on felony conspiricy charges in 1981 as a Greenpeace campaign coordinator, Jon clawed his way another rung up the ladder to minor media immortality.

After that arrest and before the charges were cleared, he fled to Paris, where he starved, played his saxophone in the Metro for centimes, and made a television commercial for Cody perfume walking arm-and-arm through the Arc de Triumph with Sophia Loren. Yes, she smelled damned good.

Most recently after spending years in television news purgatory Jon lived six years in Chicago as a reporter and news anchor for the CBS owned WBBM-TV and Fox owned WFLD-TV. In the early years there was not a single murder crime scene he did not witness. He also reported on the burning of many buildings. As a minor aside, he won three local Emmy's (one in San Francisco) for reporting of several trips covering the wars in Bosnia and Croatia . Best of all, he met Sylvia on a story at Cook County Jail.

Breaking into the news business in 1983, Jon went to Mexico City on his own dime with a couple of cameras and a poor resume, hoping to cover the wars consuming Central America. A few hours after arriving United Press International sent him to Honduras to helicopter around the region with then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Time magazine later sent him into the jungles of Nicaragua to follow and photograph "Comandante Zero", Eden Pastora.

Ultimately, bank account and spirit broken, dysentery, parasites, and giardia having run rough shod over his diminishing frame, Jon sold himself out to television to make a living.

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Design and Color by Louis Jaime. Illustrations by Louis Hinkhouse.