…to Charles Herring, Seattle’s and the Northwest’s first TV newscaster (at KING from 1951 to 1967), who passed away this Monday.

Herring’s solid, if square, demeanor helped give the new medium of local TV news a brand of credibility, back in those pre-sound-bite, pre-helicopter days. He’s best known today for his live coverage of the 1962 World’s Fair, preserved on kinescope films and excerpted in many subsequent documentaries.

His final newscast was immediately followed by his appearance in a filmed commercial for White Front, a discount-store chain expanding into the area from California. Herring’s straight-shooting reputation didn’t do much to boost White Front, which folded within six years. (A small subsidiary chain, Toys “R” Us, survived.)

Around the time White Front disappeared, Herring’s son Chuck briefly ran a bookstore on Capitol Hill and self-pubilshed his own essay book, If I Don’t Do This, I’ll Never Do Anything. The “this” the younger Herring was struggling to do? Pubilsh that very book.

The elder Herring ran a mom-and-pop radio station in Port Angeles, then returned to Seattle and worked in Boeing’s industrial-video unit until 1987.