In the 1980s and 1990s, Connie Chung was a frequent guest on my morning radio shows in Washington, DC. We had such a good time during her first appearance she was always more than happy to return. I was delighted to promote whatever she was doing in her TV career, and in return she was very informal, quite funny, and a real pleasure to talk to, regardless of what I threw at her.

Her husband, Maury Povich, was on with me quite a bit in that era, as well. At the time, he hosted “A Current Affair” (which I got a great kick out of) and then his daytime talk show (before it devolved into a pattern of daily paternity tests). Like Connie, Maury was game to talk about any topic, and more than once told her to pick up the extension so they could both opine about something in the news I was discussing.

The photo above is from 1993, when Connie had just had some new publicity photos done for her show, “Eye To Eye with Connie Chung.” I was surprised when she sent one inscribed to me and my two on-air partners (Dave Murray and Victoria Ray) at DC-101: “Always great to be on ‘Harris In The Morning.’ Thanks for asking. Love, Connie Chung, CBS News.”

I thought about all of this as I recently finished reading her autobiography, “Connie: A Memoir.” She remains a great storyteller, brutally honest about her career highs and lows, her marriage and motherhood, and what life was like when she became one of very few women working in television news at a time when the others on the air were nearly all white men.

Among my favorite anecdotes in the book is from when she was on the campaign trail in 1972 with Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. After a full day attending his rallies, she would see the guys on the bus — reporters, videographers, photographers, and campaign staffers — head for the bar. Meanwhile, she headed up to her room to start writing and preparing her reports for CBS Radio and for the network’s morning TV show. But when she’d wake up and scan the newspapers, there was often at least one scoop she knew nothing about.

She quickly figured out that those guys down in the bar were using booze to loosen lips, which led to them learning information she had no exposure to. So, Connie started hitting the hotel bar with the rest of them, and occasionally came away with scoops of her own.

At the time, she was 25 years old and the only woman in a sea of men. Not surprisingly, she got hit on a lot, including a memorable evening when one guy in particular wouldn’t stop trying to get her to go to his room with her. After enduring his obnoxious advances for over an hour, she loudly told him, “Listen, buddy, you don’t want to go to bed with me. You’ll only be horny again an hour later!”

The guy reeled back as every other man in the place applauded and gave Connie a standing ovation.

She also doesn’t hold back about how Dan Rather undercut her when she was named his co-anchor on the “CBS Evening News” in 1993. Rather’s jealousy reared up regularly — he was nice to her face but said some horrible things about her to other CBS news staffers and to the press.

When she was named to the job, Connie became only the second woman to hold that position on a network evening newscast. The first was Barbara Walters, who sat next to Harry Reasoner on ABC’s broadcast, and had also been treated terribly by her on-air partner. But Connie could claim one TV record Walters couldn’t touch.

Connie was the first Asian-American to anchor a major nightly news program in the US. That fact led to my favorite part of the book, in which she discovered that because of her presence on national television, a large number of Chinese immigrants in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s considered her such a role model they named their daughters after her.

A couple of years ago, a woman named Connie Wang researched the phenomenon, which was bigger than she had expected, and named it Generation Connie. When Ms. Wang reached out to Ms. Chung, the TV news veteran was shocked to hear about all these other women who were proud of being associated with Ms. Chung and grateful they always knew there was a Connie who had gone first.

Ms. Wang wrote a piece about this for the New York Times, which helped her track down ten Connies and had them meet in a studio where a photographer named Connie Aramaki took pictures of them — and the woman they’d been named after, who was so overjoyed at the occasion she took everyone to lunch.

I’m sure Connie regaled them with some of the stories that ended up in her book and even a few she shared with me all those years ago (including the time she told my audience that yes, she had noticed while interviewing Kevin Costner that his jeans were “packed”).