Former Channel 5 anchor dies

Ron Hunter

Former news anchor Ron Hunter worked at Chicago's WMAQ-Ch. 5 in the 1970s. (handout photo)

Ron Hunter was compared to the vain and vapid Ted Baxter of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" when he was an anchor at Chicago's WMAQ-Ch. 5 in the 1970s. He was labeled a "pompadoured pomposity" by Chicago magazine.

But Mr. Hunter, who worked with Jane Pauley and Maury Povich, also won an Emmy Award as part of the station's team coverage of a hostage situation at a South Side currency exchange.

Mr. Hunter, 70, died this week in Las Vegas, his daughter said.

He was replaced in 1978 and went on to TV stations in Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans, before turning to radio in Louisiana. He made news in 1990 when his wife, Marilou "Bunny" Hunter, died of a reportedly self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest, while Mr. Hunter lay next to her in bed.

Hours earlier, she had called Mr. Hunter's radio talk show while he interviewed a sex therapist to discuss their marital problems. The coroner said there was no evidence her death was a homicide, but Mr. Hunter could not escape the headlines. His station fired him a few days later, and he fell on hard times after that.

He grew up in Bogalusa, La., where his father had been mayor, and it was where he started his career in newspaper and radio work. His family founded the Bogalusa Enterprise, and he worked at the newspaper as a boy before turning to radio broadcasting, he told The Times-Picayune newspaper in 1990.

While in Chicago, he had his own late-night talk show, "Ron Hunter Today." But critics hounded him. Gary Deeb, the former Tribune critic, wrote that Mr. Hunter was "a smooth anchorman who delivers the news in a straight fashion . . . [but] when he covers a story himself, his writing tends to be cloyingly dramatic."

A Time magazine story about anchormen likened him to the fictitious Ted Baxter.

In Philadelphia, he was reportedly the highest paid anchor in the city and trumpeted by KYW-TV as being its savior. But ratings sagged and he moved on to New Orleans, where he made a failed effort to start his own TV station.

Original here