Bill Beutel
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| Bill Beutel | |
| Born | December 12, 1930 Cleveland, Ohio |
|---|---|
| Died | March 18, 2006 (aged 75) Pinehurst, North Carolina |
Bill Beutel, born William Charles Beutel, Jr. (December 12, 1930 – March 18, 2006) was an American journalist. He was best known for working over four decades with the American Broadcasting Company, spending much of that time anchoring newscasts for WABC-TV in New York City.
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[edit] Early Life and Career
The son of a dentist, Beutel had a lifelong dream of becoming a reporter. His boyhood idol was the legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. Beutel graduated from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire after a stint in the Army and studied law at the University of Michigan Law School, though he left Michigan without obtaining his law degree. While Beutel was in law school, he wrote Murrow a letter saying, "I very much wanted to be a radio journalist." Beutel received a letter back advising him to go to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
His first radio job was in Cleveland before moving to CBS Radio in New York City in 1957.
[edit] Television career
Beutel moved to ABC on October 22, 1962 as a reporter with ABC News and as anchor at the network's New York flagship, WABC-TV. The station had just opened up its first newsroom and created a one-hour 6:00 p.m. newscast called The Big News. WABC-TV was considered late to the game behind WNBC-TV and WCBS-TV. Beutel was doing both local and network news at a mere $20,000 a year. Among the hundreds of famous personages who were interviewed by Beutel was the African American Muslim and black nationalist leader Malcolm X.
Beutel left his WABC duties for two years in April 1968 to join ABC News full time as their London bureau chief. In 1970, he got a call from Al Primo, who had taken over as news director at WABC after Beutel left. Primo had brought the Eyewitness News format, in which the reporters directly presented their stories, along with him from KYW-TV in Philadelphia. He wanted Beutel to return to New York as co-anchor alongside Roger Grimsby, who had succeeded Beutel as WABC-TV's main anchor. Primo remembered Beutel's solo anchor run in the early '60s. Since Grimsby had already established a powerful presence after just two years in New York, Primo wanted a co-anchor "who could be his own man." Beutel assured Primo he could be.
Beutel rejoined WABC-TV on September 28, 1970 as Grimsby's co-anchor on Eyewitness News. Within three months, Beutel and Grimsby became two of the most influential personalities in television news history. Together they made Eyewitness News the most talked about news program in the country. The two worked together for 16 years, most of which was spent going back and forth with WCBS-TV for first place in the New York ratings.
On January 6, 1975, Beutel was reassigned by ABC News and became the co-host (along with Stephanie Edwards) of a new morning show called AM America. This show, ABC's first attempt at a morning news program to compete with NBC's Today and CBS's combination of network news and Captain Kangaroo, lasted only eleven months on the air. AM America was replaced on November 3, 1975 by Good Morning America, originally anchored by David Hartman and Nancy Dussault. Beutel then returned to WABC-TV and Eyewitness News, though he maintained a presence on the network as the anchor of its 15-minute late newscasts on Saturday and Sunday nights through the late 1970s.
The reformed Grimsby-Beutel team kept Eyewitness News on top of the ratings through the middle 1980s, when it briefly fell to last place. Though the ratings drop was mostly associated with ABC-TV's poor primetime performance during that time, it led to Grimsby's firing in 1986. However, within a year, WABC-TV had shot back to first place and has been the ratings leader in New York ever since. After Grimsby's firing, Beutel was joined at 6 p.m. by Kaity Tong and later John Johnson, followed by a lengthy stint anchoring alone before being paired with Diana Williams in 1998. When Ernie Anastos left Eyewitness News in 1989, Beutel returned to the 11 p.m. newscast and worked with several co-anchors, including Kaity Tong, Susan Roesgen, Roz Abrams (periodically), and finally Diana Williams. Beutel was replaced at 11:00 and 6:00 in 1999 and 2001, respectively, by ABC News correspondent Bill Ritter. He spent the final two years of his career serving as a senior correspondent and occasional commentator. Beutel retired from television and ABC after 41 years on February 2003, having served as an anchor at WABC-TV for a total of 35 years, the last 31 of those continuously -- the longest run in New York television history. Bill's trademark sign off was "Good luck, and be well."
[edit] Personal life
Beutel was married four times, first to Gail Wilder (now Gail Beutel) for twenty years. His second wife was Guiding Light soap actress, Lynn Deerfield, in 1975, followed by a brief four month marriage to Cassie in 1977. In 1980, Beutel married Adair Atwell, a former lobbyist for the tobacco industry. He has four children (all from his first wife) and eight grandchildren.
He has one sister, Marylou Henley, of Iowa City, Iowa. His son, Peter, is the president of oil industry analysis firm Cameron Hanover. His daughter, Robin Gamble, works at Kraft Foods and is married to Scot Vee Gamble who works at The Progressive magazine, and lives in Madison, Wisconsin with their five children, Skye, Kier, Antigone, Montserrat and Atticus Gamble. His second daughter, Colby Beutel-Burns, lives in Chicago with her two children, and is married to Michael Burns, who works at the Chicago Field Museum, while his third daughter, Heather Fortinberry, lives in California with her son.
Beutel died on the afternoon of March 18, 2006, in his home in Pinehurst, North Carolina from complications of Lewy Body Disease.
[edit] References
- ^1 Ritter, Bill. "Remembering Bill Beutel", WABC-TV, March 19, 2006. Retrieved on 2006-03-19. Note: When Beutel was hired at WABC-TV, the news director did not like the sound of his last name, IPA: /ˈbjuːtəl/. He asked him to change the pronunciation to /bjuːˈtɛl/.
- ^2 Haley, Alex (1965). The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove, 414–415. ISBN 0-345-37671-4.
