The Voice We Loved

Every night at seven o’clock on the dot, one elegant, serene man sat five feet away from my father at the dinner table and brought us the nightly news. At the age of five I came to love this man who told me he was Peter Jennings. My crush only strengthened over the years as I came to see him as the guiding light through my fear of Soviet nukes and killer bees. He was a torch bearer of Cronkite-style news casting, one of the last vestiges of journalism’s old guard. As we head into a new era of journalism characterized by burying the real news with human interest stories about lost puppies, Peter Jennings stands as an end of an era, and a hero lost. I will miss his smooth voice and the way it told me that regardless of what worldly horror it had to convey, that everything would be okay.