RHONDA MCBRIDE
• Radio
• Television
Inducted: 2024
RHONDA MCBRIDE
Over the airwaves and into the heart of Alaska.
For decades, Rhonda McBride’s comforting voice has floated across the Alaskan tundra, over its massive mountains and down its swift rivers.
She has reported on great achievements that affect the lives of everyday Alaskans, personal triumphs of the state’s peoples, and communities’ deep tragedies.
All the while, she has stayed objective and compassionate – the journalist’s gold-standard.
To sit with her at a café in Anchorage is a taste of sitting with a rock star, because people come up and thank her for her stories, a personal award for a job well done.
And to talk with her is to be awed by her knowledge of the state and its history in its diversity and depth.
“My father, Henry Earl McBride, in his heart of hearts, always wanted to be a writer,” McBride said. “But he was one of nine children in a hardscrabble Kentucky family that survived off cutting timber and growing food for themselves. In family photo, none of the children wore shoes.”
Her father met her mother, Hiroko Ito, while in Japan during the Korean War.
“She was the youngest of 10, and World War II disrupted her education,” McBride said. “She wanted more than anything for me to have the advantages that she and my father did not.”
At six or seven, her daily ritual was to read out loud to her mother. “She was so patient and loving,” McBride said. “Even though she spoke broken English, it was her loving presence that encouraged me to read with expression – perhaps the seeds of my broadcast career.”
McBride moved to Alaska in 1960 with her family. Driving up the Alcan Highway, every mile or so, she said, “I drove my father crazy, asking, ‘When will we get to Alaska?’”
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