R.I.P.: Jim Hartz, Former NBC News Anchor

Jim Hartz

Jim Hartz, the low-key, folksy newsman who hosted the “Today” show with Barbara Walters in the mid-1970s, less than halfway through his three-decade television career, died on April 17 in Fairfax County, Va. 

He was 82, reports The NYTimes.

The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his wife, Alexandra Dickson Hartz, said, adding that he had chosen to be removed from the ventilator that was keeping him alive.

Mr. Hartz may have looked boyish when he started the “Today” show job, at 34, succeeding Frank McGee, who had died a few months before at 52, but he was no beginner. He had already spent a decade in New York at WNBC, covering local stories, from John V. Lindsay’s mayoralty through Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral and well into the Watergate scandal.

The news stories he covered while on “Today” included President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation, the end of the Vietnam War and the American Bicentennial. But his “Today” career wound up lasting only two years.

Both on “Today” and in other broadcast jobs, Mr. Hartz covered numerous space missions. He and the broadcast-news pioneer John Chancellor were co-announcers in 1971 during the Apollo 15 launch, which led to a three-day lunar visit by astronauts. He was co-author of “Worlds Apart: How the Distance Between Science and Journalism Threatens America’s Future” (1997), with Rick Chappell, a former astronaut.

In a 1974 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, Mr. Hartz admitted that a NASA event was so overwhelming for him that afterward he would have no memory of what he had said on the air.

Recalling the first time he saw a Saturn rocket lifting off at Cape Kennedy on an Apollo mission, he said, “I was just not prepared for that 36-story building walking right off the platform into the air.”