A look back at Kim Block's 40-year legacy in Maine

Kim Block is stepping down from her position at WGME

Kim suffered a concussion after slipping and falling on her icy driveway last January.

For more than a year, Kim’s focus has been on getting better and returning to work, but her recovery has been long and difficult and that's changing the course of her career.

[A message from CBS 13's Kim Block to you]

Here’s a loving look back at Kim’s 40-year career.

January 5, 1981 was Kim Block’s first newscast. She was barely out of college.

"Now we have a little bit of time. And since I didn't have time earlier, welcome aboard,” Bruce Berlinger said to Kim during a newscast in 1981.

The top stories would change so would her co-anchors and her hairstyles, but Kim was always Kim -- poised and polished -- warm and welcoming -- through thick and thin.

Her reporting would take her around Maine and around the world.

“You never really know what you're going to find when you walk down a street in Shanghai,” Kim said while reporting from China. She would also report from Falmouth, England.

And everywhere, people trusting her to tell their stories from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey to sailors to philanthropists to famous artists like Jamie and Andrew Wyeth.

Kim also doubled as an award-winning health reporter, covering issues from cancer to organ donation but often her very best stories involved the stories of children.

For four decades Kim has told our stories, the stories of Maine -- small moments and big events -- and often sharing the memories and lessons of those events years later.

And perhaps no one "story" tells the arc of Kim’s career better than that of part-time Mainer, President George H.W. Bush.

In 1989, she covered his inauguration, and was there on his first trip back to Kennebunkport as president.

And then long after the White House, she was still interviewing him at Walker's Point.

Then in November 2018

“People here in Kennebunkport, many are waking up to the breaking news that one of their favorite long-time summer residents [President George H.W. Bush] has died,” CBS 13 anchor Gregg Lagerquist reported.

“But the sadness in this coastal town is really being felt all around Maine,” Kim responded.

A feel for the stories of Maine -- the beginnings and endings and everything in between -- it's what has made her so special.

She’s won Emmys and Murrow awards, got inducted into the Maine Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2002, and earned countless other accolades and awards along the way, and always with a smile.

So, how can someone be so down to earth and larger than life all at the same time?

Simple when that someone is Kim Block.