Post #9: Final Post (Dorothy Fuldheim)

Early Life

Having been credited as the “First Lady of Television News,” Dorothy Fuldheim was born on June 26, 1893 in Passaic, New Jersey but grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Although American, she is of Jewish descent.

Before she got a job in broadcasting, Fuldheim was an elementary school teacher. Jane Addams, a social activist, hired Dorothy in 1918 to speak about social causes, which started her love for public speaking. 

Fuldheim often spoke about topics related to foreign policy and social causes for the next nineteen years. 

Dorothy then debuted her broadcasting career on a weekly program at Cleveland radio station, WTAM, in 1929 and they then created a daily program over the NBC Red Network in 1933. 

Her speeches advocated for birth control and her opposition to publicly owned utilities and railroads. This then earned her the nicknames of “Militant Cleveland Lecturer” and “The American H.G. Wells.” Dorothy gave over 3,500 speeches within a twenty year span. She traveled and visited interwar Europe regularly, interviewing Engelbert Dollfuss a couple day before his assassination and Adolf Hitler in 1932 before he got powerful. These interviews led her to be the first female news analyst in network radio with NBC Red.

WJW, based in Cleveland, aired daily news commentary by Fuldheim in 1944 as a part of their Newspaper of the Air program. They hired her because of her reputation as a public speaker and assigned her to attend the San Francisco Conference which established the United Nations to interview attendees. 

She warned about upcoming tensions between the US and the Soviet Union and advocated for the peace movement and peacekeeping before and after the end of WWII.

Dorothy also engaged in literary criticism and book reviews, expressing surprise at the number of people wanting to hear her discuss a poorly written book centered around sex appeal while emphasizing chagrin over her other lectures not netting such large audiences. Fuldheim then hosted Young America Thinks, a weekly public affairs open forum program that aimed at high school students in collaboration with the Cleveland Board of Education, over WJW. 

TV Career

In 1947, Scripps Howard hired Dorothy for WEWS-TV during a thirteen week contract. 

Even though she left WJW, she stayed with the station after the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen purchased airtime over ABC for a weekly fifteen minute commentary program. 

WEWS was one of two television stations in operation between New York City and Chicago. 

In 1959, Dororhy began to build her own newscast in response to the new Eyewitness News on KYW. She focused her newscast on interviews, an overview of the news, and commentaries. Dorothy was the first woman in the US to have her own TV news analysis program.

Highlights of the News, which consisted primarily of news analysis, covered commentary, book reviews, and interviews. Fuldheim interviewed famous people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller, the Duke of Windsor, Barbara Walters, and a few American presidents.

She teamed with Cleveland radio legend, Bill Gordon, in the 1960’s to host “The One O’Clock Club” on WEWS-TV. It was a blend of entertainment, news, and interviews and eventually inspired KYW to premiere a similar show hosted by Mike Douglas that shifted the viewers of “The One O’Clock Club” to the KYW show.

Fuldheim was known for her sometimes controversial opinions, which often offended some members of her audience. In 1970 live on air, she made the statement regarding the actions of the Ohio National Guard during the Kent State shootings, “What is wrong with our country? We’re killing our own children.” Because of this reference to the shootings being murder, a numerous amount of calls headed her way from viewers demanding that she resign from WEWS. 

In 1980, Dorothy was inducted in the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame and discussed major events like the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, the funeral of assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and interviewed the family of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Northern Ireland. 

Later Years

At age 91, Fuldheim still performed interviews and read commentaries live on TV three times every day. Sadly, this ended when she had a stroke on July 27, 1984 after interviewing US President Ronald Reagan. She died five years later in Cleveland on November 3, 1989 at the age of 96. Dorothy Fuldheim was awarded an Ohio Historical Marker in 2003 for shaping the journalism industry and is presented in front of the WEWS building.