Chet Curtis, former WCVB Boston star anchor, passed away January 22. He was 74 and had been suffering from pancreatic cancer. Curtis, half of a famous husband and wife anchor team, along with Natalie Jacobson, spent the last dozen years at New England Cable News.
NECN said in a statement: “Chet Curtis was a Boston television legend, who we were proud to call part of the NECN family for more than 10 years. Chet had keen journalistic skills and a finely-honed talent for storytelling. His calming and reassuring presence, developed through decades at the helm of the biggest news stories in Boston and beyond, will be sorely missed in our newsroom. He was without ego, and always took the time to teach and mentor younger reporters and anchors with enthusiasm, generosity, kindness and humor.”
The New York Times said Curtis and Jacobson delivered the news together at WCVB for 18 years, before a professional split in 2000, following the personal split of the pair, known as “Chet and Nat”, the year before. “They were the de facto first couple of Boston, very likely the city’s best-known conveyors of news since Paul Revere,” said the Times.
Born Chester Kukiewicz in New York, Curtis’s previous jobs included reporter at WTOP-TV in Washington and WCBS in New York before moving to Boston in 1968. He moved to NECN, where he was a news anchor and the host of a public-affairs program, in 2001.
