“I just turned left,” he says with a grin. “We’ve been here about 15 months, I think.
Leaving New York, he and his wife of 26 years, Adair, moved into their brick home on Massachusetts Avenue.
“We just love it here,” she says.
Outside, dogwoods and azaleas blaze away around their carriage drive. Inside, Beutel ruefully confesses an occasional longing for the delights of Gotham.
“I pick up the paper and see something is on,” he says. “I want to say, ‘Oh, let’s go see that.’ Of course, we can’t anymore. It is such an adjustment. I don’t pretend to tell you it has been easy. It just simply is not easy.
“Every time I see a New York license plate, every time I see a billboard saying somebody is playing tonight at Carnegie Hall, I want to go. You are part of the world, in New York.”
For decades, Beutel and his tidewater Virginia-born wife made their home in a seven-room prewar co-op at 1220 Park Ave. on the upper East Side.
“We spent almost the whole time in the same neighborhood,” she says.
Beutel anchored Eyewitness News on WABC Channel 7 in New York at 6 and 11 p.m. almost continuously from 1962 through the end of the millennium.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he started with a radio station and then moved to a television station. From there he went to CBS Radio in New York and in the fall of 1962 came to ABC as an anchor and reporter for Channel 7’s news broadcasts.
Television was his life, radio his love.
“Radio is my favorite,” he says. “It’s the biggest cliché in the world, but it happens to be true. You can create wherever you want. You can get more news in 15 minutes of radio than you can on TV. Of course, you have all that you have to carry with you. When I first started, we had those heavy cameras. On radio, it’s just a microphone.”
He finds much present-day television news reporting badly done.
“It’s really not very interesting,” he says. “It’s just ‘Here is Charlie Jones coming to you live,’ then ‘Here is Charlie Jones, signing off.’ NPR (National Public Radio) does some very good stuff. But for me, the real fun was radio.”
He’s still proud of filling in for Paul Harvey, though he did it from New York, not Harvey’s studio.
“He was always in Chicago,” Beutel says. “And if not Chicago, then Arizona. Carefree or Scottsdale.”
Beutel had wanted to be a broadcaster from the time he was a boy. He listened to radio, hearing Edward R. Murrow reporting from Europe during the Battle of Britain. He became a broadcast journalist himself, spending a 40-year career primarily with Eyewitness News.
‘One of the Building Blocks’
Everything changed, even his name. Beutel correctly should be pronounced as if it were Boytle. On his first broadcast, he heard himself introduced as Bill “Byoo-tell.”
“That’s not my name,” he told the producer at the end of the WGAR newscast. “It’s Bill ‘Boytle.’”
“Not any more,” was the curt reply.
When he went on the air for his next broadcast, the same day, he found his name had been changed from “Boytle” to “Byoo-tell.” And so it has been, ever since.
He loves to sing, once soloing at Carnegie Hall.
Audiences in New York grew used to his farewell wish when he bade them good evening: “Be well.”
“It may be that he was just born to be a great local anchorperson,” says Peter Jennings, describing Beutel.
Beutel and Roger Grimsby pioneered the local anchor news show, pattering back and forth and poking fun at each other as they became fixtures of the Manhattan scene.
“Grimsby and I never set out to be funny,” Beutel says. “We never scripted any of the bon mots that came tumbling out of his mouth in particular. I was there as kind of the censor. ‘Oh, you didn’t really mean that, Roger.’ Of course, he did mean it. That was why people watched.”
Grimsby died in 1995. Beutel soldiered on another five years. He has been described as a throwback to the old guard, a man in the Edward R. Murrow mold.
In 1975, Beutel launched a show for ABC called “A.M. America,” which was a forerunner of “Good Morning America.” ABC filled this two-hour program with news, interviews and daily feature stories to compete against NBC’s top-rated Today Show.
“A.M. America” was hosted by Beutel, co-hosted by Stephanie Edwards. Peter Jennings read the morning news.
“Anybody who starts an operation with nothing and then sees it develop into something a little bit better than nothing, has pride,” Beutel says. “That’s what’s running through my head.”
The late Sam Ervin, a U.S. Senator from North Carolina, was a regular contributor to the show, along with John Anderson, Roger Caras, John Lindsay and Dr. Timothy Johnson. “A.M. America” somehow never quite caught on, but it broke new ground for ABC and ultimately led to the hugely successful “Good Morning America.”
“Bill was one of the building blocks of ABC,” says Charlie Gibson, one of the hosts of “Good Morning America.” “He pioneered morning television. Without the work that Bill did on ‘A.M. America,’ ‘Good Morning America’ could not have succeeded. So I owe him a personal debt of gratitude.”
Television News
After graduating from Dartmouth College and going on to study law at the University of Michigan Law School, Beutel began his broadcast career as a hard news television reporter.
“I covered the 1964 political conventions,” he said. “And then, in ’65, I persuaded our money people to send me to Vietnam. That was early, a year before the blowup. It was a wonderful vantage point to see the country at that early time.”
While there, Beutel wrote and produced a documentary on the war called “Dong-Xoai, the Town the Viet Cong Couldn't Kill.” Thirty years later, he returned to Dong Xoai to write and produce another documentary on Vietnam during the three decades that passed since he first came there.
“I was there just before the Tet offensive,” he said. “Then I came back and rejoined the news team, became anchorman on Channel 7.”
By 1968 Beutel was ABC News bureau chief. He covered Northern Ireland, Israel and the Palestinians, the Arab world, peace talks to end the Vietnam war, the Nigerian civil war.
He became known for stories connecting with ordinary folks doing ordinary things.
Emmy-winner Beutel’s documentaries covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the integration of East and West Germany, Hitler’s rise and the origins of World War II and the Holocaust.
“Gentleness and peace are pretty rare commodities in the world today,” he once said.
Over the years he developed a loyal following.
“I grew up watching you,” Bernadette Peters told him when he retired. “I kinda had a secret crush on you all these years.”
‘Something of Great Value’
He’d met and interviewed the first figures of history from the Bay of Pigs and John Glenn’s space flight, through the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon years, winning wide respect.
“They don’t make them like that anymore,” said Henry Kissinger.
He never tired of the job, not as it was during his time on the air.
“I hope the legacy is not the epitaph,” Beutel said on retirement. “If I leave a legacy, and I hope I do, it’s my joy in this work. There’s never been a day that I didn’t want to come to work. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t have rather gone fishing on a given day — but I never said, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got to go down to that studio and do this thing again.’ I would hope that younger people get the same kind of joy in this kind of work.
“What we do on the tube each day, if we are giving ourselves to it, we are doing something of great value to the country, to ourselves. If we do something that is worthwhile, with God’s luck we will be happy doing it. I was.”
News has changed. Beutel doesn’t miss it so much, the way it is now.
“I don’t really miss it, for all the reasons we talk about,” he says. “Control of news has slipped away from news people.”
He’s writing his memoirs, moving on, struggling to settle in the Sandhills.
“I say this is a bend in the road, not the end of the road,” Beutel said as he bid adieu to his Eyewitness News audience the last time. “So, for now, good luck. Be well. Have a good evening.”
