Post by John Quincy on Dec 5, 2008 17:18:27 GMT -5
Doris Hennessy made radio history in Louisville, working at both WGRC and WHAS. At WGRC she read the morning shift news and hosted a variety show under the on-air name of "Cherry." When she began rading the midday news from WGRC for the Mutual Radio Network, she became the first female network news anchor.
National television news correspondent (ABC, CBS, syndicated), midday weekday news anchor (Mutual Radio Network, 1942-44, from Louisville, KY member station)
Born, Louisville, KY;
Resident, St. Petersburg/Tampa, FL – Houston,/Dallas, TX – Los Angeles, Orange County, Loma Linda, CA – Colorado Springs, CO
Journalist, Louisville (KY) radio stations WHAS, WGRC and Courier-Journal, Los Angeles (CA) Herald-Examiner and KABC-TV, KCBS-TV, Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise, Santa Ana (CA) Orange County Register, Orange (CA) Orange City News, Burbank (CA) The Senior Report
First Woman Broadcast News Anchor Began Career in WWII
BELOVED HOST OF TV’S “SENIOR REPORT WITH DORIS WINKLER” DIES IN COLORADO
Doris Hennessy Winckler, who as on-air host of “The Senior Report with Doris Winkler (cq)” became a beloved television news source on aging issues in millions of American, Canadian, and Mexican homes between 1983 and 2000, died Dec. 4, 2008, in Colorado Springs, Co. She was 87.
The cause of death, according to the family, was related to complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mrs. Winckler, originally of Louisville, Kentucky, once said she was a “resident of every town in the country,” but lived most of her life in Southern California. She enjoyed the unique distinction of beginning her career in journalism as the first female network news anchor during World War II when she broadcast the noon news for the Mutual Radio Network from radio station WGRC.
At age 62 Mrs. Winckler started a new broadcasting career in television news at KABC-TV in Los Angeles as the station’s “senior news correspondent.” Her relatively unusual family name spelling was altered to “Winkler” on air, without the letter “c,” she said, because neither most viewers who wrote her or the television station’s payroll department could spell the name right.
She soon was airing her program nationwide as the nation’s oldest, and most successful, news reporter about topics affecting older persons and their families. Her producer-director and marketing chief when she began the syndicated version of “The Senior Report” was her oldest son, Lange Winckler. Her business partner in operating the program was her late husband, Jack Winckler, who died in 1993. Eventually, Doris involved her only daughter, Dori Lundgren, Ms. Lundgren’s daughter Marnie, and eventually youngest son Joe in producing the long-lived show. Although not all of Doris Winckler’s seven children were employed by the program, they all were involved in its production and development.
When the program reached more than 70 major U.S., Canadian and northern Mexico markets, “The Senior Report” became the most successful syndicated news program of its kind in the history of television. When aired over cable and satellite “super stations” the program reached virtually every television audience of North America. Typically the show ran three times a week during evening news broadcasts.
Doris Winckler was born Doris Ann Hennessy in Louisville, KY, in 1921. The third of six children of John M. Hennessy and Irene Schmitt Hennessy, Doris grew up in a privileged environment that endured through the Great Depression. However, she early imbibed lessons of equality and humility from her parents.
Her father, a successful insurance and real estate broker, was also a prominent progressive Democratic Party leader who served as Jefferson County court clerk and later chairman of the party for Kentucky. As a result, one of Doris’ earliest journalistic scoops was an interview with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the president’s private car during a whistle-stop campaign tour of the country during the 1936 election campaign. She was then a high school junior at Sacred Heart Academy in Louisville.
As a high school student Doris won an essay contest that gave her a 13-week contract as an on-air personality with radio station WHAS in Louisville. This experience, which included spending time in the broadcast studio with future character actor and comedian Foster Brooks, provided the essential experience she needed when Doris landed a full-time slot in radio in 1942. At the same time, the ambitious young woman, eager to claim her own identity within a competitive family, had wrangled a slot as a freelance feature writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal Sunday rotogravure edition.
Almost the first story Doris got into print at the newspaper was a probing look at poverty-stricken factory workers, most Black, who inhabited a temporary camp across the Ohio River in New Albany, Illinois. She documented the struggles of rural people who had been drawn to the area by a boom in manufacturing occasioned by the beginning World War II in Europe. The article reflected her lifelong interest in social justice and equality – an issue also championed by her father, who in the latter 1940’s was the first Catholic to receive the Brotherhood Award from the International Conference of Christians and Jews.
World War II began on Doris’ 18th birthday. Although Hitler’s Nazis had invaded Poland on September 1, the war began on Sept. 3 when the British and French ultimatums for Germany to withdraw expired. (Coincidentally, WWII ended on her birthday, Sept. 3, 1945, when Japan signed its surrender on the USS Missouri.) At the time, the event made little impression, but she soon saw things differently.
Although enrolled at Nazareth College in Louisville, Doris also persisted in earning her own way. In 1940 she was hired at the Louisville factory for Reynolds Metals. Years later she recalled the shock she got on her first day on the job as a public relations staffer. “I thought they were making aluminum foil,” she said, “but then the plant manager took me to the catwalk looking over the factory floor. They were making rifles! That’s when I understood the war was very important, and that soon America would have to be involved.”
The lesson became more personal later in the year, after the United States reinstated the draft. Her elder brother John M. “Jack” Hennessy, Jr., decided to enlist in the Army rather than wait to be called up. Extremely close to Jack, Doris was terrified of what might happen to the new Notre Dame graduate, but even more distressed about the way her father took the news. “Dad went into the downstairs bathroom,” she said in an interview in the late 1990’s, “and didn’t come out for a long time. I think it was the only time in my life I knew Father had been crying.”
Doris’ fears for her brother were justified. He was killed when his jeep ran over a land mine on July 14, 1944, while Jack was enroute to a forward artillery observation post outside of Villa Magna, a tiny wine country village north of Volturno, Italy. Doris got the news early on the morning of her parent’s wedding anniversary in August, while preparing to read the day’s news on the radio.
She left the station, went home, and burned her brother’s wartime letters to her in the back yard, because the letters had said he was soon to leave the combat theater to become a career Army lawyer based in Washington, D.C. She didn’t want her family to know that not only had Jack died so close to being in safety, but also that he was not planning to come home eventually to take over the family business.
(In 1999, on her only voyage outside North America, Doris visited her brother’s grave at the American Cemetery and Memorial just south of Florence, Italy. Accompanied by her daughter, Doris was unable to pass through airports in the U.S., Holland or Italy without running into people who recognized her and thanked her for the helpful information she delivered on air. The trip itself was both traumatic and cathartic for Mrs. Winckler.)
At the end of 1944, Doris eloped with Jack Winckler. Jack was a Canadian serving in the U.S. Merchant Marine. The two met at a soda fountain in Newport News, Virginia, while she was wrapping up a previously-boring vacation and he was on shore leave while his ship was repaired, provisioned and loaded for a voyage to Europe. He called upon her several times when back ashore between voyages, and on December 30, 1944, at the urging of friends in New York City, the two took a train to Hartford, Connecticut to get married.
The couple remained together until Jack’s death only 18 months before their 50th wedding anniversary. After initially settling after the war in Louisville, the family moved in 1951 to Florida to pursue business opportunities, settling in St. Petersburg. Later they relocated again on business imperatives to Houston, Texas, and then arrived in Los Angeles in 1953.
Apart from a few years on job assignments in Dallas, Texas, and then again in Louisville, the Wincklers remained in Los Angeles and Orange Counties until 2000. Doris wrote for newspapers in Dallas and Houston, worked as a proofreader and editor of the Los Angeles Herald-Express, the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the Orange Country Register. She then founded a public relations and advertising agency with husband Jack, until landing the on-air spot with KABC-TV in 1983.
Widely-honored for her groundbreaking work in covering issues affecting senior citizens, Mrs. Winckler received several awards from the State of California, the Los Angeles City Council and Mayor, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, regional and state organizations representing community volunteer programs and senior citizens, and various news industry organizations. She often remarked on what she felt was her greatest accolade, however, the failure of several attempts by the American Association of Retired People to put an on-air personality into the news in competition with her.
In 2000 at age 79, Doris retired from on-air work and moved to Colorado Springs. She moved in 2004 to Tampa, Florida, and then returned to Colorado to stay at the Veterans Hospital in Pueblo in late 2007. She had transferred less than a month ago to a private facility in Colorado Springs when she died.
Doris Winckler is survived by her brother, Jim Hennessy, of Louisville, KY; and her children, Lange, of Tampa, Florida; Terry, of Alameda, California; Ron, of Maui, Hawaii; Dori Lundgren, of Colorado Springs, Colorado; Mike, of Colorado Springs; Robert, of Indianapolis, Indiana; and Joe, of Sacramento, California. She is also survived by 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Condolences should be directed to Mountain View Mortuary, 2350 Montebello Square Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80918, (719) 590-8922. Services are to be held Tuesday (Dec. 9).
National television news correspondent (ABC, CBS, syndicated), midday weekday news anchor (Mutual Radio Network, 1942-44, from Louisville, KY member station)
Born, Louisville, KY;
Resident, St. Petersburg/Tampa, FL – Houston,/Dallas, TX – Los Angeles, Orange County, Loma Linda, CA – Colorado Springs, CO
Journalist, Louisville (KY) radio stations WHAS, WGRC and Courier-Journal, Los Angeles (CA) Herald-Examiner and KABC-TV, KCBS-TV, Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise, Santa Ana (CA) Orange County Register, Orange (CA) Orange City News, Burbank (CA) The Senior Report
First Woman Broadcast News Anchor Began Career in WWII
BELOVED HOST OF TV’S “SENIOR REPORT WITH DORIS WINKLER” DIES IN COLORADO
Doris Hennessy Winckler, who as on-air host of “The Senior Report with Doris Winkler (cq)” became a beloved television news source on aging issues in millions of American, Canadian, and Mexican homes between 1983 and 2000, died Dec. 4, 2008, in Colorado Springs, Co. She was 87.
The cause of death, according to the family, was related to complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mrs. Winckler, originally of Louisville, Kentucky, once said she was a “resident of every town in the country,” but lived most of her life in Southern California. She enjoyed the unique distinction of beginning her career in journalism as the first female network news anchor during World War II when she broadcast the noon news for the Mutual Radio Network from radio station WGRC.
At age 62 Mrs. Winckler started a new broadcasting career in television news at KABC-TV in Los Angeles as the station’s “senior news correspondent.” Her relatively unusual family name spelling was altered to “Winkler” on air, without the letter “c,” she said, because neither most viewers who wrote her or the television station’s payroll department could spell the name right.
She soon was airing her program nationwide as the nation’s oldest, and most successful, news reporter about topics affecting older persons and their families. Her producer-director and marketing chief when she began the syndicated version of “The Senior Report” was her oldest son, Lange Winckler. Her business partner in operating the program was her late husband, Jack Winckler, who died in 1993. Eventually, Doris involved her only daughter, Dori Lundgren, Ms. Lundgren’s daughter Marnie, and eventually youngest son Joe in producing the long-lived show. Although not all of Doris Winckler’s seven children were employed by the program, they all were involved in its production and development.
When the program reached more than 70 major U.S., Canadian and northern Mexico markets, “The Senior Report” became the most successful syndicated news program of its kind in the history of television. When aired over cable and satellite “super stations” the program reached virtually every television audience of North America. Typically the show ran three times a week during evening news broadcasts.
Doris Winckler was born Doris Ann Hennessy in Louisville, KY, in 1921. The third of six children of John M. Hennessy and Irene Schmitt Hennessy, Doris grew up in a privileged environment that endured through the Great Depression. However, she early imbibed lessons of equality and humility from her parents.
Her father, a successful insurance and real estate broker, was also a prominent progressive Democratic Party leader who served as Jefferson County court clerk and later chairman of the party for Kentucky. As a result, one of Doris’ earliest journalistic scoops was an interview with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the president’s private car during a whistle-stop campaign tour of the country during the 1936 election campaign. She was then a high school junior at Sacred Heart Academy in Louisville.
As a high school student Doris won an essay contest that gave her a 13-week contract as an on-air personality with radio station WHAS in Louisville. This experience, which included spending time in the broadcast studio with future character actor and comedian Foster Brooks, provided the essential experience she needed when Doris landed a full-time slot in radio in 1942. At the same time, the ambitious young woman, eager to claim her own identity within a competitive family, had wrangled a slot as a freelance feature writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal Sunday rotogravure edition.
Almost the first story Doris got into print at the newspaper was a probing look at poverty-stricken factory workers, most Black, who inhabited a temporary camp across the Ohio River in New Albany, Illinois. She documented the struggles of rural people who had been drawn to the area by a boom in manufacturing occasioned by the beginning World War II in Europe. The article reflected her lifelong interest in social justice and equality – an issue also championed by her father, who in the latter 1940’s was the first Catholic to receive the Brotherhood Award from the International Conference of Christians and Jews.
World War II began on Doris’ 18th birthday. Although Hitler’s Nazis had invaded Poland on September 1, the war began on Sept. 3 when the British and French ultimatums for Germany to withdraw expired. (Coincidentally, WWII ended on her birthday, Sept. 3, 1945, when Japan signed its surrender on the USS Missouri.) At the time, the event made little impression, but she soon saw things differently.
Although enrolled at Nazareth College in Louisville, Doris also persisted in earning her own way. In 1940 she was hired at the Louisville factory for Reynolds Metals. Years later she recalled the shock she got on her first day on the job as a public relations staffer. “I thought they were making aluminum foil,” she said, “but then the plant manager took me to the catwalk looking over the factory floor. They were making rifles! That’s when I understood the war was very important, and that soon America would have to be involved.”
The lesson became more personal later in the year, after the United States reinstated the draft. Her elder brother John M. “Jack” Hennessy, Jr., decided to enlist in the Army rather than wait to be called up. Extremely close to Jack, Doris was terrified of what might happen to the new Notre Dame graduate, but even more distressed about the way her father took the news. “Dad went into the downstairs bathroom,” she said in an interview in the late 1990’s, “and didn’t come out for a long time. I think it was the only time in my life I knew Father had been crying.”
Doris’ fears for her brother were justified. He was killed when his jeep ran over a land mine on July 14, 1944, while Jack was enroute to a forward artillery observation post outside of Villa Magna, a tiny wine country village north of Volturno, Italy. Doris got the news early on the morning of her parent’s wedding anniversary in August, while preparing to read the day’s news on the radio.
She left the station, went home, and burned her brother’s wartime letters to her in the back yard, because the letters had said he was soon to leave the combat theater to become a career Army lawyer based in Washington, D.C. She didn’t want her family to know that not only had Jack died so close to being in safety, but also that he was not planning to come home eventually to take over the family business.
(In 1999, on her only voyage outside North America, Doris visited her brother’s grave at the American Cemetery and Memorial just south of Florence, Italy. Accompanied by her daughter, Doris was unable to pass through airports in the U.S., Holland or Italy without running into people who recognized her and thanked her for the helpful information she delivered on air. The trip itself was both traumatic and cathartic for Mrs. Winckler.)
At the end of 1944, Doris eloped with Jack Winckler. Jack was a Canadian serving in the U.S. Merchant Marine. The two met at a soda fountain in Newport News, Virginia, while she was wrapping up a previously-boring vacation and he was on shore leave while his ship was repaired, provisioned and loaded for a voyage to Europe. He called upon her several times when back ashore between voyages, and on December 30, 1944, at the urging of friends in New York City, the two took a train to Hartford, Connecticut to get married.
The couple remained together until Jack’s death only 18 months before their 50th wedding anniversary. After initially settling after the war in Louisville, the family moved in 1951 to Florida to pursue business opportunities, settling in St. Petersburg. Later they relocated again on business imperatives to Houston, Texas, and then arrived in Los Angeles in 1953.
Apart from a few years on job assignments in Dallas, Texas, and then again in Louisville, the Wincklers remained in Los Angeles and Orange Counties until 2000. Doris wrote for newspapers in Dallas and Houston, worked as a proofreader and editor of the Los Angeles Herald-Express, the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the Orange Country Register. She then founded a public relations and advertising agency with husband Jack, until landing the on-air spot with KABC-TV in 1983.
Widely-honored for her groundbreaking work in covering issues affecting senior citizens, Mrs. Winckler received several awards from the State of California, the Los Angeles City Council and Mayor, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, regional and state organizations representing community volunteer programs and senior citizens, and various news industry organizations. She often remarked on what she felt was her greatest accolade, however, the failure of several attempts by the American Association of Retired People to put an on-air personality into the news in competition with her.
In 2000 at age 79, Doris retired from on-air work and moved to Colorado Springs. She moved in 2004 to Tampa, Florida, and then returned to Colorado to stay at the Veterans Hospital in Pueblo in late 2007. She had transferred less than a month ago to a private facility in Colorado Springs when she died.
Doris Winckler is survived by her brother, Jim Hennessy, of Louisville, KY; and her children, Lange, of Tampa, Florida; Terry, of Alameda, California; Ron, of Maui, Hawaii; Dori Lundgren, of Colorado Springs, Colorado; Mike, of Colorado Springs; Robert, of Indianapolis, Indiana; and Joe, of Sacramento, California. She is also survived by 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Condolences should be directed to Mountain View Mortuary, 2350 Montebello Square Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80918, (719) 590-8922. Services are to be held Tuesday (Dec. 9).