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Charlie Levitt (Read 3776 times)
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Charlie Levitt
Aug 13th, 2014, 5:44pm
 
Charlie Levitt, a mentor and friend to many young journalists at Radio Humberside in the 1970s and 1980s, has died.  He was 83.

He had been the News Editor of the Hull Daily Mail before moving to the Radio Humberside newsroom, where he occupied the (highly unofficial) role of senior reporter.

He had been ill in a care home since the death of his wife, Shirley, a couple of years ago.

The funeral will be on Tuesday, August 19th at 1.30 pm at Haltemprice Crematorium.
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Re: Charlie Levitt
Reply #1 - Aug 14th, 2014, 10:19am
 
This is taken from The Guardian:

Charles Levitt
by Liz Meech
theguardian.com, Tuesday 12 August 2014 13.02 EDT


My former colleague Charles Levitt, who has died aged 83, was an inspiration to scores of young journalists throughout his long career. He was a newsman to his core and spent his working life writing and broadcasting with consummate skill. His shorthand was so accurate he once read it upside down during a live news bulletin.

Charles was born in March, Cambridgeshire, the only child of Percy and Olive. He left school at 15 and started work at the Ely office of the Cambridgeshire Times. On his way to work one morning the 19-year-old witnessed a dramatic event that almost killed him. Later he recalled "a small plane fell silently out of the sky a few hundred yards in front of me, hit the top of a building tearing off the wings, flopped onto the street, skidded and slid into a shop, shearing off the tail fin. I ran into the shop to find the pilot dead. Being first with the story is every journalist's aim, but I worked on a weekly paper which had gone to press that morning so the story appeared a week later, having run in all the nationals the following day."

Charles moved on to a more senior role at the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph and then joined the Hull Daily Mail, where he spent more than 12 years, rising to be news editor. With up to five editions a day and no local radio, the newspaper was still the fastest way to reach the public. Charles claimed that his best work there came in 1961, with the announcement in the final edition of the day that fresh supplies of polio vaccine had reached the city. In 1968, he covered the Hull triple trawler disaster, when 58 men died in Icelandic waters.

Charles was always driven to be first with the news. To that end, when the BBC opened a local radio station in 1971, Charles walked across the road into a job, but not until he was assured by the BBC that he would work only in news and not have to be involved in phone-in shows or make jingles.

At BBC Radio Humberside Charles was a mainstay of the newsroom. The station benefited from having a newspaperman with 25 years' experience and boundless, infectious enthusiasm. It was a rare reporter who escaped Charles's order to rewrite a piece, such were his exacting standards.

The cod wars, the loss in 1974 of the trawler ship Gaul and its crew of 36, the Humber bridge construction, and numerous elections were among the memorable stories that Charles worked on. The high standards he set can best be illustrated by his commitment on the night of the Wensley Lodge fire in 1978 in which 11 elderly men died. Singlehanded, Charles talked to police and firefighters at the scene, to survivors and relatives at the hospital, then edited the tapes ready for the breakfast bulletins, hours before the rest of the media.

Charles was never the tired old hack who had seen it all, but someone who continued to be passionate about news and how to tell it.

His wife, Shirley, died in 2012. His sons, Martin and Malcolm, and granddaughter, Alice, survive him.
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