Don Westbrook, the pioneering broadcaster whose distinctive voice delivered both WWL-TV weather forecasts and commercials for the station and various clients during a 39-year career, died Monday. He was 79.
His daughter, Laura Westbrook, said her father died after a brief illness. Although he and his wife Jean left New Orleans after he retired from WWL-TV in 1999, their daughter said they had returned here in recent years to be closer to family.
When Westbrook left the air, he had worked nearly 40 years at the station, including more than 20 as weather anchor for Channel 4's morning and noon news. On those top-rated newscasts, Westbrook appeared alongside fellow station veterans Bill Elder, Eric Paulsen, Andre Trevigne and Sally-Ann Roberts. He and Paulsen were the first anchors of the Eyewitness Morning News when it premiered in 1977.
Though he became best known for his forecasting, it wasn't the weather map but the microphone that initially brought Westbrook to WWL. In November 1960, just three years after the station signed on the air, he was hired as a staff announcer, an important job during the early days of live television broadcasting.
