Robert Trout (born Robert Albert Blondheim; October 15, 1909 – November 14, 2000) was an American broadcast news reporter who worked on radio before and during World War II for CBS News. He was regarded by some as the "Iron Man of Radio" for his ability to ad lib while on the air, as well as for his stamina, composure, and elocution. and on Professor Quiz, radio's first true quiz program.
Trout anchored the network's live early morning coverage of the June 6, 1944, Normandy invasion on D-Day by the allied forces and was behind the microphone when the bulletins announcing the end of World War II in Europe, and later Japan, came over the air.
Postwar career
Beginning April 1, 1946, Trout anchored a daily 15-minute CBS radio newscast, The News 'til Now, sponsored by Campbell's Soup. His year-and-a-half tenure on the program ended in September 1947, when Murrow—who had been CBS's vice president for public affairs—returned to on-air work and took over the broadcast. Trout left CBS for NBC, where from 1948 to 1951 he was the first emcee of the game show, Who Said That?, in which celebrities try to determine the speaker of quotations taken from recent news reports.
Trout returned to CBS in 1952. He doubled as a network correspondent and as main anchor of local evening news at CBS' New York City television flagship, WCBS-TV until June 17, 1965.
When the July 1964 CBS Television coverage of the Republican National Convention in San Francisco (anchored by Walter Cronkite) was trounced in the ratings by NBC's Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, CBS replaced Cronkite with Bob Trout and Roger Mudd for the Democratic party's August gathering in Atlantic City. The duo failed to overtake Huntley and Brinkley, and Cronkite was back at the TV anchor desk when the conventions rolled around again four years later in Miami and Chicago. Trout remained on radio but also did in-depth news features for the TV network, including field reports for the CBS News broadcast 60 Minutes.
One overlooked aspect of Trout's career was his annual appearance on bandleader Guy Lombardo's New Year's Eve specials on CBS-TV. From 1955 through 1961, Trout would report from Times Square during the broadcast, and count down the final seconds to midnight (Eastern Standard Time) for the start of the new year.
On the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963, Trout took to the streets of Manhattan and spoke on camera with New Yorkers and tourists seeking comments and reactions to the tragic events. As a member of the news team covering the live events of that day, Trout reflected on the sudden death of President Franklin Roosevelt eighteen years earlier in 1945, which he also reported in a CBS broadcast.
Trout remained at CBS through the early 1970s. He later worked for ABC, serving mostly as a correspondent based in Madrid, where he lived for most of the last two decades of his life. He was on the ABC News team that covered the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978.
In 1979, Trout received a Peabody Award for his distinguished broadcasting career.
Near the end of his life, he broadcast commentaries and essays for the program All Things Considered on National Public Radio. Some of them were reminiscences of 20th century events he covered, accompanied by recordings. Trout also continued to attend political conventions, earning him the distinction of having interviewed every U.S. President from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. In 2000, he joined his old colleague Roger Mudd for a History Channel look at the quadrennial gatherings.
Trout announces end of WWII
While reminiscing on NPR on July 9, 1999, Trout admitted that an oft-played recording of his announcing the end of World War II — "my greatest hit, as it were" — broadcast at 7 p.m. in New York City on August 14, 1945, was actually a recreation. In 1948, he was asked to re-record the opening portion of his historic broadcast announcing Japan's surrender so that a "cleaned-up" version of that announcement could be included in the first volume of Ed Murrow and Fred Friendly's "I Can Hear It Now" historical record album series. The disc recording of the original broadcast was deemed "too messy to use."
Kit was "a significant partner in his career, serving as his personal manager, providing him with research for his broadcasts, and critiquing his on-air performances"; together, they maintained a large, systematically organized collection of his papers, correspondence, press clippings, photographs, and recordings, which was bequeathed to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.