R.I.P. PETER

Wow. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. We all knew he was sick, and obviously gravely so since I can’t imagine him otherwise stopping work. Still, when I saw the news online tonight that Peter Jennings had succumbed to cancer, it still came to me as a bit of a shock.

I don’t have any direct personal experience with Jennings other than passing him while walking on Central Park West a couple times late at night — he was walking his dog. I do remember, however, watching Jennings growing-up. You see, my uncle Greg was an international correspondent for ABC News for roughly 20 years. I remember my family always getting advance warning when Greg would have a piece coming on the air, and I remember watching World News Tonight with it’s curious three anchor format — Frank Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson in Chicago and Jennings in London. My uncle was based in London with Jennings, but when Reynolds died — also from cancer — Jennings moved to New York as sole anchor and my uncle moved to Paris.

I don’t really remember my uncle telling me any stories about working with Jennings, although I’m sure he did: I’m not here to say how I heard he was sucha great guy or the opposite. But there was something about my uncle’s working for ABC that, as a kid, always made me an ABC fan. So when Battle of the Network Stars was on, I always found myself rooting for the ABC team, even if stars from shows I liked on other networks were also playing. It was kind of like how until you go to college yourself and discover your own allegiance, you root for the college(s) your parents went to. That was always why I fell on the Stanford side of the Cal-Stanford equation.

And while I would never call myself a news junkie until the advent of cable news and my arrival at UCLA, I would always turn on that 6:30 newscast with Peter Jennings. CBS Evening News with Murrow then Cronkite then Rather? Feh. I watched ABC. Tom Brokaw? Why, ABC’s got Peter Jennings?

Of course, Rather slid, and Brokaw skyrocketed, and Jennings just kept doing what he did. Ultimately, I really stopped watching any of them. Who the hell is home at 6:30 anymore?

I talked a bit about the demise of the major broadcast network newscasts back in November when Brokaw was about to leave his chair and Rather announced his pending retirement from his. At the time, I said that Jennings will probably benefit the most in the short term after Rather’s departure., but don’t expect him to stay around forever. At 66, he’s no spring chicken himself.” Still, at 67 — almost exactly twice my age — he wasn’t so old that he couldn’t have done this job for another eight-10 years, or longer, had he wanted. It’s sad and unfortuante for all of us that he didn’t have the chance.