Early Life & Career
Harris, whose real name was Roy Darwin Humphrey, was born near Vidalia, Georgia. In 1957, Harris worked first for WVOP, a radio station located near the place of his birth. He then began delivering television weather reports at a station in North Carolina. From 1964 to 1968, Harris worked at WTVT in Tampa, Florida as a staff announcer. From 1968 to 1969 he worked at WTOP in Washington, DC. In December 1969, he began working as a reporter and news anchor at WFAA-TV in Dallas, TX. From 1970 to 1972 Harris concurrently co-hosted a live morning TV newsmagazine called "News 8 etc..." Harris quit WFAA in 1973 following a dispute with management.
In 1973, He began work for NBC-owned KNBC-TV in Los Angeles. In 1975, NBC promoted Harris to the network news staff, where he covered the fall of Saigon and reported from the trenches in Vietnam. American soldiers referred to Harris as "Mr. Lucky" because Harris managed to dodge bullets and avoid land mines.
Harris won four Emmys and the a DuPont/Columbia Award. In the spring of 1978, before traveling to Jonestown, Harris broadcast an investigative piece on international terrorism that ran on NBC Nightly News.
Read more about this topic: Don Harris (journalist)
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees its close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)