Barbara Walters, pioneering TV journalist who began on ‘TODAY,’ dies at 93

LTC Eugene Chu May she Rest in Peace...
..."Childhood exposure to celebrities
In some ways, Walters had been preparing for those trademark interviews all her life. Born in Boston on Sept. 25, 1929, Barbara Jill Walters got to see the rich and famous up close as the daughter of nightlife impresario Lou Walters, who owned clubs up and down the East Coast.

“I learned that celebrities were human beings,” Walters said in 2014. “I never thought of a celebrity as someone so perfect and wonderful that I should be put off.”

Inheriting her father’s drive, Walters graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a bachelors degree in English and broke into journalism as an assistant at NBC affiliate WRCA-TV. In 1955, she married businessman Robert Henry Katz, but her first love remained her fledgling career. The couple divorced three years later.

Hired as a writer and researcher on “TODAY,” Walters rose to become the only female producer on the show and started filing in on air occasionally as the “TODAY Girl,” a reporting role reserved for fashion shows, lifestyle trends and the weather that was previously held, among others, by Florence Henderson of “Brady Bunch” fame.

Hardly the kind of hard reporting to which Walters clearly aspired.

Off-air, Walters married the theater producer Lee Guber in 1963, with whom she adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, named after Walters’ older sister, who was developmentally disabled. The marriage would last 13 years."...

Rest in Peace.

She was a pioneer and mentored many in her field and became a legend! May she rest in peace!