Dick DeWitt, 1933-2015

“It hasn’t been a good few months in the Reno media world, as we’ve lost several good people,” writes my dear friend, Elizabeth Rose on Facebook.

She couldn’t be more right as longtime Reno TV and radio newsman Richard DeWitt Oakerson, better known as ‘Dick DeWitt,’ passed away May 14, 2015, following a battle with cancer.  He was 81-years-old.

Born in Maryville, Missouri, July 16, 1933, he graduated from Maryville High School and Maryville College, then serving in the United States Marine Reserve, before joining the Air Force and being assigned to the Armed Forces Radio Network in Taiwan. After leaving the Air Force, he found work as the editor of the Del Rio, Texas, News Herald, before moving back to Kansas City to start his radio/television news reporting career at KCKN, working there 1960 to 1963.

In fact, in the October 10, 1960 edition of “Billboard,” reported: “Dick DeWitt, KCKN, Kansas City, Kan., says his three-month-old daughter, Laura Diane, is already following the deejay path with loud testing of her vocal chords.”

He later moved to Eureka, California to do the news on two of the three area TV stations. As a kid, I remember when he headed up the 6:30 newscast on Channel 3 KIEM-TV and did the news for Channel 6 KVIQ-TV.

He moved his family to Reno in the late 1960’s to be the news director for Channel 4 KRNV where he worked for over 20 years.  The Nevada Broadcast Association’s Hall of Fame inducted him in 1998.

In 2011, during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Eureka and Arcata, and years after he had left Northern California, his memory was still being invoked, “Dick DeWitt was a good reporter…,” and “…I still miss Dick DeWitt’s newscasts…”

Any broadcaster who came from that area in the year’s since, including me, should be so fortunate to be remembered in such good light over four decade’s later. He was news director for radio stations, KROW and KNEV in the late 80s and early 90s, where I had the opportunity to work for him in the news department.

Dick remained on the air for another decade after KROW changed its call-letters to KKOH and its long-established country-music format to news-talk. In 2005,  AllAccess online reported that he was recovering in Washington state following cancer surgery.

He’ll be missed.