Dick Oliver, a newspaper man who became a TV reporter on Fox-owned WNYW’s Good Day New York, has died at 77, reports The New York Times.
Oliver joined the station in 1988, and was the first television reporter live on the air in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. He’d been doing live hits just a few blocks away, near City Hall, when the first plane hit the North Tower. Within seconds, Oliver was shouting at producers “come to me! Come to me!”
Live on the air, he told anchor Jim Ryan it sounded like an aircraft had hit the tower:
“Dick Oliver was both the toughest and liveliest of cigar-chomping city editors from the era of clacking typewriters,” said New York Daily News editor Arthur Browne. “His mantra was to write ‘Hey, Martha,’ stories, imagining that a husband would call his wife and ask ‘Did you see this?’ on reading a Daily News story.”
Oliver rose from copy boy at the News to become an award-winning reporter before moving to television.