The man who would eventually help to usher in the age of the super-anchor, veteran journalist Peter Jennings, got an early start to his broadcast career. At age nine he was the host of Peter's People, a short-lived Saturday morning children's radio show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. For the precocious Jennings, journalism qualified as a family business. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was established in the mid-1930s, his father Charles Jennings became its first voice, and was known as the "Edward R. Murrow of Canada."

Jennings was born in Toronto. A high school drop-out, he never finished tenth grade. Initially discouraged by his father from choosing journalism as a career, Jennings worked as a bank teller for three years before joining a small private radio station in Brockville, Ontario. In 1961 Jennings made the transition to television, joining one of Canada's first private...