DON GILLIS (BOSTON, MA, SPORTSCASTER)

'Don Gillis' (born 1922 in Antigonish, Nova Scotia), is a retired American sportscaster, born in Canada, who was sports director of Boston's Channel 5 (WHDH-TV through March 18, 1972; thereafter WCVB-TV) from 1962 through 1983. Gillis pioneered the 11 p.m. sports report in Boston during his tenure at WHDH-TV, becoming the dean of the city's sports anchors, and also would host highly popular candlepin bowling programs on the station from 1967 to 1996.
Gillis's family moved from Nova Scotia to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was a boy. After attending Holy Name High School in that city, Gillis served in the U.S. Navy during World War II in the Pacific Theater of operations. At war's end, he attended Boston's Leland Powers School of Broadcasting on the GI Bill and began a career in radio broadcasting at New Bedford's WBSM-AM in 1949, becoming that station's first sports director. He then joined the air staff of Boston's WHDH-AM 850, where he hosted music programs before focusing exclusively on sports.
WHDH at the time was the flagship station of the Boston Red Sox, and carried Boston Celtics basketball, Boston Bruins hockey, and Harvard University football during the autumn and winter months. Gillis hosted pregame coverage of Red Sox games — his "Warmup Time" five-minute segment often revisited great moments in baseball history – and was a color commentator on Bruins and Celtics games. During the 1957 season, Gillis joined the Red Sox' broadcast team when the #1 announcer, Curt Gowdy, was sidelined for the year by a back injury. In addition, Gillis hosted a weekly sports roundtable radio show, called "The Voice of Sports," that featured sportswriters from the Boston Herald-Traveler (which owned WHDH), and other personalities, such as longtime Pittsburgh Pirates scout Chick Whalen and NBC sports producer Joe Costanza.
But Gillis became best known as a television sports anchor. He began his sports report in October 1962 on the night Johnny Carson debuted as host of The Tonight Show. WHDH-TV expanded its late news from 15 minutes to a full half-hour to accommodate extended weather and sports segments. During the period when WHDH-TV held the license to Boston's Channel 5, the station was the television flagship for Red Sox coverage. After the team's improbable 1967 American League pennant, its TV ratings soared and Gillis was able to use video highlights of the team's games during his sportscasts.
In March 1972, however, the Herald-Traveler and WHDH lost the license for the television property. Gillis, along with much of the legacy on-air staff, transitioned to the new WCVB-TV, where he carried on as sports director. Even though the Red Sox did not follow, ratings for the station's newscasts (branded NewsCenter 5) at 6 and 11 p.m. remained high. When WCVB-TV was acquired by Metromedia in 1982 for the highest price then ever paid for a local television station, Gillis was one of many stockholders who profited handsomely from the transaction.
He retired a year after the sale, although his son, Gary Gillis, continued as a popular sportscaster and sports anchor in the market for the city's Channel 7, which would assume the WHDH-TV call-letters in 1990.