Dillon Smith, Chicago TV newsman known for his editorials, dead at 71
BY MAUREEN O’DONNELL Staff Reporter Twitter: @suntimesobits February 26, 2013 12:30PM
Dillon Smith, a longtime TV newsman in Chicago at WMAQ-TV and WGN-TV, has died at age 71.
Updated: March 28, 2013 6:21AM
The broadcast bug bit Dillon Smith early. His grandmother stoked his interest in the news by telling him stories about surviving the Johnstown flood of 1889, when a dam collapse killed 2,209 people in his Pennsylvania hometown.
Mr. Smith went on to become an influential broadcaster at Chicago’s WGN-TV and at WMAQ-TV. During a 15-year career at WMAQ, he was a five-time Emmy-winning producer, program director and editorial director. Mr. Smith, 71, died Friday at the Naples, Fla., home where he lived with his third wife, Patti. At the time, he was doing one of his favorite things: watching golf on TV. His home — which bordered the Quail Creek Country Club, where he often golfed — featured an embroidered chair pillow that said: “If There Isn’t Golf in Heaven, I’m Not Going.” While at Northwestern, he visited WMAQ, impressing Robert E. Mulholland, who would go on to be president and chief operating officer of NBC. “He was inquisitive, just nuts about broadcasting, wanted to know everything about broadcasting and how it all worked,” Mulholland said. Mr. Smith began his career at WGN in the late 1960s, said his daughter, Lisa Fulton.
He produced editorials on the Equal Rights Amendment, encouraging the Republican Party to avoid “weasel-worded” policies that gave the proposal only lip service.
“The party’s nominee-to-be, Ronald Reagan, is 100 percent in favor of equal rights for women,” Mr. Smith said in one broadcast editorial, “and 100 percent against ratification of the ERA. That puts him right up there, straddling the old ranch fence.”
His “Beef about It” editorials, which questioned butchers’ union regulations that prohibited meat sales after 6 p.m., helped make it possible for Chicagoans to buy meat at any time in groceries. “He understood the role the news department played, and you had to support that mission — because, besides a profit component, there had to be a public-service component,” said Chicago Sun-Times columnist and NBC5 political editor Carol Marin. Mr. Smith sometimes went out with a camera to busy places like Woodfield Mall to get interviews, asking people to weigh in on any issue that was on their minds. After retiring from WMAQ in 1984, he started Dillon Smith Communications, a production company that worked with comedian Tom Dreesen and Chicago Bear Tim Wrightman. One of his favorite trips was to the golf mecca of St Andrews in Scotland. “For him, it was like going to a cathedral, or going to the Louvre,” said his son, Kevin Smith. Throughout his life, he was an early adapter when it came to technology. One of the first to get a Kindle, he used to seal it in a quart-size plastic bag so he could read in the hot tub, his son said. He remained an active NU alum, according to Mulholland, who said, “Right up until his death, he was interviewing prospective candidates in Florida for the [Northwestern] Law School.”
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