Fame rested so lightly on the shoulders of television newsman Joel Daly that one afternoon some years ago, when he was sitting on the Randolph Street steps of the Chicago Cultural Center, he didn’t seem to mind at all that few of the hundreds of people walking by gave him a second look.
“Fine with me,” he said. “They get enough of me on TV.”
A daily presence in the lives of a couple of generations of Chicago television news viewers, Daly died early Thursday. He had been suffering from vascular parkinsonism, a condition marked by a series of mini strokes. He had been in hospice care at the suburban home of his daughter Kelly. He was 86 years old.
“He died peacefully,” said his daughter, who was with him at the time. “This is the way I believe he wanted his life to end and he was able to see his beloved dog.
“I was the youngest child and the only girl and when he pushed me, I would push back,” said his daughter, a former Cook County State’s Attorney. “We were so very much alike in that way and I realize that his mentorship and guidance made me stronger. He did have what I like to think of as his golden rule. It was not complicated. It was ‘Just be kind.'”
Joel Daly was born Aug. 21, 1934, in Great Falls, Mont. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale University in 1956. He served in the U.S. Army, stationed in New York and Panama, and worked in radio and television in Cleveland before coming to Chicago.
In 1967 he was paired at ABC’s WLS-Ch. 7 news anchor desk with Fahey Flynn and, in the company of sportscaster Bill Frink and weatherman John Coleman, they successfully crafted a brand of news that would become known as “happy talk.”
Previously, TV news types were characterized by straight-faced, stuffy seriousness when they read the news of the day. By loosening up and lightly (and playfully) bantering between stories and segments, the WLS-Ch. 7 foursome not only climbed to the top of the ratings but influenced a generation of television news personalities and broadcasts.
“We came down from Olympus, and we just became regular people talking to regular people. It’s the best form of communication,” Daly once told a reporter.
He worked alongside the older, white-haired Flynn for many years and also with Mary Ann Childers, Linda Yu and, for a time as an “experiment” before her superstardom came calling, Oprah Winfrey. For a while he was able to display gifts that defied the “happy talk” label, contributing frequent commentaries that were erudite, serious and intelligent.
Though many television personalities have interesting lives beyond the screen, few explored their intellectual and artistic curiosity and talent more energetically than Daly. Among his outside-TV activities: piloting airplanes; singing with the Sundowners country band; championship yodeling, a talent he developed as a child in Montana; attending Chicago-Kent College of Law at night and passing the Illinois bar exam in 1988; and taking to various local stages as an actor playing, among many roles, Atticus Finch in a 1994 Wisdom Bridge Theatre production of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
He had been married since 1955 to Sue Weiss, a delightful and self-assured woman. He often talked of their years together, trips to a summer home in Wisconsin, late night dinners at restaurants near their west suburban home.
“I used to wait on them sometimes at a restaurant in LaGrange after Joel’s nightly news broadcast,” said Beth Myburgh. “Joel was in jeans and cowboy boots along with his sport coat and tie. They were so down to earth and friendly. He was a gem.”
On those Cultural Center steps, he was in rehearsals for the demanding role of attorney Clarence Darrow in the one-man show “Clarence Darrow” by David Rintels. He was still working full-time as a news anchor and he did talk about his career: the foreign travels for stories; the many events and people he had met along the way, especially about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He talked of his family, his love for dogs and theater and Darrow.
He would retire in 2005 but appeared occasionally on newscasts, reporting on legal matters and hosting the St. Patrick’s Day parade. He won a pile of Emmys, was inducted into the Hall of Fame and received the first Illinois Broadcast Pioneer Award. He taught in law school, worked as information officer of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and wrote a fine and lively biography, “The Daly News: A Life on Television News” (Eckhartz Press).
Sue died in 2016 of complications from lung cancer at their La Grange Highlands home. They had suffered the pain of losing two adult sons, Doug and Scott.
On the Cultural Center steps he picked up his script and, saying “This is my favorite part,” started to read aloud, a portion of Darrow’s his famous summation in the 1924 defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb for murder, “I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men.”
Recognizing that voice, people stopped on the sidewalk to listen. A crowd formed.
Daly is survived by daughter Kelly, sister Viola Patrice Kraus and granddaughters Kate and Madison. Services will be private.
UPDATE: This obituary has been updated and lengthened since it was first published.
