By: Mary Lyon

Funny thing about these anchormen. They’re almost like national dads. They’re old enough to have that older-than-you gravitas, and they deal in many serious things. Since they’re on TV every evening, usually joining your family at dinner, they take on this almost super-human, unflappable aura. They speak to you with a reassurance and overriding wisdom that somehow, it’s just all gonna be okay, even if they’re telling you about some exceedingly dismal and distressing things. They ALWAYS look good, whether it’s under those hot studio lights or out in the middle of a hurricane. Peter Jennings, for one, ALWAYS looked splendid in that foreign-correspondent trench coat.

Peter Jennings is gone. He’s the first of the “Big Three” to leave with this kind of finality, since we still have Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw around to weigh in from time to time. We even still have the venerable Uncle Walter to turn to. For decades, America’s TV Generation has huddled in front of the tube as though by a national camp fire, hearing the stories both engrossing and ghoulish. No matter how confusing, perturbing, or disturbing surrounding events may have grown, the elder of the group, the dad, the camp counselor, the Scoutmaster, always presided, offering the strong persona to look to for guidance – and that longed-for reassurance. When Cronkite said “…and that’s the way it is” in his nightly signoff, we all trusted that there just really wasn’t anything more to know about for that day.

I grew up a Huntley-Brinkley kid. We watched NBC News out of habit at my house, where every dinner set at table in front of the family room TV had Chet and David providing the subjects of the conversation, while my mother talked back to the screen throughout the newscast and even across the commercial breaks. The folks on that newscast were our family dinner guests every night.

The news of Jennings’ death of lung cancer shortly after his 67th birthday brought a flood of testimonials and much airtime given over to his life and accomplishments that, I suspect, might strike some as excessive. Hey, this was only an anchoman. A news guy. One of many attractive middle-aged men on television catching us up on the stuff that happened that day. Why so much attention? I mean, this was just a photogenic guy who’d held a great job of high visibility and princely paycheck. What’s the big deal?

I don’t have any problem with the big deal that was made of Peter Jennings’ passing. He deserves the attention. For far too long, he labored in the vineyard, the guy who was just always there, but somehow not kicking up the noisy fuss of the pizzazz people like Diane Sawyer, the controversial and edgy lightening rod Rather, Brokaw with all his sonorous self-anointed expertise on the World War Two era, the trusted and avuncular Cronkite, the wry Brinkley, the bland Roger Mudd, that guy with the suspenders on CNN, the first prominent national black anchor – the late Max Robinson, the fiery Frank Reynolds, and that odd-couple of Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner – the Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs of TV news. They’d get all the headlines and make all the fuss. Peter Jennings would just be back there, hunkered down, working, Old Reliable. It wasn’t until his ratings started speaking for him that he might even be mentioned first in the troika that included Rather and Brokaw. More often than not, he’d be listed third. And he wasn’t even a native like those other two were – he was Canadian – SHEESH! But there was something comforting, trusted, and reliable about Peter Jennings. When Walter Cronkite stepped down, it eventually became Peter Jennings we could turn to for a cool, objective assessment – AND the sense that it would all somehow be okay.

Our national news anchors are important to us. Just as you’ll always remember where you were when you heard that Kennedy’d been shot, or John Lennon had died, or the Challenger had exploded, or the Twin Towers were rammed, you usually also remember with whom you shared that experience. You’d seen it on Cronkite. You got it from Brokaw. You learned all the background about the hostages in Iran from Koppel. You kept the vigil all weekend with Sander Vanokur, John Chancellor, Frank McGee, and Chet and David while JFK’s coffin rolled slowly down the grand boulevard toward Arlington Cemetery. You were transfixed and horrified, with Aaron Brown, as the towers crumbled in the background just over his shoulder. Kind of like “Buddy Day” at my kids’ elementary school. The older classes were paired off with the littler ones, and every kid in the lower grades had some honorary “big brother” or “big sister” to sit with and talk to. Any of these huge, history-making events, that we as American news junkies, have shared around our national campfire, came with a buddy. We sat with Dan, Tom, Peter, Ted, or one of the others, and hoped to be able to process and make sense of it. A televised buddy system – almost as though you got to sit with your big brother who’d been starting high school when you were born. And even when you had to put up with the histrionics of someone like Dan Rather, who more often than not didn’t merely cover the story but WAS the story, it was still helpful to share his company. It was helpful, beyond words, to be sitting through it with some wise elder, and not have to deal with it alone.

I always had a soft spot in my heart for Peter Jennings because he was one of those rare public figures who earned his own redemption. In 1965, at the tender age of 26, he was picked as the ABC Evening News anchorman, only to be “invited” to step aside a couple of years later because he needed more seasoning. He wasn’t a ratings champ back then, and was dismissed as just another pretty news face. So he hit the road and earned his chops as a reporter covering all manner of international stories, won some prestigious awards, and gained that mysterious seasoning. Best of all, after putting in all that time and effort, he actually got back into the anchor chair again. You don’t see that too often. I always found it encouraging and – there’s that word again – reassuring, to know that it does happen. There IS life, AND triumph, after you’re dismissed/demoted/kicked sideways. It happened to him. He got a second chance. That was as reassuring as any smooth, steady intonements from any news anchor. It gave us hope.

Peter Jennings had grace under fire in many respects. Not only could he handle any calamity effortlessly and commandingly on the air, he could maintain his composure when somebody’d yanked the rug out from under him. It was mostly with Jennings that I shared the nail-biting hours of that infamous “slow-speed freeway chase from the gravesite of Nicole Brown Simpson up the freeway across two counties to O.J.’s mansion. I was still at the AP at that time, in studio, waiting for a satellite window to feed my off-the-subject reports on Hollywood for the next day, when my colleague was busy with multiple live updates every ten minutes or so. At every work station in the L.A. bureau, the TV monitors were on and blaring. Mine in the broadcast booth had Peter Jennings on most of the time. After Al Cowlings had pulled the white Bronco into the driveway and nobody opened the doors and came out, the nation – and even much of the world – watched nervously and waited. Would Simpson come out of there feisty and rebellious? Would he slump in pathos, collapsing into custody? Would he blow his brains out with that handgun all the commentators repeatedly reminded that he was carrying?

While the minutes dragged on, Peter Jennings tap-danced with his on-air colleague and sports specialist Al Michaels. One of the producers behind the scenes wanted to put a call through – someone claiming to be an eyewitness, at that scene, with a unique, close-up perspective on what the rest of us could only see from the news choppers hovering overhead. The caller was put through to Jennings. He drawled on, describing the scene from his viewpoint, how he could see O.J. and see that O.J. was scared. Jennings did a brief Q-and-A with the caller and then wrapped it up. As the caller bade farewell, he added – “and baba-booey to y’all.” Jennings didn’t get it, but Al Michaels did, instantly recognizing one of the signature buzz words of radio mad dog Howard Stern’s rowdy morning show. Sheepishly, Michaels interjected to his partner – “um, Peter, we have reason to believe that the caller who was just on with us was – er – not for real.” Jennings was unperturbed. Even though he’d just been had by some wiseguy prankster on national television, Jennings steered around and past it like a seasoned Formula One driver. Didn’t bat an eyelash. Simply glided on with the show. If you hadn’t understood the subtext yourself, or you weren’t a Howard Stern listener, you’d never have suspected anything had ever been amiss. That’s called professionalism. It’s also called Peter Jennings. Any DJ or announcer who’s been mooned on the other side of the on-air booth windows, or had his/her copy set on fire while they were trying to read it, live, had to have mentally cast a vote for sainthood for Peter Jennings at that moment. Having been subjected to those same shenanigans myself, I certainly did. And, again, it brought a little bit of reassurance to a nutjob of a night – that a tiny spark of life-goes-on humanity still existed while we were otherwise paralyzed watching the O.J. soap opera play out.

I’ll always remember Peter Jennings fondly for that, also. I was one of his many younger “buddies” on the big breaking news Buddy Days.” I tried to study his expertise and emulate his panache. Yes, I loved Rather and Brokaw, too, but Jennings was somehow in a class by himself. We were reassured by guys like him, when the world seemed to be falling apart all around us. And when it does, many times again in the days ahead, we’ll remember when he sat next to us around the national campfire, and wish he was still there.

Mary Lyon spent the first 25 years of her adult life as a broadcast journalist, at Los Angeles radio stations KRTH-FM, KFWB-AM, KHJ-AM and KLOS-FM, the NBC, ABC, and RKO Radio Networks, plus KTLA-TV. She retired from day-to-day broadcasting in 1996, after covering Hollywood for nine years in radio, TV, and print, for the Associated Press. She wrote and illustrated "The Frazzled Working Woman's Practical Guide to Motherhood," and is presently at work on a new craft book for kids and friends. A lifelong Democrat who began her political involvement in the Student Coalition for Humphrey-Muskie, and Tom Bradley's first L.A. Mayoral campaign, Mary currently is a weekly columnist for www.democrats.us - from the Left.