Charlie Gaddy was that trusted newsman, who for 24 years became more like the next-door neighbor than the WRAL TV anchor telling us about the tropical storms and hurricanes heading our way.
His was that calming voice whatever the news.
He had an assuring presence.
“I just feel like I was in the right place, this was what I was supposed to do, and I wanted to do it well,” he once said in reflection about his time as the Raleigh television station’s news anchor from 1974 until his retirement on July 1, 1994.
Charlie Gaddy was that welcome face and voice in our homes for the six o’clock news of the Triangle and beyond to include viewers in Cumberland County.
He has been described as the “Walter Cronkite of North Carolina television,” who told us about state news before Walter Cronkite, known as “the most trusted man in America,” would follow on the CBS Evening News with national and international news.
Gerald Owens, now a lead news anchor at WRAL, describes Charlie Gaddy as a broadcast journalist of integrity, honesty and fairness, and there are no other finer hallmarks of what a newsman should be.
From Biscoe to the Big Apple to Raleigh
Charlie Gaddy grew up in a little white house in the town of Biscoe in Montgomery County. He listened to the legendary Edward R. Murrow on the radio as Murrow reported on World War II from abroad.
“I thought I sure would like to be a broadcaster,” Charlie Gaddy is quoted in a Tar Heel Traveler documentary about his career.
A graduate of Guilford College, he served a two-year Army hitch and later gave thought to a law career, according to published reports, before landing a job with NBC News in New York. Along with his late wife, Nancy, the couple moved to Raleigh in 1960, where Gaddy joined the WPTF-AM radio station in Raleigh. He hosted “Ask Your Neighbor,” in his 10 years with the radio station before moving on to WRAL in 1970.
There was just something about Charlie Gaddy.
He had a charming, sincere and down-home soothing way.
He had a compassionate and empathetic heart for others, and by 1974, he was anchoring the news along with news desk mates to include the late Bobbie Battista, late weatherman Bob DeBardelaben and sports anchor Rich Brenner.
Charlie Gaddy called a devastating Nov. 28, 1988, tornado in Raleigh and earlier the Feb. 1, 1988, takeover of The Robesonian newspaper office in Lumberton by Tuscarora Indians Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs among the more memorable stories of his news anchoring career.
“What would it take for you to just put the guns down and let those people get out of there?” Gaddy asked in a live telephone interview with Hatcher, who along with Jacobs, held newsroom editors and reporters hostage with shotguns for 10 hours.
It was a riveting news interview by Charlie Gaddy, who pleaded with Hatcher to release the newspaper hostages. It was news reporting at its best. It was Charlie Gaddy at his news reporting best.
‘We lost a great friend’
Charles Reece Gaddy died June 12.
He was 93.
“Tonight, the WRAL news family is in mourning,” evening news anchor Gerald Owens told viewers on June 13. “We lost a great friend and legendary news anchor. I was off today, but I wanted to be here to share the news with all of you.”
Owens remembered Gaddy as a mentor and friend, as did others from WRAL TV’s past.
“As an anchor, he was a gifted communicator,” former WRAL news anchor David Crabtree said in a televised tribute. “Charlie’s connections to viewers transcended television.”
Paul Pope is the former vice president of the Capitol Broadcasting Co., parent company of the television station.
“If Charlie Gaddy said it,” he told Crabtree, “it was so.”
Fred Barber is a former WRAL general manager.
“A lot of the success the station enjoyed in those early years as the news really grew an audience was attributable to Charlie Gaddy,” Barber said in the tribute.
John Greene, also a former general manager, remembered Gaddy as a gifted communicator.
“You felt like Charlie was talking to you and not reading to you,” he said in the tribute. “Not preaching to you or any of that, but just simply sitting back and talking to you.”
Jim Hefner, another former general manager, remembered Gaddy as the newsman who brought WRAL into national prominence.
“That was the charm and the magic of Charlie Gaddy,” Hefner said in the tribute. “When you saw him on TV, he was telling you, one neighbor to another, what was going on in our community that day. Folks believed him and they had a reason to believe him.”
Epilogue
Charlie Gaddy was that trusted voice communities from the Triangle to Fayetteville came to know, whether it was reporting from across the globe or telling us about the Gulf War, the HIV/AIDS health epidemic, environmental issues, school violence or those tropical storms, hurricanes and tornadoes heading our way. And the Emmy-award-winning newsman always had a compassionate heart for children as evidenced in his fundraising support for Wednesday’s Child and the Duke Children’s Miracle Network.
A celebration of his life is scheduled at 11 a.m. on June 26 at Edenton Street United Methodist Church in Raleigh, according to his obituary. A graveside service will follow at 2 p.m. at Montlawn Memorial Park.
“… This was what I was supposed to do,” Charlie Gaddy once said of his distinguished broadcast news career, “and I wanted to do it well.”
He did it well indeed.
There are those news reporters we come to remember along our way. And then there are those news reporters like Charlie Gaddy we come to revere, and Charlie Gaddy became that newsman.
“His legacy,” Gerald Owens told us, “will never be forgotten.”
Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at billkirby49@gmail.com or 910-624-1961.
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