Ward Chamberlin Jr., Architect of Nation’s Public Broadcasting, Dies at 95

[JSngry]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/arts/television/ward-chamberlin-jr-architect-of-nations-public-broadcasting-dies-at-95.html?_r=0

 

Ward Bryan Chamberlin III was born on Aug. 4, 1921, in Manhattan to Ward Bryan Chamberlin Jr., a corporate lawyer, and the former Elizabeth Nichols. He was raised in New York City and in Wilson Point, Conn. He called himself Ward Jr. after his father died.

Mr. Chamberlin attended St. Bernard’s School in Manhattan and Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut and graduated from Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Ineligible for military service because he had lost his sight in his right eye to childhood meningitis, he left Princeton in 1942 to enlist as a volunteer ambulance driver with the American Field Service.

He was assigned to North Africa, where he was supposed to be consigned to desk duty because of a mild bout of polio. But he expunged those orders and was deployed to the front lines in central Italy instead, retrieving the dead and wounded at Monte Cassino, where the Allies suffered more than 50,000 casualties.

“That was the key to who he was,” Mr. Burns said. “After that, there was nothing that could rock his boat.”