Another Ch. 17 news personality leaves; Bob Pantano gets a deserving honor
Plus, salute to Robert MacNeil; Phillies City Connect uniforms looking good; and final thoughts on O.J.
Another “PHL 17 Morning News” figure departs with no apparent professional destination.
Alex Butler, who had been the Channel 17 newscast’s roving feature reporter, said farewell to her viewers and colleagues on Friday from an Italian Market food festival she was covering.
Butler began her piece by saying this was her last broadcast. Several times, she mentioned her “last day” and having “no job.”
Butler leaves the same day as “Morning News” anchor Amanda VanAllen, who announced she would remain in the Delaware Valley but had no job lined up.
Butler is pregnant and expecting a child in June, but her departure is total and not a maternity leave. She and her husband, Nate, have been married since 2019.
She is from Florida and came to the Philadelphia region in 2017 to join QVC. She went from there to a feature slot at News 12 New York and has been on
Channel 17 for more than a year.
Bob Pantano honored
Since 1977, Bob Pantano has been throwing a “Saturday Night Dance Party” on local radio, mostly on WOGL (98.1 FM), home of oldies music for the last several decades.
Pantano was heard on WOGL every Saturday from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. for 45 years before the station moved his program from its main band to its HD2 outlet in 2022. It can also be heard through the Audacy app.
No matter. Bob keeps entertaining and holds live dance parties throughout the region, anywhere from South Philadelphia to Penns Grove and Wildwood.
In a career than spans more than 50 years, Pantano has won just about every award available, some from his alma mater, Temple University, and in 2007 a spot on the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame.
Last week, Bob received the ultimate accolade, the 600 block of Federal Street in South Philly, where he grew up and began his radio career, being designated by the City of Philadelphia, “Bob Pantano Way.”
In a blurb in Inside Radio, Bob recalled how his professional career began in 1971 when he was asked to fill in for Jerry Blavat on WCAM (1590 AM) in Camden. He hasn’t stopped since.
Old-school journalist passes
The passing of Robert MacNeil on Friday reminded me of days when television news was important and respectable.
MacNeil and his longtime onair micmate, Jim Lehrer, made a Public Broadcasting System (PBS) newscast a worthy rival to traditional network news when they launched “The MacNeil/ Lehrer Report” in 1975. It later became the “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.”
MacNeil and Lehrer were rigorous news reporters and anchors, trained to be old-school in preserving objectivity and choosing the news items that would be most salient for their viewers to hear that day.
They were like a HuntleyBrinkley for public broadcasters, a pair of strong individual journalists who combined their talents to create an influential newscast, one that was an alternative, or partner, to what could be seen on commercial air.
MacNeil was known for his reporting skills before his PBS newscast with Lehrer was launched. He was in Dallas covering President John F. Kennedy’s visit there on Nov. 22, 1963.
He witnessed JFK’s assassination on Dealey Plaza.
One story about that day has MacNeil asking a tense young man where he could find the nearest telephone so he could relay events to NBC. A famous story pegs that man as Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman most associated with Kennedy’s murder.
By 1967, MacNeil was working for the British Broadcasting Co. as a correspondent for American and European politics. He joined PBS in 1971 as the host of “Washington Week in Review.”
In 1973, he covered the Watergate hearings for the network, reporting for which he earned an Emmy. It was during that time, he was teamed with Jim Lehrer.
Their mutual report remained a PBS staple until 1995, and the
program continues today as the “PBS News Hour.”
I doubt anyone today will be able to amass the journalistic resume and lasting respect Robert MacNeil had.
Television news has gone from an era of star anchors and incisive reporters to a business of personality.
Every time a network shells out millions to secure a particular anchor, my first reaction is to laugh at the folly of thinking anyone in current broadcasting has the influence, credibility, following, or clout of MacNeil, Lehrer, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, Diane Sawyer, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Bob Schieffer, Barbara Walters, Frank Reynolds, Eric Sevareid or Roger Mudd.
These stalwarts may have had points of view, but they had the good taste and professional decency to keep them to themselves. They are far from the popularity-seeking, propagandaspreading, TV stars we have at anchor desks today, especially on cable news.
Some, like Jennings, Walters and Brokaw may have revealed their leanings late in their careerd, but like McNeil, they never skewed the news in a biased direction while reporting it.
PBS News is today prone, although in less argumentative fashion, to its cable and network counterparts.
I hear it mostly via NPR reports. Every time I listen to Jack
Speer or Lakshmi Singh, as authoritative as their voices are, I make it a point to weed out the editorialization in their intros and reports.
Robert MacNeil, in death and in life, stands as a beacon of a purer, more meticulous time in journalism, TV or otherwise. His kind may never come again.
McNeill passed from natural causes at New
York Presbyterian Hospital at age 93.
Thumbs-up on uniforms
What a relief! Well, 90% a relief.
The Phillies’ City Connect uniforms, revealed during Friday’s loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates, are far better than anything I expected.
But for one detail, they’re fairly handsome. I had reason to fear.
I understand merchandising as well as anyone. I realize that uniform introduction or adaptation of any kind creates an immediate new item to sell in team souvenir shops and via franchise.
Understanding or not, every City Connect I saw before the one the Phillies donned was positively hideous.
Disgraces, even to a game that allowed the Atlanta Braves and Chicago White Sox debacles of the ’80s, they were ugly affairs that featured slashes of pastel colors — even the red on them was muted — and looked like failed attempts at tie-dye.
If I was a played subjected to having to wear one, I’d consider refusing on the basis of terminal embarrassment.
The Phillies version verged on having some class.
I was surprised they ignored the team’s historically signature red. Then, I remembered merchandising and realized how different they’d look among shop displays.
The outfits are two shades of blue with yellow accents. The colors, although far from exact from their model, are meant to mirror the colors on the Philadelphia flag.
Luckily, they are much darker, avoiding a horror like the Boston Red
Sox pastel yellow and baby blue uniforms that are as a bad as any City Connect garb aside from the Phillies.
The shirt, or jersey, begins in a middle blue, referred to as Neptune Blue, and turns darker, to a Midnight Navy Blue as it tapers from shoulder to waist. There is a yellow, or Midwest Gold arc around the shoulder blade.
The lettering spelling “Philly” and numbers on the back are in the same yellow.
The back of the uniform approximates the Philadelphia skyline in shadow. There is a yellow Liberty Bell on one sleeve.
The lone mistake in the entire uniform is the taper from Neptune to Midnight Navy. The change is too abrupt and needs to be more gradual, a steady flow from one shade to the other rather than a sudden one.
Pants are fine, being solidly Midnight Navy blue with a Midwest Gold, titter, titter, stripe on both legs’ outer side. Caps are Midnight Navy Blue with yellow markings. Cleats, I’m told, also sport an outline of the skyline.
The team looked good in the new duds even if it didn’t play well in them. Friday’s game outdid Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors.”
The relief came because the Phillies have one of Major League Baseball’s classiest and most classic uniforms. Even the change from red pin stripes to maroon during the Veteran’s Stadium years, was done in taste.
Along with the Yankees and Dodgers, the Phillies have always had the sharpest uniforms in baseball.
It was heartening to know their City Connect uni would follow suit and not be trashy like the ones I saw last season.
Thoughts on Simpson
O.J. Simpson’s death last week rekindled memories of the wall-to-wall ride down a Los Angeles freeway Simpson made in a borrowed van while the police trailed him in droves while waiting for him to pull over and submit to arrest for the suspected murdered of his estranged wife, Nicole, and a guest of hers. Ron Goldman.
I would be surprised if any event would garner such coverage today, even when we have a spate of 24-hour news channels of a kind newly established and without full footing in 1994.
I sat with the late Edie Huggins, the brilliant cabaret artist Steve Ross (not the local broadcaster), and David Pershica in a Philly restaurant and though conversationalists all, we remained silent watching the chase.
Since those killings, of which Simpson was acquitted, I use O.J. as an example of my “100 Percent Rule”: An individual is the sum of all parts, Simpson being a probable criminal, and later convicted criminal, does not negate his talent as a football star or as an engaging personality before his less attractive traits were revealed.
Simpson died from the results of cancer at age 76.