Fred W. Friendly
| Fred W. Friendly | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer October 30, 1915 New York City |
| Died | March 3, 1998 (aged 82) Bronx, New York |
| Cause of death | Stroke |
| Resting place | Kensico Cemetery |
| Alma mater | Nichols Junior College (A.A., 1936) |
| Spouse(s) | Dorothy Greene (m. 1947; later divorced) Ruth Weiss Mark (m. 1968) |
| Children |
David T. Friendly Andy Friendly Lisa Friendly |
| Parent(s) | Samuel Wachenheimer Therese Friendly Wachenheimer |
Fred W. Friendly (October 30, 1915 – March 3, 1998) was a president of CBS News and the creator, along with Edward R. Murrow, of the documentary television program See It Now. He originated the concept of public-access television cable TV channels.
Friendly was born Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer in New York City to Samuel Wachenheimer, a jewelry manufacturer, and Therese Friendly Wachenheimer. The family moved from Manhattan's Morningside Heights district (where Friendly would eventually teach for a quarter-century) to Providence, Rhode Island, where he graduated from Hope Street High School. He went on to graduate from Nichols Junior College in 1936.
Friendly entered radio broadcasting in 1937 at WEAN in Providence, Rhode Island. In World War II, he served as an instructor in the Army Signal Corps and reported for an Army newspaper in the Pacific Theater (The CBI Roundup) before mustering out as a master sergeant in 1945; his decorations included the Legion of Merit and the Soldier's Medal.
By the late 1940s, Friendly was an experienced radio producer. It was in this role that Friendly (who had changed his name during his Providence days) first worked with Murrow on the Columbia Records historical albums, I Can Hear It Now. The first entry in the series, released on Thanksgiving Day 1948, covered the crisis and war years 1933–1945. It was a ground-breaker in that it used clips of radio news coverage and speeches of the major events from that twelve-year time span. Friendly created the concept after noticing the new use of audiotape in regular radio news coverage, as opposed to wire or disc recordings that were an industry standard. Nonetheless, Friendly periodically recreated the recordings of news events when such recordings didn't exist or were considered too chaotic to use on an album [1]. CBS correspondent David Schoenbrun, in his memoir On and Off the Air, said he once was forced by Friendly to ask Charles de Gaulle if he would recreate the speech he gave upon his return to Paris (de Gaulle refused). The recreations never were identified as such, and trying to separate the real from the recreated continues to be problematic for radio historians.
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