Decades before every Mary, Joe and Harry had a camera and a microphone in their pockets and ability to broadcast news or nothing burgers to the entire world, there was Gabe Pressman.
Pressman, the legendary New York City WNBC newsman who died Friday at 93, was the city’s first roving television reporter and a singular force in local news.
While other journalists were still scribbling quotes in their notebooks, or reading wire stories to their producers and editors, Pressman — a rumpled and pushy journalist, beloved for his everyman, middle-class broadcasting style — had already shoved a microphone into a newsmaker’s face and got it all on tape.
He did all his own reporting and across a broadcasting career that spanned more than 60 years, covered every New York City mayor from Robert F. Wagner to Bill de Blasio and countless stories in between.
He was there when the Beatles landed at JFK in 1964, he was on the scene during the big blackouts in 1965 and the most terrifying one in 1977.
Pressman could be found pushing his way to the front of the crowd gathered around heinous crime scenes, protests, train or plane crashes, election events, accidents, scandals, strikes and the terrorist attacks that wounded the World Trade Center in 1993 and the one that brought the towers crashing down in 2001.
Even at age 93, Pressman didn’t stop. In March, he was on the street again to cover New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.
As always, he had his microphone in his hand.
And it was one of many that Pressman had pushed into the faces of our culture’s most famous and infamous — from the most powerful people on the planet to those who were most vulnerable.
He grilled Fidel Castro, wooed Marilyn Monroe, talked music with Elvis, politics with Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights with Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Others he orbited included Eleanor Roosevelt, New York’s various governors, U.S. Presidents, the homeless, the powerless and the mentally ill.
But politics was his true love. Countless politicians were his guests on WNBC’s “News Forum” on Sundays and he could be found over the years moderating political debates (including a singularly great one once between Senate candidates Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer), town hall meetings and even an occasional argument on the street.
And as always, he had his microphone.