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How many of you knew this? I didn't.
Peter Jennings is Anchorman and Senior Editor of
ABC Television’s “World News Tonight with Peter
Jennings.”
Peter Charles Archibald Ewart
Jennings [didn't GHWB get chastized by the news
media for have more than 3 names?) was born in July
1938 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His father Charles
Jennings was, from the founding of the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in the 1930s, the
voice of CBC and came to be known as the “Edward
R. Murrow of Canada.”
His powerful father
gave his nine-year-old son his own nationwide show,
“Peter’s People,” on CBC Radio. The weekly half-hour
program featured news and music for children.
As a child he was “bone lazy and a bit delinquent,”
Jennings told a Good Housekeeping Magazine interviewer,
and he found school “boring.” He was expelled from
several private schools, then dropped out of school
forever before completing 10th Grade. His father
discouraged him from seeking a career in broadcasting,
so the high school dropout worked for three years
as a teller at the Royal Bank of Canada before taking
a job at a small Ontario radio station.
In 1961 Peter Jennings found work at one of Canada’s
first private television stations, where his jobs
ranged from newscaster to host of a Canadian version
of “American Bandstand.” When this station became
part of the new private national network CTV, his
famous last name vaulted Jennings to the position
of co-anchor of its national evening news. Executives
of the fledgling American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
quickly noticed this rising northern star.
“My mother…was pretty anti-American,” Jennings
said on the September 6, 2002 CBS “Late Show with
David Letterman. “And so I was, in some respects,
raised with anti-Americanism in my blood, or in
my mother’s milk at least.”
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