Brinkley, David (10 July 1920–11 June 2003), broadcast journalist, was born David McClure Brinkley in Wilmington, North Carolina, the son of William Graham Brinkley, a railroad worker, and Mary MacDonald West. Brinkley's father died when the boy was eight, leaving him in the care of a dour, deeply religious mother. Brinkley, seeking escape through reading, spent hours at the Wilmington Public Library. He also enjoyed writing. Encouraged by his high school English teacher, Brinkley worked part‐time at Wilmington's afternoon newspaper, the ...
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David Marc
Chancellor, John (14 July 1927–12 July 1996), television reporter, anchorman, commentator, and documentarian, was born John William Chancellor and raised in Chicago, Illinois, the only child of E. M. J. Chancellor and Mary Barrett Chancellor, hoteliers. Despite comfortable middle-class circumstances and a pronounced appetite for learning, he had little patience with formal education, preferring to adventure into such blue-collar jobs as carpenter's assistant and Mississippi riverboat deckhand while still a teenager....
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Adam R. Hornbuckle
Cosell, Howard (25 March 1920–23 April 1995), radio and television sportscaster, was born Howard William Cohen in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants Isidore (or Isadore) Cohen and Nellie (maiden name unknown). Cosell’s father, an accountant at a credit clothier, moved his family to Brooklyn, New York, where Howard attended public schools. He graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School with an outstanding academic record in 1938. Cosell, who ran track and played varsity basketball, served as the sports editor of the high school newspaper. After graduating from high school, he wanted to become a newspaper reporter, but his parents persuaded him to pursue a law career instead....
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Stacey Hamilton
Dickerson, Nancy (27 January 1927–18 October 1997), television news correspondent and producer, was born Nancy Conners Hanschman in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, the daughter of Frederick R. Hanschman and Florence Conners Hanschman. Reared in the suburbs west of Milwaukee, she enrolled after high school graduation in Clarke College, an all-women's Catholic school in Dubuque, Iowa. After two years Hanschman transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where she pursued a liberal arts degree, studying English and foreign languages. She graduated in 1948....
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Grange, Red (13 June 1903–28 January 1991), football player, coach, and broadcaster, was born Harold Edward Grange in Forksville, Pennsylvania, the son of Lyle Grange, a lumber camp foreman, and Sadie Sherman. When Grange’s mother died in 1908, his father moved the family, which included Red’s older sisters and his three-year-old brother, to Wheaton, Illinois, where the elder Grange had grown up. Years later, Red, as he was nicknamed because of his auburn hair, recalled that “at first I missed Forksville terribly,” but as time passed he realized that Wheaton “offered a more civilized way of life.”...
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Robert T. Bruns
Huntley, Chet (10 December 1911–20 March 1974), broadcast journalist, was born Chester Robert Huntley in Cardwell, Montana, the son of Percy Adams “Pat” Huntley, a railroad telegrapher, and Blanche Wadine Tatham, a former schoolteacher. In 1913 his parents claimed a homestead on 960 acres of land near Saco in northern Montana. Chet’s earliest memories were of farm chores, and his early schooling was in a one-room schoolhouse built on a corner of his parents’ land, where he was taught to read by phonics (sounding out letters), a system he later advocated....
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Betty Houchin Winfield
Murrow, Edward R. (25 April 1908–27 April 1965), broadcast journalist, was born Egbert Roscoe Murrow in Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, North Carolina, the son of Roscoe Murrow, a farmer and later an engineer on a logging railroad, and Ethel Lamb, a teacher. The Murrow family soon traveled to the state of Washington, which was still thought of as a frontier, full of labor strikes and conflicts over free speech, trade unionism, and legislative reform....
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Safer, Morley (8 Nov. 1931–19 May 2016), television and print journalist, was the youngest of three children born in Toronto, Canada to Max Safer, an Austrian Jew who owned an upholstery shop and Anna Cohn Safer, a Cockney seamstress from London’s East End....
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Bruce J. Evensen
Schirra, Wally (12 Mar. 1923–3 May 2007), astronaut, aeronautical engineer, and television commentator, was born Walter Marty Schirra, Jr. in Hackensack, New Jersey to army aviator and engineer Walter Marty Schirra, Sr., who flew bombing missions over Germany in World War I, and Brooklyn-born Florence Leach Schirra, who barnstormed after the war as a wing walker in the couple’s Curtiss Jenny....
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Robert L. Gale
Sevareid, Eric (26 November 1912–09 July 1992), journalist and author, was born Arnold Eric Sevareid in Velva, North Dakota, the son of Alfred Eric Sevareid, a bank teller, and Clare Pauline Elizabeth Hougen. He enjoyed setting type at the weekly Velva Journal, owned by a friend of his father’s. When wheat-killing droughts closed many local banks, the Sevareids moved in 1925 to Minot, North Dakota, and a year later to Minneapolis, where Sevareid attended high school. He said that the only thing he learned there was how to manage the school paper. Upon his graduation in 1930 Sevareid and a friend took a 2,200-mile canoe trip from Minneapolis to York Factory on Hudson Bay. (He later wrote a book for juveniles based on this adventure, titled ...
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Stacey Hamilton
Swayze, John Cameron (1906–15 August 1995), television news anchor and product spokesman, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and grew up in nearby Atchison. After high school, Swayze, whose childhood dream was to become an actor, took a job with the Kansas City Journal-Post...
