Category: Featured Legacies Home

Robert “Bob” Mulholland, Medill alumnus and former Medill professor and broadcast chair, died peacefully March 9 in Naples, Florida. He was 87.

Mulholland received his bachelor’s degree at Medill in 1955 and his master’s in 1956. After serving for two years in the U.S. Army in Korea, his career was spent in broadcasting, most of it with NBC. He joined NBC in 1961 as a news writer in the network’s Chicago station, WMAQ-TV. Twenty years later, he was named president and chief operating officer of the entire company. In the intervening years, Mulholland worked in the NBC News London bureau; was the Washington producer for the well-known “Huntley-Brinkley Report;” was director of news for KNBC, the NBC-owned station in Los Angeles; was executive producer of the “NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor;” and was executive vice president of NBC News.

“Bob’s contributions to Medill are still seen today through our outstanding broadcast journalism program,” said Medill Dean Charles Whitaker. “His legacy lives through all the students who use his lessons to share some of today’s most important stories. We will forever be thankful for his talent and tenacity, and grateful that he chose to share it with Medill.”

Mulholland was named president of the NBC network in 1976, and in 1981, he was promoted to president and chief operating officer, assuming additional responsibility for the company’s five owned television stations, as well as the news, sports and radio divisions. He left NBC in 1984.

Mulholland returned to his alma mater in 1988, where he is credited with revamping and revitalizing Medill’s broadcast program.

David Nelson, associate professor emeritus and Mulholland’s colleague and friend, recalled, “A grin that welcomed you as a friend. A heart open to all. A commitment to journalistic accuracy and fairness. And an exceptional intellect sprinkled with curiosity. Bob Mulholland was special. Really special.

“I got to know him for 50 years, he admirably remained the same person – in the board room, in the classroom, on the golf course or tennis court. And, oh, did I mention his sense of humor? About 20 years ago Bob and I helped Dillon Smith drive his antique Bentley from Chicago to Naples. I drove. Dillon directed. Bob sat in the luxurious back with teak table down, food and beverages at the ready. Several times cars and even trucks would slow down to see who was in this Rolls Royce. Dillon would say: ‘Bob, another one’s coming up on the left and looking.’ Bob would grab the Grey Poupon mustard jar from the table, hold it out the window and flash that smile that could stretch from New York to Los Angeles. We played like high school kids all the way to Florida.”

While at Medill, Mulholland was named in the 1952 and 1953 Syllabus yearbooks as one of the top members of the varsity rifle team. At the time, he chose a letter blanket instead of a jacket, but upon returning to Medill to teach, he decided he would like a jacket.

“How many faculty members have an NU letter jacket?” he told the Daily in September of 1989, adding, “Now I can’t wait for the cold.”

That same year, Mulholland spearheaded the expansion of Medill’s quarter-long externship program, then called Teaching Newspaper, to include television stations. He was adamant that the students have a chance to do real broadcast work, telling the Daily Northwestern, “I would like them to go to smaller stations where they will do everything. I don’t want them to go into Chicago where they’ll just stand and watch.” The first five students were placed into television stations in the fall quarter of 1990.

It was also during Mulholland’s tenure that a new studio building was constructed in partnership with the School of Speech, now School of Communication. The building, John J. Louis Hall, opened in the fall of 1991 and featured a state-of-the-art broadcast studio for Medill students, complete with fold-out bleachers so students could watch the productions and carrels for the student reporters to write their stories.

“Bob and I have been friends from the time we met at Medill in 1956,” said friend and MSJ classmate Al Borcover. “From the outset, he was a friendly, professional, humble, funny guy. He was a great scrounger. Shortly after he joined the Medill faculty, I recall that he was able to get a satellite dish (I believe from WGN) to provide live feeds for his students, and an anchor desk that was being discarded by Channel 5. Bob was always a hands-on guy. He was a pro at Medill, WGN, NBC and throughout his life.”

In the spring of 1992, Mulholland spoke to a group of Northwestern students in the Communications Residential College. His talk, “Television in the year 2000,” covered five decades of TV history and included some prophetic forecasts for the future. Accurately, he predicted that fiber-optic cable would create thousands of available channels and total viewer control. “New technology may also allow viewers to ‘punch up’ any program they want, at any time of the day, for a fee,” Mulholland told the students.

Medill Professor Emeritus Donna Leff headed the search committee for Mulholland’s replacement. “​Bob Mulholland was a consummate broadcast professional who brought distinction, honor and considerable joy to Medill,” Leff said. “Although famous, and truly accomplished at the highest levels of network television when network television was the industry’s gold standard, Bob was a dedicated, accessible and beloved teacher.”

He retired from Medill in 1993 and was inducted into the Medill Hall of Achievement’s inaugural class in 1997.

Mulholland is survived by his wife, Judith, of Naples, Florida, daughter, Leslie (Leigh) Anderson (Chris) of Amherst, New Hampshire, son, Todd Mulholland (Licet) of Naples, Florida and stepsons, Michael Holleran of Warrenton, Virginia and Matthew Holleran of Menlo Park and San Francisco, Calif. and seven grandchildren.

Mulholland met Judith while he was working at Medill after NBC. Shortly after, they both retired and moved to Naples, Florida.

About their joint retirement, Judith said, “We took up golf, something neither of us had tried before, and Bob discovered gardening. He loved working in the yard. He enjoyed creating beds of plants, many of which he shared with others and others shared with him. On March 23, we will have been married 30 years.”

About his distinguished career, Judith said, “Bob had an exciting career at NBC, eventually becoming President. During his years there, he helped launch the careers of Tom Brokaw, Bryant Gumbel and Tom Snyder. He negotiated Johnny Carson’s contract in Johnny’s kitchen after one difficult season, just the two of them.”

Photo: Mulholland on the roof of Kresge Hall with new studio building in the background. Undated photo courtesy of the NU Archives. 

Published in the Washington Post – April 10, 2020

Byline: Adam Bernstein, Washington Post
Photo: Darran Simon while at CNN Digital. (Jeremy Freeman/CNN)

Darran Simon, a journalist who developed an expertise reporting on trauma during a wide-ranging career that had recently brought him to The Washington Post, where he covered District politics and government, died April 9, 2020. He was 43.

Simon was born in England and spent his childhood in the South American nation of Guyana and in New Jersey. In his professional life, he displayed restless curiosity as well as deep compassion for people who had endured natural catastrophe and man-made violence.

“I am drawn to writing about suffering and trauma,” he once noted, “because I am in awe of the human spirit’s ability to persevere.”
After two years as the Miami Herald’s minority affairs reporter, he moved to New Orleans in 2007 as an education reporter for the Times-Picayune, compelled to document the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “Down the road, 35 years from now, when memories are all I have,” he told the University of Rhode Island alumni magazine, “I’ll be able to look back at this time and remember this experience.”

He wrote about school reconstruction and covered accountability issues as well as the upending of students’ lives in a city of dramatic inequities even before the storm. “History often depends on who is telling it,” he said. “My role is to try to understand it and paint a full picture.”

A reserved and conscientious reporter, he went on to cover crime for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was a general assignment reporter for Newsday, and was a senior writer with CNN Digital in Atlanta focusing on national and international breaking news before starting March 2 on The Post’s Metro staff.

In covering the city government’s preparations for handling the coronavirus outbreak, he reported on official pronouncements as well as delivering humane accounts of local victims of the disease, including a former “Jeopardy” contestant.

“Darran had an immediate impact at The Post with his talent, grace and earnest devotion to his work,” said Mike Semel, The Post’s top metro editor. “He was here barely a week when the city he was covering shut down because of coronavirus. But he forged ahead and found great stories to tell.

“Despite his short tenure,” Semel continued, “we entrusted him to write the main coronavirus news story several times over the past couple of weeks — taking feeds from his colleagues and weaving those into a coherent story. He worked so well with everyone and was a graceful, fluid writer. But beyond that, he was just a nice guy with an electric smile.”

Darran Anthony Simon was born in London to Guyanese students on March 18, 1977. He lived in Guyana until he was 9 before the family settled in Iselin, N.J. His mother is a middle-school teacher and his father, an accountant, is a securities regulator for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

At the University of Rhode Island, Simon was on the men’s track and field team, won awards for student leadership and shared a top prize from the Association of Social and Behavioral Scientists for a comparative study on black student activism in the 1970s and the 1990s. He graduated in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in English and, energized by his work on the campus newspaper, received a master’s degree in 2004 from Northwestern University’s journalism school.
His marriage to Karin Pryce ended in divorce. Survivors include his parents, Stephen Simon and Jacqueline Simon, both of Iselin; a brother; a sister; and a grandmother.

Simon brought particular sensitivity to follow-up interviews after a tragedy that served to humanize statistics. One example, for CNN, was a profile of the spiritual leader who took over the flock of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., after a white supremacist killed nine members, including its pastor, in 2015.

In July 2019, Simon was among 15 journalists chosen from about 300 applicants for the week-long Ochberg Fellowship at Columbia University journalism school’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
Dart Center Executive Director Bruce Shapiro called him a “quiet, curious and very deeply engaged journalist” who had spent years writing about survivors of violence in some of the toughest cities in the United States, from New Orleans to Camden, N.J., and how they cope with those experiences.

For all his drive to make loss more intimate, or perhaps because of it, Mr. Simon was also known as a roving epicure with a sharp understated cool to his wardrobe and an ear for sumptuous music. On his website,  Simon described himself as a “a foodie and a jazz lover who will travel anywhere for a good meal and a horn section.”

Murray Olderman, an author and journalist who for more than six decades chronicled the sports world with his nationally syndicated cartoons in addition to writing features and columns, died on Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 98.

Olderman was inducted into Medill’s Hall of Achievement in 2015. He traveled to Chicago to receive his award.

Olderman graduated as a journalism major from the University of Missouri. He received another bachelor’s degree from Stanford, where he studied French in a World War II Army program and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After the war, he obtained his master’s from Medill.

From Mickey Mantle to Joe Namath and Bear Bryant to Tiger Woods, Olderman  covered them all. For 35 years he was a syndicated columnist and cartoonist whose work was distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association to 650 daily newspapers. After serving as executive editor of NEA, he retired from the syndicate but remains active as a writer and artist.

One of the leading national authorities on pro football, Olderman was a past president of the Football Writers Association of America and the founder of the Jim Thorpe Trophy (for the NFL’s most valuable player) and the Maurice Podoloff Trophy (for the NBA’s MVP). His football murals hang in the Pro Football Hall of Fame at Canton, Ohio. He was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and is in the writers’ wing of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

In 2013, he published a personal account of his time in the war. “A year apart…Letters from War-Torn Europe,” featured his letters to his wife written from Europe at the end of World War II with added insight into his experience abroad and his family.

He is survived by his daughter Lorraine and another daughter, Marcia Linn; a son, Mark; a sister, Diane Morton; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Nancy (Calhoun) Olderman, died in 2011.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/sports/murray-olderman-dead.html

Photo: Taya Lynn Gray/The Desert Sun