HARRY REASONER FOUND
From the March 1007 Re-Echo

We had two great responses to our request for information about Harry Reasoner. It turns out that he and his young family lived at 4085 Alabama Ave. from 1953 to 1956. He and his wife Kathleen Carroll “Kay” Reasoner came with four of their eventual seven kids from a three-year posting in Manila with the U.S. Information Agency.

He apparently wasn’t employed when he first got here, but he took his first TV news job here in Minneapolis in late 1954. He served as the first News Director at the new KEYD-TV, which was a member of the DuMont Television Network and precursor to KMSP-TV.

During the family’s stay in St. Louis Park, former neighbor Betty Beach Barrus reports that the Reasoners were quite social, and kept some of their St. Louis Park friends for decades.

In 1956, the DuMont network shut down, KEYD was sold, and the news department was no more. That was the year Reasoner got the job at CBS in New York. Brookside teacher Pearl Heitke remembers that son Stuart Reasoner was in her 4th grade class, and that he left for New York in the middle of the school year. Harry Reasoner wrote his autobiography, Before the Colors Fade, in 1983, but while he did describe his days at KEYD, he didn’t talk about St. Louis Park.

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This information comes from a variety of sources: newspapers, books, yearbooks, phone directories, interviews, etc. Given the varied sources, we cannot guarantee that all of this information is correct, and welcome any additions and corrections. Please contact us with your contributions and comments.