Dean Mills, dean of the Missouri School of Journalism, saw his friend Elmer Lower become “cranky” just once, “when he couldn’t get the latest Missouri sports scores at his Florida retirement home.”
Lower, the former ABC News president who died last Tuesday at the age of 98, was “fiercely loyal” to Missouri, Mills said. “Even though he was in a wheelchair at the time, he insisted in coming back to Mizzou for the school’s centennial celebration in 2008,” Mills said in an email.
Lower attended the University of Missouri in the early 1930s, during which time he befriended Tennessee Williams, according to the MU Alumni Association. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1933 and spent the next decade as a reporter. In 1942, he became a field representative and photojournalist for the U.S. Office of War Information, a job that took him overseas.
Lower continued to job-hop in the 1950s and, in 1963, became president of ABC News in New York, where he would serve until mandatory retirement at age 65.
Lower hardly retired. Instead, he earned a master’s degree in public law and government from Columbia University in 1970 and joined the Missouri School of Journalism faculty as a broadcast professor in 1978. In 1982 and 1983, Lower served as interim dean of the journalism school.
“Lower was, as anyone in the broadcast industry will tell you, a giant in the industry — one of the handful of people who helped create the golden age of broadcast journalism,” Mills said in an email. “He was also a superb human being.”
Mills described him as funny, warm and upbeat. And the one time he was cranky was short-lived. “We arranged for the Missouri staff to fax” Missouri scores to him in Florida, Mills said.
Reach Janese Silvey at 573-815-1705 or e-mailjsilvey@columbiatribune.com.
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This article was published on page A14 of the Tuesday, August 2, 2011 edition of The Columbia Daily Tribune with the headline "Broadcast legend was a ‘loyal’ alumLower died last Tuesday at 98.."
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