Iowans remember award-winning journalist Richard Threlkeld

CEDAR RAPIDS - Eastern Iowans on Saturday remembered award-winning news correspondent and Cedar Rapids native Richard Threlkeld as someone with a humble and generous nature.

Threlkeld, 74, who died Friday after his car collided with a propane tanker in Amagansett, N.Y., fashioned an impressive journalism career at the local and network levels, working as a correspondent for CBS News and ABC News after getting his start at WMT Radio and WMT-TV, which is now KGAN in Cedar Rapids.

“You wouldn't know he covered some of the major stories in the last half of the 20th century,” said author and broadcast historian Jeff Stein, executive director of the Iowa Broadcast News Association and former professor at Wartburg College and Iowa State University. Stein said Threlkeld was modest and looked like your next-door neighbor, or a teacher.

“He did not forget Iowa,” said Stein, who hosted Threlkeld at a broadcasting seminar in 2002 at Wartburg. He said Threlkeld spoke about the hallmarks of journalism, urging students to be curious in nature and have an interest in people.

“It sounds like basic advice but it's often taken for granted,” Stein said.

Threlkeld joined WMT in 1961. Dean Borg of Iowa Public Television and Radio, who also worked at WMT, said Threlkeld wasn't permitted to anchor newscasts because management did not like that his voice sometimes cracked. He defended his peer there to the news director, calling him an “excellent newsperson.”

Borg said he kept in touch with Threlkeld often through e-mail and considered his death “a tremendous personal loss.”

“He was a bulldog on a story,” Borg said, recalling that for days during a holiday weekend in the early 1960s, Threlkeld followed a massive explosion at an ammunition depot in Burlington.

“Dick had tremendous integrity for getting the facts right,” he said, noting he would stay on a story until it was complete.

In 1966, Threlkeld was awarded a CBS News fellowship at Columbia University and an internship at the network's headquarters in New York City. That's where Threlkeld met his wife Betsy Aaron, Borg said.

Borg and Threlkeld met up again as foreign correspondents for WMT and CBS respectively during the war in South Vietnam. While Borg returned to Iowa, Threlkeld continued his network career at ABC's World News Tonight, and later again at CBS, where he co-anchored programs, including CBS Sunday Morning.