Icons: The Voice of God

IN PHILADELPHIA, JOHN Facenda’s fame had grown until he could hardly move among the public in peace. His young son, Jack, watched him shake hands at restaurants until his food grew cold. He famously treated the public like family. He gave away his watch, once. He gave away money. He gave away his time. “I was a copy boy then,” says Bill Baldini, who went on to cover Philadelphia as a television reporter for four decades. “There was nothing lower than a copy boy. And John Facenda always treated me the same way he treated the station’s general manager.”

Facenda was the archetypal Philadelphia star, and he felt a responsibility to shine. His position did limit his home life, though; before Jack came home from school each day, Facenda left for work. He did news at 6 p.m., then again at 11, and typically got home sometime early the next morning. On most days, Jack saw and heard his father more on television than in person; a face in the corner, a voice murmuring during dinnertime. A TV father-figure for the city; a TV father for Jack.

John Facenda had fallen into broadcasting by accident, when he was young. He worked for the company that owned radio station WHAT, and one day the station’s announcer fell sick, so Facenda stepped in. His talent won him a job right away, although he was soon tripped up by his stubborn principles: While climbing WHAT’s radio tower to knock off ice after a storm, he tore his $5 leather gloves. When the station manager refused to reimburse him, he quit. He didn’t allow anybody to take advantage of him, even if it cost him his job.

Despite the gloves incident, Facenda went on to become a local radio star just as the new medium of television appeared. He saw its potential early, and anchored his first newscast in 1948, years before the term “anchorman” came along, much less all its blow-dried, manicured connotations. John Facenda looked like South Philly — dark Italian hair slicked back, a prizefighter’s nose, a forehead like a cinder block — but he spoke from Mount Olympus.

Facenda pioneered the evening news as America knows it when he anchored the country’s first 11 p.m. broadcast at Channel 10. The station’s producers called the idea crazy: Who would stay up that late to hear the news? But Facenda’s face and voice became so ubiquitous that Philadelphians waited to hear his sign-off — “Have a nice night tonight and a good day tomorrow. Goodnight, all” — as a cue to turn off their televisions and go to sleep.

Facenda’s fame — and his identity through that fame — was both a blessing and a curse to young Jack. “Sometimes I resented the intrusion on our private life,” he says now. “People can be unthinking. … ” His voice tightens. “If my mother and dad and I were out for a rare dinner at a restaurant, people would keep coming over — ‘John, come over and meet my wife’ — and I would think, can’t you understand there’s a family having dinner here?”

There’s a certain ownership a boy feels for his father, a certain greedy love, a certain bottomless capacity for attention and time, and perhaps even more so if the son knows his father largely in reproduced form.

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