Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,030

This is the grave of Frank Reynolds.

Born in 1923 in East Chicago, Indiana, Reynolds grew up in the area and went to Wabash College. Like most young men of his generation, he fought in World War II. He was in the infantry as a staff sergeant and was very much on the front lines, earning a purple heart. He never did finish that degree.

After he was mustered out of the Army, Reynolds decided to take a stab at the radio. He got a job at a station in Gary, was good at it, and was soon involved in the burgeoning field of TV journalism. He became an anchor on WBKB in Chicago in 1949, which was a CBS station. He moved to ABC in 1963, still working out of Chicago. In 1965, ABC News offered him a job as a correspondent. Interestingly, it was a 50% pay cut to take that job, but he took it.

Again, he was very good at this sort of thing and he rose fast at the national level. By 1968, he was doing the ABC Evening News with Howard Smith as co-host. He actually turned it down in 1967, thinking the job would be boring, but took it with another offer the next year. That didn’t last super long–he was replaced by Harry Reasoner in 1970. But he didn’t take the promotion so hard as to leave the network. He went back to being a correspondent. By the late 70s, it was Reasoner and Barbara Walters. The network moved on from the two of them in 1978 and brought Reynolds back. This was now World News Tonight. He was the key anchor, though with Max Robinson working out of Chicago and Peter Jennings based in London as co-anchors. But Reynolds was the anchor at the desk that really mattered.

One of the things that made Reynolds unpopular with some people and very much with ABC ownership is that he was an unabashed liberal and this angered the people who owned TV stations, a very conservative group of people even before the Sinclair conglomerate started turning late night local TV into a far-right propaganda network. Among the people who really hated Reynolds was Spiro Agnew, who would talk openly about how much he hated Reynolds. It’s no wonder that Donald Trump can get away with this stuff today. As I’ve said many times before, there’s very little new about Donald Trump, it’s just that he combines all the horrible things. Anyway, we are very much living in Spiro Agnew’s America. Hard to find someone who I’d be more happy hating me than Agnew. Interestingly, he later became personal friends with Ronald and Nancy Reagan during the news overage of Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1976. But then this was an age when people talked to those who disagreed with them politically, for better or worse.

Not long after Reynolds became World News Tonight anchor, the Islamic Revolution happened in Iran. Reynolds really raised his profile by his coverage of the issue. The network started a night show called “America Held Hostage” that Reynolds hosted. In 1980, this became “Nightline.” Reynolds gladly handed it off to Ted Koppel because it was too much work hosting both. He would go on to get a lot of credit for his handling of the Reagan assassination attempt. He and Jim Brady were personal friends, so this was hard for him.

In 1983, Reynolds started getting sick. He was skiing and fell. He broke his leg. Not a huge deal. But a month later, he was diagnosed with hepatitis. While being treated for that, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Blood cancer is never a good thing. He died shortly after, at the age of 59.

Frank Reynolds is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other TV journalists, a mixed group at best, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Edward R. Murrow is in Worthington, Massachusetts and Chet Huntley is in Bozeman, Montana. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.