Jim Hartz(1940-2022)
- Actor
Jim Hartz is a former American television personality during the mid-
and late-1970s. Hartz became best known to a national audience for a
two-year stint as the co-host of the Today Show, along with Barbara
Walters. Hartz replaced Frank McGee. Hartz was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
and graduated from Tulsa Central High School in 1958. He then attended
the University of Tulsa as a premed student, but after three years he
decided to pursue journalism instead. Hartz first became a reporter for
KOTV in Tulsa in 1962 and was promoted to news director in 1964,
shortly before he joined NBC-owned WNBC-TV in New York. At the age of
24, he was the youngest correspondent that NBC had ever hired. There,
he served as anchor of the 6 o'clock and 11 o'clock nightly newscasts,
where he remained until 1974, when NBC promoted him to Today.
Throughout his career with NBC, Hartz earned five Emmy Awards and two
Ace Awards for cable television. His run turned with "Today" turned out
to be relatively brief; future NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw would
take over from him in 1976, when Walters left for ABC. Hartz then went
to WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., where he was an anchor until 1979. After
leaving NBC, Hartz succeeded Hugh Downs as co-host of the Emmy
Award-winning PBS series Over Easy, sharing the program with Broadway
legend, Mary Martin. He also hosted another public television program,
Innovation, during the early 1980s. In the early 1990s he co-anchored a
weekly PBS-NHK joint venture news program, Asia Now, from Tokyo, Japan.
Hartz, who resides in Alexandria, Virginia, became chairman of the Will
Rogers Memorial Commission in 1993, is a member of the Oklahoma
Journalism Hall of Fame, and is regarded as an aerospace expert. His
first major assignment was co-anchoring with David Brinkley during the
sudden return of Gemini VIII on March 16, 1966. Hartz has covered every
manned flight after that from 1966 to 1976.
