American journalist, Bruce McLellan, has reported on stories from coast to coast.
A former television news anchorman and award winning reporter in America's Heartland
for more than a decade, he also wrote news stories for the Indianapolis Star and Today
newspapers as well as the Associated Press. Some of his video stories were picked up
and carried by TV stations, across the country. In 1985, one of his stories led off the
NBC Nightly news.
McLellan was born in 1947, as one of the "lead scouts" in what's become known as
The Baby Boomer Generation. He was one of the atomic age "duck and cover" kids
in grade school, wearing a Davy Crockett coonskin cap, armed with his Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle, being careful not to shoot his eye out, and he grew up in the woods along a river in the rural outskirts of a small town, Chagrin Falls, in northeastern Ohio.
He lived through the Happy Days of the 50s and the tumultuous years of the 60s,
remembering Ike, the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the Bay of Pigs, and those 14 days in October, when we were brought to the brink of nuclear war. A year later came the assassination of an American President. While most people learned about it all from history books ... McLellan lived through those times and experienced those events first hand.
McLellan attended Kent State University, and later transferred to and graduated from a school in Chicago that specialized in Radio/TV broadcasting. The year was 1968, and that summer, mayor Richard Daley was welcoming one and all to the Democratic National Convention. As Bruce sat in a pancake house at two in the morning, at the corner of State and Division streets, an army halftrack, came rumbling by on its way to Michigan Avenue, where it would meet up with army jeeps with six foot plywood squares attached to their front bumpers, wrapped with barbed-wire. Welcome to Chicago, indeed! The whole world was watching!
Chicago was the jumping off point for McLellan's career, which first began as a radio
personality out west, just outside Spokane, Washington, and a year later, down south in Daytona and New Smyrna Beach, on an island in the inter-coastal waterway. At both locations, besides his air work, McLellan sold commercial advertising, wrote copy and produced the commercials that aired. In Florida, he would become acting station manager until the radio station was sold to new owners.
McLellan then took a radio job in the Midwest in Terre Haute, Indiana, where a year later the transition into television news took place, but not before radio's "big leagues" in Washington, D.C. called and offered him up a dream job, only to be shocked that he would turn them down, based solely on a handshake he had made a week earlier with his new bosses at the TV station. Big market radio and four times the money losing to a handshake and a person's word!
Some of McLellan's highlights included his putting together and moderating that state's
first Democratic Presidential Primary Debate in 1972. Later that year, a disturbance
at the federal prison and the inmate's demand that McLellan meet with them, earned
attention from Congress, who appointed McLellan to a Congressional Investigation
Task Force to look into federal prison unrest. The resulting investigation, meetings
and a tour of the facility allowed McLellan to drop back away from the tour, and now alone within the inmate population, he entered one of the industry rooms where inmates made woolen blankets for the army. He motioned for some of the inmates to follow him to the back of the room and behind some of the heavy equipment, they sat down on the floor, allowing the inmates to to tell their side of the story and voice their concerns. A final hour long special program, where McLellan presented his findings, and attacked the other Congressional Committee members for pushing their own agenda instead of listening to what was being said to them, earned McLellan national recognition. His hour long show, became part of the permanent orientation program for new inmates and guards at the facility, and he received a letter of appreciation from the director of the U-S Bureau of Prisons, Norman Carlson. A book on prison reform, written later, highlighted McLellan's work. Whether coincidental or not, the year ended with McLellan receiving an invitation from the White House to attend the Presidential Inauguration the following month.
McLellan would later move behind the scenes into news management at
various TV stations around the country, holding titles in all facets of the profession- from producing newscasts to executive producer, from assignment editor to managing editor, assistant news director and news director. In all the stations he worked for there was a noted improvement in the ratings, and in two of them, the station went from number three to number one in the market.
McLellan retired in 2001, after 33 years in radio/TV, spanning five decades.
He lives in Livingston, Tennessee, as a writer and researcher.
BIO - WHO AM I ?
