David Brinkley was certainly the best known native son of Wilmington until Michael Jordan started dribbling a basketball on national TV. By then Brinkley was a legend in broadcast journalism.
Brinkley was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on July 10, 1920. He lived at 801 Princess Street, an area eight blocks from the center of town now filled with a mix of non-descript commercial buildings and large historic homes. The Wilmington he grew up in was a Southern town that was also a thriving port city.
Because it was a Southern town there was a lot of attention paid to decorum and politeness and the proper way to do things. Later in life David Brinkley was often described as a "gentleman." Sometimes the word, "courtly" was used. It was something he learned here, in Wilmington.
The Wilmington of Brinkley's childhood was also a port city teeming with commerce and people from all parts of the globe. It offered a young man like David Brinkley the opportunity to observe all the things that might come under the heading of "news".
You can imagine the young Brinkley noticing Belle Kingoff, wife of the founder of a local jewelry store, as she made her way from her house on fifteenth street down the fifteen blocks to the courthouse, past his home on a Monday morning.
Belle spoke several languages. And, at the courthouse she would translate for the sailors who stood before the bench after having a bit of shore leave, getting rowdy and winding up in jail. Brinkley would have known about that from observing, the way he knew about the Sprunt family's cotton compress and about the way men would wile away time by shooting wharf rats. Brinkley observed it all.
Observing was one way to learn. There was reading, too, and Brinkley spent a lot of time reading, often at the library, which was then upstairs in Thalian Hall, a grandiose building now used for a performance stage. One of the librarians, Emma Woodward, became a kind of mentor to Brinkley. Mrs. Burrows Smith, one of his English teachers at New Hanover High School suggested he become a journalist.
He got his start by working at the Star-News in Wilmington. Often his stories would include a bit of local history. He also wrote up Associated Press news bulletins and assembled them into a five minute newscast that was broadcast on WRBT.
WRBT was the leading radio station in Wilmington at the time. In fact, it was the only radio station in Wilmington, but it provided the broadcasting start for the man who is probably more imitated than any newscaster in history.
Newscasters sound like Brinkley without trying to, the way that all airline pilots sound like Chuck Yeager. Brinkley delivered the news and his commentaries with a distinctive, clipped style. It doesn't sound very southern, though.
There are two stories about what happened to Brinkley's southern accent, and Brinkley has told both of them. One story is that the style developed naturally from his habit of underlining all the words in a newscast that he wanted to emphasize.
The other story is more interesting because it has a love interest. Brinkley, it seems, was dating a young woman who had been trained in drama. They were quite serious and saw each other daily. In addition to anything else they were up to, she helped him develop his pronunciation.
There may be more to the accent story. When Brinkley was coming up at NBC it wasn't a good thing to have a Southern accent. Network executives were in favor of the "announcer voice" and a neutral Midwest accent. Brinkley might have been doing what he felt was necessary for success in his career.
Brinkley delivered the news in that concise style on radio and later on television. Mostly, though, the work he did in his early years was writing. He worked for UPI in Atlanta, Charlotte and Nashville. In 1943 he went to Washington DC to interview for a job at CBS News.
When he didn't get the CBS job he simply went over to NBC. They hired him in ten minutes. With that he became one of the few journalists who began in newspapers and then made the move into radio.
Brinkley didn't stop there. In Washington he became a member of the small group of radio journalists to make the move to television. Everything was new then and things didn't always work the way they were supposed to.
The station where Brinkley was working had a man assigned to go about the city during the day with a movie camera. His job was to find interesting things to film that would appear on the evening news.
Bits of the film taken during the day were spliced together by a crew who then showed it on command during the evening news show. The commentator, Brinkley, was in the studio and told the audience that the pictures were coming, but had never seen the pictures himself before they appeared on the air. It was Brinkley's job to comment on the pictures as they rolled by.
On one particular night the film, quite by accident, was threaded into the projector backward. So there, on the screen, awaiting commentary was a marvelous movie of a sheep, upside down. To make matters worse, there was music playing to accompany the film. But the music was chosen based on the film at the other end of the reel. So the upside-down sheep flickered across TV screens accompanied by funeral music. For once, Brinkley decided that the best course of action was to say nothing.
During those days in the early 1950s, Brinkley and others created the conventions of modern television news. Because there was no precedent, everything that early newscasters like Brinkley did established precedent.
Once in the early days, for example, some manager somewhere got the idea that television news anchors ought to wear bright red jackets. Brinkley thought it was a bad idea and refused, but years later he wondered if all TV newspeople would have to wear red jackets today if he'd agreed.
His big break came in 1956 when he was teamed with Chet Huntley to cover the national political conventions. They were a great team. Soon they were doing the nightly news and calling it the Huntley-Brinkley Report, which shortly became the most popular newscast in America.
Every evening they signed off by saying "Good Night" to each other. Huntley hated it. Brinkley hated it. The only folks who liked it were their boss and their millions of viewers.
For years CBS News, the network of Edward R. Murrow, had been the premier television news organization. Their CBS Evening news had been at the top of the ratings for as long as there had been ratings. Now NBC took top honors.
After Huntley retired, David Brinkley did lots of things at NBC until they figured he was past his prime and, therefore, expendable. They let him go in 1981. ABC snapped him up.
At ABC he hosted a Sunday morning show called "This Week with David Brinkley". The show was longer than most Sunday morning news shows of the time. Soon other shows matched it in length and tried to equal it in quality. And so David Brinkley was blazing the trail again.
He retired in 1997, a long way from the young high school student who started out working for his hometown newspaper in the 1930s. He had set the standard for others to follow in several different ways.
In over sixty years he covered an immense amount of news. He made a partial list and used it as the subtitle of his Memoir: "11 Presidents, 4 Wars, 22 Political Conventions, 1 Moon Landing, 3 Assassinations, 2,000 Weeks of News and Other Stuff on Television". It was an incredible career, one that rightly receives the appellation, "legendary."
And it all started in Wilmington, North Carolina. It ended in Wilmington as well. Today the body of David McClure Brinkley was buried in his family plot here, at his birthplace, in a quiet private ceremony.
