Sisters man covered news of the world

For three decades his name, face and voice were familiar to television viewers on two networks. Barry Serafin was a news correspondent with ABC News for over 20 years and with CBS News for 10 years.

A year and a half ago, he retired to Sisters.

Serafin covered many events, including Watergate, three presidential campaigns, the United States invasion of Grenada, the Falkland Islands War, the Iran hostage crisis and sniper shootings in Washington, D.C.

He won two Emmy Awards, one for the CBS News Special Report on Watergate and one for ABC’s millennium broadcast. He received an Alfred I. DuPont and Peabody Award for contributions to ABC’s coverage of September 11.

Born in Coquille, Oregon, Serafin and his family soon moved to Roseburg. He was there in 1959 during “the Roseburg Blast.” A truck with six and one-half tons of dynamite parked in downtown Roseburg. When a fire broke out in a nearby building, the dynamite exploded, killing 13 people, injuring 125, and damaging buildings.

Serafin lived a mile away and was blown out of bed.

“All windows in our house were blown out and glass was like snow. It moved the roof on our house,” he recalls.

When Southern Oregon Public Television recently produced a documentary on the blast, they interviewed Serafin’s father who was mayor shortly after the blast and who still lived in the city. They learned about the son and invited him to narrate the documentary.

Following high school, Serafin entered Washington State University.

“WSU was Edward R. Murrow’s alma mater and Murrow was my hero,” he said. “WSU had a good broadcast journalism school with two radio stations and a television station.”

Following graduation, he went to KOAP-TV public television in Portland as a producer and director.

“It was great with a small staff and no money, so you did everything,” he said.

In 1965 he moved to KOIN-TV in Portland and became a 25-year-old “boy anchor” for the evening news. While he was covering the Oregon primary, a CBS producer saw him and encouraged him to move to CBS-owned station KMOX-TV in St. Louis.

“Within a year, I moved on to the Washington Bureau. For the next 10 years I worked with Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid and Roger Mudd, the best broadcast journalist I ever knew, and others,” he said. “For a young guy, it was an astonishing place to work.”

Serafin, then 28 years old, lived in Virginia with his wife and two young daughters. Next door was another 28-year-old Washington newcomer, his wife and two young daughters: Dick Cheney.

The Watergate crisis was his most memorable experience.

“Boxes of transcripts of President Nixon’s White House tapes were delivered to CBS one evening. We divided up the transcripts and read them all night, wondering what they said and how to present a broadcast,” he said. “One person had this idea of reading the words, rather than running them across the screen.”

Giant photos of Nixon, Halderman, Ehrlichman, Dean and Mitchell were installed. The next morning CBS Morning News ran the hour-long program.

“Five of us read the words as the photo of each speaker on the tape was shown. I sat in front of Nixon’s photo and read his words. If John Dean responded, Bob Schieffer next to me and in front of Dean’s photo read his words. It was stunning and chilling. When we got off the air, it suddenly hit me: Nixon could not survive. I didn’t know if he had a month to go, six months to go, but it was over.”

The same program was presented that night in prime time.

Serafin was in Iran in 1979 during the hostage crisis.

“It was hard,” he said. “We were outside the American embassy with no information on the hostages’ condition. Thousands of Iranians were shouting and there I was with a camera crew. They came right up in my face, shouting ‘death to the Americans.’ A couple of times the Canadian Embassy called to say ‘stay away from your hotel for the next few days.’”

In 1979, he left CBS for ABC because “there was a log jam of people about the same age, Bob Schiefer, Roger Morton, and others, and we were all looking for a little daylight.”

During the Falkland Islands war in 1982, no reporters were allowed on the islands, so Serafin stayed in Argentina. For several months, he covered the war while Peter Jennings reported on the British side from London. Serafin also spent two months in Kuwait and Iran during the First Gulf War.

“Watching the oil field fires was like being in Hades,” he said.

He was the first reporter on the Washington D.C. sniper shootings and covered that incident for three weeks.

When NASA announced the “journalist in space” program, he and 5,000 others applied. He was one of 40 finalists when the Challenger explosion happened, ending future civilian space flights.

Serafin has cautious concerns about today’s news coverage.

“For years, ‘news’ was not expected to make a profit,” he said. “That changed in the 1980s, impacting what stories could be covered based on the cost. Then, cable news started voicing opinions, what we had always avoided. That created a different public attitude towards all news coverage.”

When the time came to retire, a friend suggested he look at Sisters. In his youth, Serafin had visited Central Oregon to hunt and accompany his father on business. He and his wife, Lynn, visited the area and bought their home here.

“Everyone is friendly, the scenery is great and it’s a sophisticated town,” he said. “I’ve taken the master gardeners’ course, some computer classes, done a few PBS documentaries, and look forward to some hiking.

“I’ve tried to stay under the radar, but I just love Sisters,” he said.