By Grant Pick
It’s not a big story, but it demonstrates Walters’s skill at storytelling. “Phil could take a simple notion and peel it down like an onion so you’d see its facets, its dimensions,” says Channel Two’s Carol Marin, who worked with Walters for years. “And I don’t care if you’re talking about a 7-Eleven robbery or the irony in how you market Father’s Day. On TV you can’t fake it. It’s much more revealing than people think–television strips away whether you are the real thing or a fraud. People get that, especially in Chicago. Phil was an authentic voice and gifted writer. He was one of the best working reporters in this city.”
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He came to Channel Five as a newswriter in 1967 and was soon producing the noon news with host Jorie Lueloff. He was a zealous booker. The day after Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed in a December 1969 police raid, Walters got an explosive Bobby Rush to appear live with Lueloff. Yet Walters was disorganized and always running late. His colleagues dubbed him “Captain Chaos,” and the nickname stuck.
Walters first got on the air by freelancing movie reviews. In 1976 he was hired to deliver Washington news for Channel Two and other CBS stations, and three years later he returned to Chicago as a general-assignment reporter, covering crime, politics, and sports and doing features. Bill Kurtis and Walter Jacobson were then anchoring the nightly broadcasts, and reporters had more freedom to choose their pieces than they do today and more time to deliver them, sometimes as much as three minutes.
Walters was perfectly capable of doing dumb pieces. One Thanksgiving evening he was dispatched to do a take on last-minute preparations. “The sun is setting and store shoppers are hefting glaciated birds that still must somehow get thawed and roasted in a matter of hours,” he said, standing in a grocery aisle. “If misery loves company, this should make you feel better.”
Walters and Weiss had had a son, Tyce, in 1986, when Walters was 44. He taught his son to fish and play chess, and he began going to the theater after Tyce developed an interest in plays. “We were friends and father and son,” says Tyce. “I don’t know if it can be described, we were so close.”
Walters had smoked for years. It was an issue for Weiss, and he hid it from Tyce. His son only learned of his father’s habit when he was ten and a friend told him he’d seen Walters smoking. Of course everyone at work knew. He smoked in the office at the Merchandise Mart, then in the smoking room near the cafeteria at the NBC Tower. When the smoking room vanished he went outside by the loading dock. Company policy outlawed smoking in the TV trucks, so Walters puffed outdoors. Once he made the mistake of lighting up in a van, and a cameraman kicked him out.
