When Walter Cronkite signed off as the anchorman of CBS Evening News nearly 40 years ago, the beloved and iconic journalist made little of what was then much ado about his exit.

“This is but a transition, a passing of the baton,” he told the millions watching in their living rooms, “ ... and anyway, the person who sits here is but the most conspicuous member of a superb team of journalists, writers, reporters, editors, producers, and none of that will change.”

Jerry Anderson, as with most of us huddled in front of a TV set just before dinner on March 6, 1981, remembers well Cronkite’s informal good-bye.

And when the longtime local anchor signs off for good at the end of the Friday 6 p.m. WTOL-TV, Channel 11, newscast, Anderson said he wants little made of his exit as well.

“I don’t think the news should ever be about the news person; I’m not the news,” Anderson said in an interview at WTOL earlier this week. “So for me to have a big dang deal made about it, that’s just uncomfortable, that’s silly.”

Anderson, who turns 65 on Saturday, was just beginning his TV news career when Cronkite more or less ended his, joining WTVG-TV, Channel 13, when it was still Toledo’s NBC affiliate, and only a year after the station changed its call letters from WSPD-TV.

Nearly 40 years later, he is walking away from it. On Monday, there will be another anchor in his seat; the station is promoting morning news anchor Andrew Kinsey to its evening newscasts, where he will be partnered with Viviana Hurtado for the WUPW-TV, Channel 36, newscasts at 6:30 and the hourlong 10 p.m., and Kristi Leigh for the 5, 6, and 11 p.m. newscasts.

In a Toledo City Council ceremony last week honoring Anderson with a resolution, councilman Cecelia Adams noted that the veteran broadcast journalist will be “really hard to replace.”

To her point, the newsman was recently inducted into the Associated Press Hall of Fame, and is a local journalist in the truest sense: Anderson was born, raised, and lived his life in and around the same city he has covered on TV and radio for decades.

Anderson, though, balked at the suggestion that he’s irreplaceable, noting that when Dan Rather took over for Cronkite, the CBS Evening News remained atop the ratings for many more years.

“It was a lesson to me,” he said. “If they can lose Walter Cronkite and not miss a beat, we’re all replaceable.”

Anderson was born in Bowling Green, grew up in Toledo, graduated from Bowling Green High School and Bowling Green State University, and took his first professional job behind the microphone of WFOB-AM in Bowling Green in 1974.

He joined WSPD-AM in 1978 and as a news reporter at the station caught the attention of cameramen at WTVG-TV, who convinced the 27-year-old to apply to the station when there was an opening for a reporter in early 1980. Anderson was hired in September, 1980.

“I was like a kid in a candy story because I had pictures,” Anderson said. “Radio, we had words and our voice and actualities, which are the sound bites of television, but with TV you had pictures.”

Less than two years later, Anderson was promoted to a lead anchor at WTVG, after the departure of Randy Price to a TV station in Boston.

WTVG’s current anchor, Diane Larson, joined the station in 1984 and was later teamed with Anderson, first for the 6 p.m. newscast and then the 11 p.m. as well.

“Television was so different back then,” Larson said. “There were a lot of laughs. He was a funny, funny guy. I do have fond memories at the laughing and the funny things that we did.”

Including those minor on-air pranks Anderson pulled on Larson while she was on-camera and he was off, like the time he breathed through his nose just loud enough so that only she could hear it as she delivered a more upbeat news story to viewers.

“He was one of those guys who took the job very seriously, but never took himself very seriously,” she said.

Anderson left WTVG in 1993 and returned to WSPD, where he hosted a popular AM morning radio talk show that often made the news. WTOL took notice of his radio success, and seized on the opportunity in 1994 to hire a former competitor for its new 5 p.m. newscast, a counter to what WTVG had recently launched, that included a live on-the-air interview segment with viewer phone calls.

Chrys Peterson was also hired by WTOL in 1994, and worked with Anderson for two decades, most of it as the station’s evening anchor pair, until she retired in 2014.

Even after several years removed from broadcast journalism, Peterson credits Anderson for her success.

“I learned so much from him,” she said. “I feel like Jerry made me better. He performed at such a high level that you wanted to do your best to perform at the same level to match that. I think he brings a lot of coworkers up that way because he is so good.”

“I affectionately call Jerry my work husband,” Peterson added. “He and I spent more time together than probably we spent with our spouses.”

It was Anderson’s off-air marriage to his wife of nearly 40 years, Teri, that convinced him to make his retirement decision earlier this year, even with another year remaining on his WTOL contract. That he’s willing to “leave money on the table” speaks to his readiness to spend more time with his wife, three grown-up children, and young grandchildren, he said.

“It’s a bigger deal for me and Teri ... we’re the ones going into a new phase. We don’t know where the path is going to take us, [but] we’re excited to find out, we’re excited to be doing it together.”

Contact Kirk Baird at: kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.

First Published June 15, 2018, 12:06 a.m.