Welcome to Tuesday, August 7, 2012! It’s time for another look back through time
with the always popular Tuesday Timeline feature.
I’m not going to waste any time here. Let’s just get right to it. Would you like to know some of the major
events in world history that took place on August 7? Well, have a look!
1420
– Construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Flore begins in Florence, Italy
1714
– The Battle of Gangut; becomes the first important victory of the Russian Navy
1782
– George Washington orders the creation of a military award known as the “Badge
of Military Merit” to honour soldiers who have been wounded in battle...today,
the award is known at the “Purple Heart”
1789
– The United States War Department is established
1794
– George Washington invokes Militia Law of 1792 to suppress Western
Pennsylvania’s “Whiskey Rebellion”
1890
– Anna Mansdotter becomes the final woman to be executed in Sweden for the 1889
Yngsjo murder
1909
– Alice Huyler Ramsey and three of her friends became the first women to
complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York
City to San Francisco
1927
– The Peace Bridge opens between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York
1930
– The last confirmed lynching of black people in the Northern United States
take place in Marion, Indiana
1933
– Iraqi government slaughters over 3,000 Asyrians in the village of Sumail
1938
– The building of Mauthausen concentration camp begins
1944
– IBM dedicates the invention of the Harvard Mark I, the first program-controlled
calculator
1955
– Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering (which later became Sony) begins selling
the first transistor radios in Japan
1959
– The Lincoln Memorial design starts appearing on the American penny
1964
– Prometheus, the world’s oldest tree, is cut down
1965
– Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters meets up with the Hell’s Angels at Kesey’s
estate, linking the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang with the hippie movement
1970
– California judge Harold Haley is taken hostage in his own courtroom and killed
in an effort to free George Jackson from police custody
1974
– Philippe Petit performs a high wire act in New York City between the twin
towers of the World Trade Center
1978
– Jimmy Carter issues a state of emergency at Love Canal following the negligent
disposal of toxic waste there
1981
– The Washington Star ceases operation after 128 years
1985
– Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri, and Chiaki Mukai are chosen to become the first
Japanese astronauts
2007
– Barry Bonds hits his 756th home run, breaking the record held by
Hank Aaron
We also have a few celebrity birthdays to list
here. Celebrating an August 7th
birthday are Stan Freberg, Don Larsen, Tobin Bell, B.J. Thomas, Lana Cantrell,
David Rasche, Alan Page, Wayne Knight, Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden), David Duchovny,
Jacquie O’Sullivan (Bananarama), Bruno Pelletier, Harold Perrineau Jr, Marcus
Roberts, Michael Weishan, Jason Grimsley, Sydney Penny, Rachel York, Charlize
Theron, Samantha Ronson, Eric Johnson,
Tina O’Brien, Sidney Crosby, and Helen Flanagan.
For today’s look back through time, we’re going to
take a look at what ended up being the final day of life for one man.
August
7, 2005.
That was the day that ABC News lost one of their
own, and the day in which millions mourned the loss of a true professional in
the world of journalism.
Today we’re going to look at the life of
Canadian-born journalist Peter Jennings, who spent decades reporting the news
at various television and radio stations (including a stint in my own
hometown!).
Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings was born in
Toronto, Ontario, Canada on July 29, 1938.
He and his sister Sarah were born to Elizabeth and Charles
Jennings. Peter was always surrounded by
radio at an early age. After all, his
father did work for CBC Radio as a broadcaster when Peter was born.
Would you believe that Peter Jennings’ first radio
gig was in 1947 at the age of nine?
How’s that for starting early in life?
The name of the show he hosted was “Peter’s People”, and it ran on CBC
Radio every Saturday morning. The
30-minute program debuted while his father was out of the country on business,
and when Charles came back to Canada and found out what happened, he was
furious. Charles Jennings did not like
the concept of nepotism, and was outraged that the network allowed Peter to
host his own show.
Two years later, when Jennings was eleven, he
began attending school in Port Hope, Ontario, where he excelled in school
sports. When his father was transferred
to the Ottawa headquarters in the 1950s, he began attending high school in
Ottawa. But Peter didn’t exactly like
high school very much. By his own
admission, he was a lazy student who only cared about comic books and
girls. He ended up dropping out of high
school in the tenth grade. At some
point, Peter attended Carleton University, but dropped out.
Despite dropping out of school, Peter dreamed of
following in his father’s footsteps, and had the goal of becoming a famous
broadcaster. It took a bit of time for
him to get there though. At first, he
started off as a bank teller at the Royal Bank of Canada. He hoped to get transferred to the bank’s
Havana branch, but instead he ended up working at the branch in Prescott,
Ontario (current population 4,284).
Shortly after, he began working at the nearby Brockville, Ontario branch
(current population 21,870), where in between shifts at the bank, acted in
various musicals put on by the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society such as “Damn
Yankees” and “South Pacific”.
While Jennings was in Brockville, he started
working at the town’s local radio station, CFJR. He was only 21 years old. CFJR hired him to be a part of their news
team, and over the next year, Jennings covered several stories, including one
of a local train wreck which were picked up by the CBC. In 1961, Jennings left CFJR to work at
CJOH-TV in Ottawa, where he worked as an interviewer and co-producer for the
show “Vue”, and shortly after that began hosting a show called “Club Thirteen”,
a show similar to American Bandstand.
In 1964, CTV hired Jennings as the co-anchor of its national late-night newscast. During his time with CTV, Peter Jennings was thrown into several high-profile news stories. He was the first Canadian journalist to arrive in Dallas after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He also attended the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where he would meet a man by the name of Elmer Lower, who at the time was president of ABC News. Elmer offered Jennings a job with ABC to become a correspondent, but initially, Jennings turned down the offer. After three months had passed, he changed his mind, and moved to New York City to take on the job.
At the time that Jennings took on the job, ABC was
in third place behind NBC and CBS as far as news coverage went, and ABC decided
to try and add a more youthful presence to the network in hopes of attracting
younger viewers (more than likely the coveted 18-49 demographic). On February 1, 1965, Peter Jennings took over
the anchor desk at ABC News, and began hosting “Peter Jennings with the
News”. At the time, the program only ran
for 15-minutes, but Jennings ended up making history. Being only 26 years old at the time, he
became the youngest person ever to anchor a news program in the United States,
a record that has yet to be broken as of August 2012.
That’s not to say that everything transitioned
smoothly at first. Peter Jennings may
have been the youngest of the anchors, but at the time, he was also very much
inexperienced when compared to the likes of Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley,
and Chet Huntley. The viewing audience
found it hard to relate to Jennings, and some even made fun of his Canadian
accent! However, Jennings admitted that
he was out of his league at that time, and three years after anchoring the
news, he left the position to become a foreign correspondent for ABC.
This decision was beneficial in helping Peter
Jennings build up his name and his reputation.
In 1968, he established ABC’s Middle East bureau in Lebanon, the first
American news bureau in the Arab world.
Four years later, he covered his first major news story, the “Black
September” massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in
Munich, Germany. He hid with his camera
crew near the building where the Israeli athletes were being held hostage, and
ended up providing ABC with clear video of the hostage-takers. The piece was well-received, although
Jennings was criticized over referring to the hostage-takers as “guerillas” and
“commandos”.
The following year, Jennings covered the Yom
Kippur War, and in 1974, he served as chief correspondent and co-producer of a
biographical piece of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. The piece established Jennings as Sadat’s
favourite journalist, and Jennings won the first of two Peabody Awards for his
coverage.
Over the next few years, Jennings would become a
Washington correspondent, anchor a short-lived morning show, served as a
foreign anchor for “World News Tonight”, and became a father to two children,
Elizabeth and Christopher, born to him and his third wife, Kati Marton.
In 1983, Washington World News Anchor Frank
Reynolds fell ill with multiple myeloma, and was forced to leave the anchor
desk that April. Peter Jennings was
asked to take over the Washington anchor desk expecting Reynolds to return...but
sadly, Reynolds passed away in July 1983.
Three months later, Peter Jennings became the permanent sole anchor of
World News Tonight, after the show relocated to New York. Over the next few years, Jennings proved to
the world that he had learned a lot since his first stint as an anchorman back
in 1965, and the ratings for ABC News certainly reflected this. With his extended coverage of the 1986
Challenger explosion, his prompt response to the October 1989 Lorna Prieta
earthquake, and being the first of the big three news networks to report the
fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, by the beginning of the 1990s, World
News Tonight was ranked #1, beating CBS for the first time.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Jennings
continued to become a huge presence at ABC News. He garnered a lot of attention for his
marathon reporting stints, often staying on the air for 12 hours or more. Some of these stories included the Gulf War
in 1991, the millennium celebrations of 2000, and the September 11 terrorist
attacks in 2001. And Jennings received
praise from viewers in 1995 when he made the decision to backburner the
coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial to report on the unrest in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. But on the flipside,
Jennings also received criticism for what some called a “liberal bias”, as well
as his contribution to a news documentary regarding the 50th
anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Some people were so angered at what they
called a “revisionist look” at the history of the decision to drop the bomb
that they mailed bus fare to Jennings, telling him to go back to Canada.
But, Jennings persevered and rose above the
controversy, becoming an American citizen in 2003, and continued anchoring
World News Tonight.
By December 2004, however, something would happen
that marked the beginning of the end. He
was sidelined with a respiratory infection that month, and as a result, he was
unable to fly out to cover the December 26, 2004 tsunami that struck several
Asian countries. Three months later,
viewers noticed that Jennings’ voice was beginning to sound different. It wouldn’t be until April 5, 2005 that the
viewers understood why.
Peter Jennings was diagnosed with lung
cancer. He had told viewers that he
would do his best to come back to the anchor chair, but this would end up being
his final appearance. Charles Gibson and
Elizabeth Vargas would serve as temporary anchors of World News Tonight as
Jennings underwent treatment.
Sadly, on August 7, 2005, just after 11:30pm,
Peter Jennings succumbed to cancer at his home, at the age of 67. Just minutes after his death, Charles Gibson
interrupted programming to announce the sad news. Over the next few days, many in the news
industry remembered their friend and colleague.
His ABC colleagues Diane Sawyer, Charles Gibson, Ted Koppel, and Barbara
Walters all shared their memories of Jennings as did Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw,
who competed with Jennings as the anchors of CBS and NBC’s news broadcasts
respectively. Canadian anchors Kevin
Newman, Lloyd Robertson, and Peter Mansbridge offered up their condolences, as
did George W. Bush and Paul Martin.
Although Peter Jennings may be gone, his legacy
continues to live on, and his career was celebrated. He ended up winning sixteen Emmy Awards, and
two Peabody awards for his work with ABC News.
He was named Best Anchor by the Washington Journalism Review in 1988,
1989, 1990, and 1992. He was awarded the
Paul White Award in 1995 in honour of his work in journalism, and in 2004 was awarded
the Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Broadcasting.
On July 30, 2005, just eight days before he passed
away, Jennings received word that he would be inducted into the Order of
Canada, an honour that his daughter Elizabeth accepted in his honour. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg
announced that a block of West 66th Street would be renamed Peter
Jennings Way. And in January 2011,
Jennings was posthumously inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences Television Hall of Fame.
Not bad for a high school dropout, huh? But Peter Jennings proved to be much more
than that. He was a journalist and a
professional to the end, and he will forever be known as one of ABC’s finest
anchors.
And that was our look back on August 7, 2005.
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