Leslie G. Midgley

Leslie G. Midgley  A memorial celebrating the journalism career of Salt Lake City native, Leslie Grant Midgley, was October 2 at the Century Club in New York City. Among the speak-ers were Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney and oth-ers who had worked with Les during his 25 years at CBS News. He pro-duced more than 1,500 programs for the network. These included the prime time portion of four commercial-free days devoted to the Kennedy assassination tribute. Other subjects were the Vietnam war and the fall of Saigon. Leslie died June 19, 2002, of pneumonia at a hospital in White Plains, NY. He was 87. He was born Jan 15, 1915, to J. George and Anna Grant Midgley, and was a grandson of Heber J. Grant, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He attended LDS High School in Salt Lake, then the University of Utah, which he left after two years to work as a reporter for the Deseret News. There he served as city editor from 1937 to 1940. He also worked for other newspapers around the country, ending up at the New York Herald Tribune as a copy editor. In the late 1940s he spent five years with the Herald Tribune in Paris. Returning to the U.S., he worked for magazines, including Look, where he became managing editor. Then, in the mid-1950s, he left print media to take up the very different news medium--television, producing programs for Eric Sevaried, Charles Collingwood, Mr. Cronkite and other star correspondents. Examples of the documentaries he produced on major subjects are The Face of Red China and a four-part series on the Warren Commission. He won many Emmy, Peabody and other broadcasting awards. For five years he was executive producer of The Evening New, with Mr. Cronkite. He loved New York. And in an autobiography on his career, How Many Words Do You Want? (Birch Lane Press, 1989) he lauded it as the big town, saying To make it you have to make it there. Nothing else really counts. And on his journalistic philosophy he wrote that the greatest service that can be done for the American people is to give them honest, complete information about what the hell is going on. Les's accomplishments were possible because his skill and experience were at their height just when the networks were almost the only sources of quality TV national and international news. And CBS was taking in enough advertising revenue to maintain a group of remarkable correspondents. He is survived by three children born to wife, Jean Burke Midgley, who died in an accident in 1965: Leslie Rand Midgley (Fred Shaw), Hague, NY, Andrea Connors (W. Bruce), Cortlandt Manor, NY, and Peter J. Midgley, Mesa AZ. In 1967, Les married Betty Furness, the noted television personality and consumer advocate. She died in 1994. Other survivors include three grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and three siblings: Grant W. Midgley (Marsha B.), Salt Lake City, Joy M. Orr, Bountiful, UT, and Ann M. Gowans, Columbia, MO.