Christopher Glenn

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Joseph Christopher Glenn (March 23, 1938 – October 17, 2006) was an American radio and television news journalist who worked in broadcasting for over 45 years and spent the final 35 years of his career at CBS, retiring in 2006 at the age of 68.

Glenn was born in New York City in 1938. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Colorado. His early years in broadcasting were spent working for the American Forces Network while he served in the US Army in 1960.

Glenn worked at various radio stations in New York, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. before joining CBS in 1971. While at CBS, Glenn worked in a variety of capacities in its news organization. He was a narrator for In the News, which was a long-running and Emmy award-winning TV news program geared for children and young people.

He served as an anchor for two of the CBS Radio Network's signature news roundups carried by affiliates in the United States - The World Tonight (now the CBS World News Roundup Late Edition) , from 1988 to 1999; and the morning CBS World News Roundup from 1999 until his retirement. Glenn's final morning broadcast occurred on 23 February 2006.

Glenn had a short-lived and little-known stint as a television news anchor, on CBS News Nightwatch, which aired from 2-6 AM weekdays from 1982 to 1984.

Glenn's best-known report came on January 28, 1986 when he anchored CBS Radio's live coverage of the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Glenn had just signed off -- after what was thought to have been a normal launch -- when the Shuttle exploded, killing the seven astronauts on board. " I had to get back on the air real fast to describe that, and had a very difficult time doing that," he recalled. Glenn and correspondent Frank Mottek (now a reporter at CBS Radio Station KNX) covered the Challenger disaster from that point.

An evangelist for space and computer technology, Glenn was among the first CBS News correspondents to use a personal computer (an Apple II). Ironically, though, Glenn continued to play sound clips in his newscasts from carts long after most of the industry had switched to computer-based playback systems.

Glenn, who suffered from liver cancer, died suddenly on October 17, 2006 in Norwalk, Connecticut. Glenn was posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in Chicago on November 4.