SEATTLE – Charles J. Herring Jr., a pioneering television news announcer in 16 years at KING-TV, is dead at 83.
Herring, credited by news historian Feliks R. Banel of the Museum of History &Industry as the first live TV news anchor north of Los Angeles and west of Minneapolis, died Jan. 16 at Swedish Medical Center after a long battle with cancer, hospital officials confirmed.
News officials at KING said his coverage of the world’s fair in Seattle in 1962 was the nation’s first live broadcast via satellite to Europe.
Known for an authoritative voice and dapper suits, Herring made his first 15-minute live evening report on Sept. 10, 1951, later covering the test flight of the Boeing 707 prototype in 1954 and congressional hearings in 1957 on the late Teamsters union president Dave Beck of Seattle, who wound up going to prison for tax evasion.
Herring grew up on a farm near Waitsburg and was graduated cum laude as an English major in 1944 at Whitman College in Walla Walla, working his way through school as a newscaster and announcer at KUJ Radio.
After two years in the Navy, and five years at KJR Radio in Seattle, Herring went to work for KING, starting in a makeshift newsroom in a former mom-and-pop store with a sloping floor on Queen Anne Hill.
“His desk was propped up with something so that his pencils wouldn’t roll off onto the floor as he was trying to edit his news script,” Banel said.
After typing his script with two fingers on a manual typewriter, he drove to the TV studio near the south end of Lake Union, sometimes arriving minutes before airtime.
In 1967 Herring and his wife, the late Mary Bemus, purchased KAPY Radio in Port Angeles, which they ran until 1978. He then worked for Boeing as a video producer before retiring in 1987.
Other survivors include a brother, Jerry Herring of Sonora, Calif.; a sister, Carlee Lorenz, of Rolling Hills, Calif.; daughters Mary Susan Pitlick of Seattle, Pam Beil of Fox Island and Jenny Herring of Edmonds; and six grandchildren. At his request, no services are planned.
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