The Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia

Ed Eisen

Broadcast Pioneers member Ed Eisen’s career in communications spans 52 years. He was an award-winning reporter at three major metropolitan newspapers, a broadcast news reporter and public relations consultant where his clients included two popes and a world-boxing champion. He taught broadcast news journalism at Temple University and crafted hundreds of profiles on the famous, the infamous and the faceless in society.

Ed grew up in Brooklyn when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president and the New York Yankees won the world series. He’s been on deadline -- of one kind or another -- since he was 19. First as a Top 40 D.J. working at WWBZ in Vineland, NJ, then as a newsman at WJTN in Jamestown, N.Y., and as a TV booth announcer at WEAT-TV in West Palm Beach. Once he did a stint as a traffic reporter from a convertible with a flat tire. He served 15 years as a reporter with The Philadelphia Inquirer and two other papers, now long gone --- The Philadelphia Bulletin and The Fort Lauderdale News.

Along the way there were scores of investigative pieces like the one on how the feds flunked a security test in Philadelphia 30 years before 9/11, a week after the Weather Underground exploded a bomb at the Pentagon. Perhaps the most compelling was a one-year series on Pennhurst State School and Hospital about innocent children housed in the state’s most notorious warehouse for the mentally retarded, a story about man’s inhumanity to man. Nineteen years later the Commonwealth closed down the place.

There was the piece about Martin Luther King Jr. coming to a news conference in Philadelphia two years before his assassination. There was also Senator Edward M. Kennedy attending the funeral of Mary Jo Kopechne, the young woman who died in a car he accidentally drove off a narrow Massachusetts bridge.

In another career shift, Ed led the efforts at one of the city’s largest ad agencies -- Gray & Rogers -- to promote the arrival of Pope John Paul II to Philadelphia for the 41st International Eucharistic Congress. His Holiness arrived in the midst of a unique urban crisis: American Legionnaire’s Disease landed in the City of Brotherly Love.

Mother Teresa -- that remarkable nun from Calcutta -- and this Jewish kid from Brooklyn -- broke bread together at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He says the 48-minute interview altered his life and led him to write a remembrance the year she died.

When Ed went independent as a PR consultant, a modern-day Charles Lindbergh became one of his most prominent clients. Bipin Shah, a pioneer banking technologist who brought the automated teller machine network to public attention, hired Ed to help find his kidnapped daughters. Shah offered a $2 million bounty, nothing quite like it since the Lindbergh case of 1932. The story landed on the front cover of Time Magazine, on the CBS Evening News and scores of other media outlets worldwide. And yes, the girls were recovered in Switzerland. But alas, no one collected the reward.

On another occasion, Ed worked to connect folks in Philly to boxing champ Joe Frazier with a new fangled bill-paying system called Pay-By-Phone. It was a nice gig. And Ed got to keep Joe’s glove. The champ autographed it with a Sharpie: “To Ed Eisen, Boogie, Bookie. Joe Frazier.”

Ed’s Pennsylvania license plate reads: ‘Give-Bak’ because he’s a great supporter of volunteerism. For unemployed immigrants, he established the Russian Jobs Network in the city, taught English as a second language for 13 years and coaches seniors in nursing homes on how to write their life stores.

The e-mail address of the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia is pioneers@broadcastpioneers.com