Dick Bertel, whose career spanned doing interviews for local radio and TV in Connecticut, anchoring national radio news and working at Voice of America, died Monday at age 92.
“While still a Connecticut high school student, Bertel started his radio career in 1948,” according to an obituary from Dick Bertel Communications.
“As he earned a degree in broadcasting from New York University, he worked for the next several years at Fairfield County stations in Norwalk, Greenwich, Bridgeport and Stamford before moving to Hartford, where he joined the announcing staff of WTIC and WTIC-FM in 1956.”
Bertel worked there for more than two decades as an air personality and interviewer. When WTIC launched a television station in 1957, Bertel added TV news anchor and public affairs host to his duties.
“In 1978, he was hired to manage Hartford’s WKSS, then a beautiful music station, where he also hosted the morning show. Then in 1984 he relocated to Washington to work at the Voice of America.”
At VOA he led affiliate relations for the VOA Europe network, based in Munich, and created the international call-in show “Talk to America.”
He retired from VOA at age 75 in 2006.
“To keep his local broadcasting skills sharp, he also moonlighted as a news anchor at WTOP Radio until 1988, when Westwood One recruited him to anchor national newscasts for NBC Radio News and the Mutual Broadcasting System,” according to the obituary.
It said Bertel left a collection of interviews about the pre-war Golden Age of radio network entertainment programming from the program “The Golden Age of Radio” that he hosted for seven years at WTIC, featuring interviews with former radio stars about the days of early radio.
