Veteran network news reporter and anchor and Ball State Telecommunications (TCOM) professor Steve Bell died Friday at the age of 83.

Steve Bell was a radio and television news correspondent before becoming a college professor. Teaching was his original professional goal. When he began his academic career at Ball State in 1992, he said he merely had a 39-year detour into broadcast news.  He started as a reporter for WOW-TV (now WOWT) in Omaha. He was sent by the station to Dallas on November 22, 1963 to cover the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  This was his first experience of covering a national story.  Countless other such stories would follow in his distinguished career.

He then moved with his family to New York City where he was a radio reporter for WNEW.  In 1967, Bell began a 19-year stint with ABC News, first as a radio reporter and anchor, and then as a television correspondent and anchor.  He covered the Vietnam War, the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, Watergate, and the White House before becoming Good Morning’s America’s first news anchor.  Bell left ABC News in 1986 to take a TV news anchor job with Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Philadelphia. In 1992, Bell was offered the first Edmund F. and Virginia B. Ball Endowed Chair in Telecommunications at Ball State.  After five years in that position, he taught for another 10 years in the Department of Telecommunications, serving for one year as its chair.  He retired from Ball State in 2007.

Ball State Department of Telecommunications Interim Chair Mike Spillman said about Bell, in an email to faculty, “Those of us who had the honor of working with Steve will remember him as a kind and thoughtful man who always could regale everyone with amazing stories of his career.  He made tremendous contributions to our department and our college and we were honored to have him as a colleague and department leader.”

Steve Bell is survived by his wife Joyce and daughters Allison and Hillary and their families.  Services are pending.