News at Ten
By Austin Hoyt
Ed.: Austin Hoyt discovered the archives had no history of the News at Ten and submitted the following.
The News at Ten was WGBH’s first nightly news program and Boston’s first 10:00 pm news program. It aired for a year beginning in the spring of 1966.
The staff included Peter Richards who covered the State House as he had for UPI and Howard K. Spergel, a 1966 Nieman Fellow, on the education beat at a time when court ordered bussing to desegregate Boston’s public schools was an important and controversial issue. Jane Doerfer, new to the news business, covered City Hall.
WGBH had a producer training program then and chose two trainees with newspaper experience. Martin Hurwitz had worked for the UPI in Columbus, OH; Austin Hoyt, for the Niagara Falls Gazette.
Hurwitz and Hoyt became general assignment producer-reporters, Hoyt specializing in the environment, an issue that was heating up, and transportation including the Port of Boston.
Myron “Mike” Spencer, a professor at Northeastern, began as the anchor. Don Fouser was producer. He was succeeded by Art Stauber who had worked at a commercial station in Pennsylvania. Peter Richards remembers that Stauber brought in Stelio Salmona, who had experience at a commercial station in New Haven, as anchor to replace Spencer. Werner Bundshuh and Peter Hoving were the film cameramen.
There is some confusion as to exactly when the program began. The reporters were given voice and diction lessons by staff announcer Bill Pierce. The plan was then to have closed circuit broadcasts for several weeks to iron out the rough edges. Several of the staff remember that after only two days, the Boston newspapers went on strike and The News at Ten went live. An online search reveals that the Chicago Tribune reported that five Boston papers had gone on strike on March 7.
The WGBH archives contains a document saying the program was launched May 24, 1966 and ran through April, 1967. The launch date is in question; the end date does not seem to be certain.
The News at Ten aired weekdays from 10:00 – 10:30. Segments taped late in the afternoon were rolled in as was commentary by veteran reporter Louis Lyons.
In the summer of 1966, The News at Ten team covered the Democratic and Republican state conventions gavel to gavel. As the year went on, the program gained the attention and respect of Boston’s politically savvy viewers.
In the spring of 1967, after a little more than a year, Hartford Gunn, WGBH general manager, cancelled The News at Ten because, his announcement read, its half million-dollar budget consumed “a disproportionate share of WGBH’s discretionary income.”
Peter Richards left to work for the City Planning Commission of New York under Mayor John V. Lindsay, where he edited a six-volume master plan published by the MIT Press. He and his wife, Jean, later owned a prize-winning group of newspapers in Dutchess County, NY and went on to become antiques dealers in Maine.
Howard Spergel returned to WGBH to cover education on The Reporters, a news program that ran from 1970-73. He died an untimely death from a brain tumor.
Jane Doerfer enjoyed a career writing and editing cookbooks. They include The Vegetable Cookbook with Marion Morash, editor; The Legal Seafoods Cookbook, co-author; and Going Solo in the Kitchen, author. She ran the Green Trails Inn in Vermont for 10 years before she died in 2019 at age 78.
Martin Hurwitz pursued a business career in New York City and retired in Brooklyn. The News at Ten launched the 45-year careers of Austin Hoyt as a producer for WGBH and Peter Hoving as a cameraman as well as that of cameraman Werner Bundshuh.
I am reminded that there were multiple news programs that started at 10 p.m. weeknights on WGBH:
• The 1961 program described by Dan Beach in these comments
• The News at 10 from 1966-67 chronicled by Austin Hoyt in the original post
• The Ten O’Clock News in the 1970s and 80s; Bob Nesson commented on some of those highlights earlier
Please do continue to add your memories of these pioneering news programs.
Several points were not covered in Austin Hoyt’s excellent story about the Ten O’clock News.
There were brilliant writers and producers at a time when — in the late ’60s and through the ’70s — the city was in turmoil.
One was Alan Lupo whose reporting — and his book — about the “people before highways” movement helped crystallize the action to stop the construction of a huge highway (I95) that would have cleaved through the heart of Roxbury, the Fenway, Brookline and Cambridge.
Then coverage of busing and the integration of South Boston High, led by journalists like Judy Stoia and covered by Ten O’clock film crews like myself, Eric Neudel, and others helped bring sharp focus to those actions.
There were so many others — in-house and freelance — who were critical to the Ten O’clock News.
Going back further, Ed Salners and I were joint anchors of a 10 p.m. WGBH-TV news broadcast in the fall of 1961, one of the first in Boston. It was at the 84 Massachusetts Avenue studio, just before the October fire that destroyed the station, and that may well have been the reason that series ended.
Ed and I sat in front of a black magnet board, with a desk between us to hold our copy. It was rip-n-read, as I recall, from an AP machine, verbatim. Don’t recall much local news, maybe a Harvard press release or something. Bill Pierce, as always, was our pronunciation tutor.
The magnet board behind us held the weather readings in little white letters made by the Art Department — with images of clouds, sun and rain, each on a black card and magnet — that the engineers compressed in close-up to look, well, graphic.
The broadcast was not distinguished except for the fact that during the newscast the temperature info kept sliding down the magnet board behind us into a jumble at the end of the segment. I actually remember viewer mail on the subject. A learning experience, for sure.
As I recall, Eric Oddleifson was “News Director” at the time. And we got very cool Boston Police Press passes.
Thanks, Austen. Great stuff.
A couple notes about Jane Doerfer.
Jane was the writer of “The Victory Garden Cookbook,” working closely with Marian, who informed the book (recipes, information about the vegetables, testing of the recipes) and was therefore the author. The exact citation is: “by Marian Morash In collaboration with Jane Doerfer”.
And, after the Inn in Vermont, Jane went on to own and run a truly great restaurant on St. George’s Island, Florida, “The Blue Parrot,” just across the bay from Appalachicola, on the Panhandle coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Karen
I was working at ‘GBH at that time. I remember an inordinate amount of fuss over Jane Doerfer’s hair!
She was made to wear a wig, which she (unwittingly?) wore upside down.