Around Town
Honoring Dick Salant: Library’s Lecture Series Marks 20 Years
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The late Dick Salant, a 37-year New Canaan resident and longtime CBS executive who led the network’s news division through nearly all of the 1960s and ‘70s—introducing programs such as “60 Minutes” and “CBS Morning News” along the way, among other monumental feats in broadcast journalism—would have turned 100 this month (he passed in 1993). This year also marks exactly 20 years since New Canaan Library began running its roughly annual Salant Lectures series, which saw Andy Rooney deliver the first installment and counts among its high-profile speakers Walter Cronkite (whom Salant himself had assigned to anchor the “CBS Evening News” in 1962), Charles Osgood, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, Lesley Stahl, Connie Chung, Scott Pelley and, most recently, Ann Curry. At 5 p.m. today, Al Jazeera America President Kate O’Brian will speak as part of the series (register here). “It’s a very special year,” said Susan LaPerla, the library’s programming director. “He lived in New Canaan and he made a gift before he passed away in 1993, to start a collection on journalism and the first amendment and ethics in journalism, and then he broadened it to include other broadcast news-type topics and personalities,” LaPerla said.