It was in 1909, when radio & TV newsman Robert Trout was born in rural North Carolina. While with CBS before & after World War 2 Trout became known as the "Iron Man of Radio" for his incredible ability to ad lib, as well as his stamina, composure, and elocution. He died Nov 14, 2000 at age 91. Trout was born Robert Albert Blondheim in Wake County, North Carolina; he added the Trout name early in his radio career. He entered broadcasting in 1931 as an announcer at WJSV, an independent station in Alexandria, Virginia, founded in the early 1920s by James S. Vance. In the summer of 1932 WJSV was acquired by CBS, bringing Trout into the CBS fold. (WJSV is now WFED in Washington D.C.) He was the man who used the on-air label "fireside chat" to regular radio broadcasts of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression and World War II. (Trout actually credited the genesis of phrase to Harry Butcher, a CBS vice president in Washington.) Trout was behind the microphone for many of broadcasting's firsts. He was the first to report live congressional hearings, first to transmit from a flying airplane and by some definitions the first to broadcast a daily news program and to create the news anchorman role. It was Bob Trout in the mid-1930s who passed on to a then-new CBS executive, Edward R. Murrow, the value of addressing the radio audience intimately, as if the announcer was talking to one person. Trout played a key role in Murrow's development as a broadcaster, and the two would remain colleagues until Murrow left the network in 1961, and friends until Murrow's death in 1965.
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