Robert Northshield; Created ‘Sunday Morning’ on CBS

Robert “Shad” Northshield, the salty ex-newspaperman who created the famously languid CBS “Sunday Morning” show with Charles Kuralt, died Monday in a New York nursing home after a long illness. He was 78.

It was Northshield who persuaded folksy veteran broadcaster Kuralt to leave his “On the Road” segments on the CBS Evening News to anchor “Sunday Morning” when it made its debut in 1979. Kuralt, who died in 1997, was the face of “Sunday Morning” for its first 15 years.

In contrast to cheekier weekday morning news shows, “Sunday Morning” was decidedly unhurried, its antennae tuned to the offbeat story, to small-town America, to cultural figures who rarely made the evening news.

The show’s hallmarks--including wordless video essays on nature, profiles of classical or jazz performers and unrepentantly literary narration--were owed largely to Northshield, whom veteran broadcaster Bill Moyers once described as “a man of exquisite taste.”

“The show has turned out to be exactly what we had in mind--a Sunday version of a newspaper . . . art stuff, long and more thoughtful stuff,” Northshield once said. “What I try to do is a show that I think works.”

Northshield, whose television career included stints at all three major networks, made television documentaries and produced both NBC’s “Today” show and “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” before assuming the assignment for which he was best known.

He was a decorated veteran of World War II who entered journalism in the 1940s, as the halcyon days of Chicago newspapering were ending. A reporter and columnist for daily newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, he once confided that he was never very good at the hard-boiled, blow-the-lid-off-the-town style of journalism that thrived in his hometown. The reason? Not laziness or stupidity, he said, but “shyness, of all things.”

In 1948, he found himself intrigued by a new medium--television. Five years later he was the producer of a children’s educational show called “Adventure” that was hosted by a fellow named Mike Wallace. Next, in the late 1950s, he produced the acclaimed series “Seven Lively Arts.”

After a brief stint at ABC, he embarked on 17 years at NBC as a documentary maker and producer. He produced “Today,” “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” and coverage of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space shots, as well as election night broadcasts from 1962 to 1974. The subjects of his documentaries ranged from grizzly bears and Navajo life to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the mixed-raced offspring of GIs in Vietnam.

He returned to CBS in 1978 as executive producer of “CBS Morning News,” then anchored by Bob Schieffer and later by Kuralt and Diane Sawyer. After several months, he created “Sunday Morning,” for which the network made room by displacing religious programming. To everyone’s surprise, the show wound up making a modest profit, despite eccentricities such as a 13-minute essay on the disappearing wood stork.

Northshield once told The Times the common threads running through “Sunday Morning” were America and people. “We are raving humanists here,” he said in 1980.

The show betrayed his passions--nature photography, classical music and jazz. It was Northshield who chose the opening theme of “Sunday Morning”--a 20-second trumpet fanfare called “Abblasen” by an 18th century composer named Reicha.

Classical music and performers were regularly featured, including soprano Jessye Norman and composer Aaron Copland. Northshield himself wrote the narration for the program’s 15-minute salute to Copland on the composer’s 85th birthday in late 1985.

Of that segment, Northshield said: “The piece probably had three minutes of narration, but it was hard work. It takes great effort to keep your mouth shut. In television, writing involves keeping your mouth shut more than anything else.”

“Sunday Morning” boldly kept its mouth shut for minutes at a time. Every show closed with a nature study without narration--two minutes of nothing but the sounds and images of, say, fiddler crabs scrabbling up a marshy Florida shore. This signature was solely the inspiration of Northshield, a wildlife photographer who also was an ornithology expert. He continued to produce some of these segments, even after leaving as senior executive producer of the show in 1987 to develop other programs.

Northshield, who lived in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., retired from CBS News in 1995. His honors include Peabody and Emmy awards, as well as the Alfred I. du Pont-Columbia University Award.

He is survived by his wife, Jane; four sons--Joseph, Samuel, John and Hoang Van Ngoan, the son he adopted while covering the Vietnam War--and four grandchildren.