Evansville TV icon Brad Byrd is leaving the airwaves after 46 years
It’s 3 p.m. on Wednesday. Brad Byrd is dressed for work in a gray suit, white dress shirt and dark tie with blue dots. In two hours − as he has done thousands of times before − he will go on the air to anchor the weeknight news.
But for the moment, he’s talking about the latest milestone in a long career packed with milestones.
“I’m departing from Channel 25,” Byrd said.
It’s taken a long time to reach this point. He’s been the weeknight anchor at WEHT-ABC25 for more than 46 years. If there’s anybody in America who has been a television news anchor longer than that at the same station, in the same time slot, the 72-year-old Byrd can’t name them.
As an on-the-ground TV reporter in his early years, and as a new anchor for many more years, Byrd has delivered news about some of Evansville’s, and the Tri-state’s, most momentous stories.
Many were tragic.
On the night of Dec. 13, 1977, a DC-3 airplane carrying the University of Evansville basketball team crashed shortly after takeoff from the Evansville airport. At dawn the next day, Byrd was on the scene reporting as part of WFIE-TV’s Live Eye 14, the Tri-State’s first live broadcasting unit, from a bluff overlooking the shattered airplane. None of the 29 aboard the plane survived.
Later, Byrd was in a portion of a community center where family members were brought in to identify victims.
“I could hear the sounds of wailing going on” in another room, he said. “It was just so sad. A lot of us grew up that night.”
There would be other tragedies. Shootings in which multiple family victims were killed. The 1992 crash of a C-130 military plane into the Drury Inn and JoJo’s restaurant near Evansville Regional Airport. The 2005 tornado that took 25 lives, many at Eastbrook mobile home park.
“The tragedies in Evansville, I’ve learned from it,” Byrd said. “The single concept is to tell the truth.”
Indeed, truth is at the core of his ethos as a broadcast journalist.
“I try to offer a calming voice in times of chaos,” Byrd said. When broadcasting breaking news live, “The way I view it, our viewers are right by my side. I’m seeing things for the first time. I try to keep it in context and stay calm.”
For example, after the 2005 tornado, he was determined to stay disciplined. Regardless of televised images, “I said we’re not going to report fatalities until they are confirmed by authorities.”
Unlike people on social media who feel free to speculate and exaggerate, Byrd said he remains committed to facts. “People like me on the anchor desk, we’re the last filter before it gets out,” he said. He wants to get it right.
“If we make mistakes, I like to get it out as quickly as possible: We made a mistake and we’re trying to set it right.”
“Social media can do wonderful things,” Byrd said. “It can bring families together. It can help people in pain.
“But there is an underside to that, slowly doing great harm to our populace by spreading misinformation that’s intentional.”
Byrd worries that the field he cherishes is under assault, whether from social media activists who spread misinformation (unwittingly) or disinformation (intentionally) or from political figures who paint the news media as an enemy that should be ignored, or worse.
“Journalism,” he said, “is under siege.”
Not all of the stories have been tragic
Byrd’s news career has not all been about reporting on tragedy or controversy.
He has enjoyed paying tributes to veterans, for example. Allen Sanderson was a P-47 fighter pilot during World War II who survived 118 missions and lived to be age 99. In 2020, Byrd and cameraman John Simpson flew to Houston with Sanderson to witness a P-47 Thunderbolt being flown back to Evansville, where they had been assembled during the war, so it could be displayed at the Evansville Wartime Museum.
In 2018, Byrd and Simpson collaborated on a story, “The Reverend and the Politician,” on the 50th anniversary of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. For that broadcast, Byrd and Simpson received a national Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Writing.
Byrd has been to Yankee Stadium to feature Evansville legend Don Mattingly, and traveled to Poland to see how youngsters benefitted from baseball gear donated from the Tri-state.
A native of Muncie, Indiana, Byrd said he “got hooked (on journalism) when I was a teen growing up during the most tumultuous decade” of the 1960s with jarring events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy — with the subsequent four days of nearly nonstop television coverage — the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the assassinations two months apart in 1968 of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
“I guess I was an impressionable youth,” Byrd said. “It’s not that I wanted to be on TV so much, but the ability to witness (and report on) events like that.”
Brad Byrd came to Evansville in 1975
He graduated from Ball State University, studying communications and journalism, and after a year with a TV station in Fort Wayne, landed a job in July 1975 as weekend anchor with Evansville’s WFIE-TV, where he worked with local broadcast legends such as David James, Mike Blake and Ann Komis.
In January 1978, WEHT hired him as its weekend anchor, just in time to report on historic blizzards.
And thus began his stretch of more than 46 years as a local news anchor.
Byrd cherishes “wonderful colleagues” he worked with, and often mentored, over the decades.
He, in turn, is beloved by colleagues such as Shelley Kirk, with whom he first shared an anchor desk some 30 years ago.
“He is one of a kind,” Kirk said. “We wouldn’t be where we are today” without him.
Byrd, she said, is “the best.”
“I wouldn’t be where I am, professionally, as a news person (without) his constant example of professionalism, of kindness, of taking the time for the next person, of honoring news and journalism and getting it right,” she said, pausing to harness her emotions.
“All the things journalism should be, he exhibits,” Kirk continued. “He values journalism and he wants others to value it as well. He’s had such an impact on so many people who have come through these doors. Countless people reach out to him, to tell him what he means to them.”
Few people have the perspective of Byrd’s career as does Lloyd Winnecke. Years, ago, Winnecke was WEHT’s news director. After many years in the banking industry, he was elected to the first of three terms as mayor of Evansville, serving 12 years. Now, he is CEO of the Evansville Regional Economic Partnership.
“First of all, he’s the consummate professional, telling the best stories with the greatest accuracy,” Winnecke said of Byrd. “Always wanting to make sure everything’s 100% right all of the time,” he said.
“Since I heard the news (of Byrd leaving Channel 25) earlier today, I’ve been thinking of him a lot and my years in the newsroom there. What I remember the most about Brad, he always pushed us to do better, pushed us to do impactful stories and not just take the easiest route to a story. He was about telling stories. but also about making sure the stories told were important.”
During his years as mayor, Winnecke was interviewed by Byrd many times on WTVW’s InDepth public affairs program at 9 p.m. broadcasts.
“It was really easy, and not just because we were long-time former colleagues,” Winnecke said. “Because I was totally confident that whatever I told Brad would be depicted accurately, without embellishment and without any bias.”
“Just a really humble human being,” he said of Byrd, “who takes his craft seriously and is just a real pleasure to work with. It will seem odd to not see him on television every night.”
'He almost became a friend to people'
“I think he’s done a terrific job as anchor,” John Morris, instructor in radio and television at the University of Southern Indiana for more than 30 years, said. “That many years, he almost became a friend to people.”
Even from a mid-market television market, Morris said, “You could stack him up against any anchor” in the country for being able to “convey intelligence and knowledge.”
Byrd might be stepping away from the anchor desk at Channel 25, but he isn’t vanishing.
He said he intends to continue the numerous community service programs he’s been involved with for years, such as telethons for the Easter Seals Rehabilitation Center, the Santa Clothes drive, fundraisers for the American Heart Association (“I have heart disease. It’s no secret.”), hosting Evansville Business Hall of Fame ceremonies for the past 19 years and more. He’s received numerous awards for his work in such charitable initiatives.
And he has been honored professionally as well. He is a member of the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame (2005), The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Silver Circle (2005), the Indiana Broadcasters Fairbanks Hall of Fame (2016) and The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Gold Circle (2022).
He has received multiple Regional Emmy, Associated Press and Society of Professional Journalists awards.
“I’ve been a very lucky man,” Byrd said.
He acknowledges he has had help.
“My wife of 32 years (T.J.), she watches my back,” Byrd said.
One night, T.J. called the station to inform him that throughout the first segment of a newscast, the collar of his suit jacket had been flipped up. Like some 1950s street corner hoodlum.
“When I came home that night, I told her I was just trying to look cool,” he recalled.
Now, with his nightly appearances on television nearing an end, he has a new fashion concern.
“What to do with all these suits,” he deadpanned.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Brad Byrd leaving WEHT Channel 25 after long career
