Veteran Radio-TV Newsman Dick Bertel Dies At 92

Dick Bertel, one of the founding news anchors on WFSB Hartford, Conn., when it operated as WTIC-TV from its launch in 1957 to its first sale in 1974, died Monday, Sept. 11. He was 92.

While still a Connecticut high school student in 1948, Bertel started his broadcasting career, initially working at a few Fairfield County radio stations before moving to Hartford where he joined the WTIC announcing staff in 1956. The operation was preparing to start operating the following year as the state’s second VHF station, Channel 3, which would quickly dominate the state’s television landscape with the WTIC call letters for its first 17 years.

Bertel’s voice has the distinction of being the first broadcast by Channel 3. The engineers recruited him to record the station’s legal identification which ran constantly in a loop over the test pattern as the official launch approached in September 1957.

To mark WTIC’s debut, Bertel was assigned to host an elaborate on-location program called Voice of the People. It spotlighted Hartford’s Italian immigrant community which was then consolidated in the riverside Front Street neighborhood on the eve of its demolition to make way for the urban revitalization project known as Constitution Plaza. The program earned the station its first recognition of excellence, the Grand Award, a predecessor to the local Emmy, which was presented by the American Advertising Federation of America.

Although he continued to contribute to WTIC Radio, over the years Bertel’s presence on WTIC-TV increased steadily. His TV newscasts expanded from weekends to the daily 11 p.m. Channel 3 Late Report in 1966. In 1969, he was tapped to anchor the station’s first midday newscast, the Twelve O’clock Report, which also was its first with a female co-anchor, Jean Tucker. Then in 1972, he was elevated to the Six O’clock Report, taking over from the original anchor, Bruce Kern.

Meanwhile, he hosted the WTIC-TV public affairs program Perception from 1958 to 1971. While usually a straight interview format, Bertel often expanded it into elaborate stage productions to depict historical events.

From 1971 to 1974, he was the first moderator of the weekly newsmaker program Face the State which ended its run in 2020. Other Channel 3 assignments included the human-interest series People and Places (1970-74) and Hartford Symphony Orchestra telecasts during the 1960s.

Bertel chose to remain with WTIC Radio when the stations were sold in 1974. Then, in 1978 he was recruited to manage WKSS Radio in Hartford.

From 1984 to 2006, he resumed his television work at the Voice of America in Washington, D.C., as an anchor at WorldNet and as host of the global call-in program Talk to America.  During this time, he also anchored radio newscasts for NBC and the Mutual Broadcasting System.