During his high-profile decades on the KFMB, KGTV and KUSI TV news desks, San Diego’s Michael Tuck was the ultimate anchorman. He had the commanding on-air presence, the ability to pivot gracefully from breaking-news bulletins to heartwarming human-interest stories, and the confidence to share his opinions on polarizing topics, regardless of the fallout.
And Tuck had a voice. A resonate, self-assured, built-for-broadcasting baritone that made everything he said sound worthy of everyone’s attention. That voice and the journalistic chops behind it helped Tuck win multiple awards, including 15 regional Emmys, four Golden Mike Awards and the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award.
But one of his favorite awards from the recognition-rich 1980s came as a part of Disabled Awareness Week, when he was voted the most easily lip-read newscaster in town. For Tuck, who died on Wednesday at the age of 76 after a long battle with post-stroke complications, it wasn’t the voice that mattered.
It was the story.
“He loved that award because he loved to communicate,” Tuck’s wife, Jill, said Thursday from the couple’s home in Rancho Bernardo. “He always felt like he was sharing a story. It meant a lot to him.
“San Diego meant a lot to him.”
Lifelong fascination with news
John Michael Tuck — born on Sept. 10, 1945, in Silsbee, Texas — grew up with empathy in his heart and journalism in his veins.
His father, Irvin, changed jobs frequently, working at a dairy and in an oil field, but also as a teacher. Tuck described his father as a brilliant man and a socialist, and when Tuck began loosening his anchorman tie and speaking his mind about local politicians and hot-button issues during his sometimes-controversial “Perspectives” commentaries on KGTV, you could hear Irvin’s social conscience coming through.
“I think Mike might have identified with guys like (TV journalists) Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid,” said veteran local sportscaster Ted Leitner, whose on-air banter with Tuck was always a highlight of the KFMB broadcasts.
“He wanted to be more than the local news guy doing the live shot at the fire. He wanted to do something special. He wanted to do what the big boys did, and it worked out very well.”
Tuck’s fascination with broadcast news started with his older brothers, Cecil and Gene. Both men started off in radio broadcasting. Gene went on to become a news anchor. Cecil, who died in 2021, was head writer of “The Smother’s Brothers Comedy Hour.” In a 2000 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Tuck ed wanting to follow in his brothers’ fascinating footsteps.
“I was in awe of them,” Tuck said. “To me, the presidency of the United States took a back seat to what they were doing.”
With Tuck, awe translated into ambition. He studied journalism at Trinity University in San Antonio, and by the time he graduated in 1970, he had already put in three years at KENS-TV in San Antonio. Between 1970 and 1978, Tuck worked at KTVU in San Francisco and WCAU in Philadelphia, where he met Leitner. It turned out to be fortuitous friendship.
‘He was great’
Less than a year after Leitner was hired by KFMB, an anchor position opened up there. Leitner recommended Tuck, and news director Jim Holtzman hired him.
Tuck started at KFMB in 1978, launching an award-winning, ratings-generating career in local broadcasting that made him one of the most high-profile people in local media — and made his voice one of the most recognizable sounds in town.
“He was more than good. He was great,” said longtime reporter and anchor Hal Clement, who worked with Tuck from 1979 until Tuck left for KGTV in 1984 . “He had everything you would want in an anchor. He had talent and presence and command. And he had that voice that commanded attention. It had a timbre that cut through everything.”
Tuck spent six years at KGTV, where he helped Channel 10’s local-news ratings climb from second place to first and stirred up ion and controversy with his “Perspective” commentaries, taking on everyone from America’s Cup winner Dennis Conner to the city of El Cajon. In 1990, Tuck left KGTV and San Diego for Los Angeles and its CBS , KCBS-TV.
Unhappy with station’s high management turnover and what he saw as an obsession with celebrities and sensationalism, Tuck left KCBS and returned to KFMB in 2000. In 2005, he moved to KUSI, where he stayed until 2007.
For almost 20 years, Michael Tuck helped San Diegans better understand their world and themselves. It was all in a life’s work for a TV newsman who never wanted to be anything else.
“I think Michael resonated because of his energy and because people could watch him and understand he was a pro and that he cared about it. They could sense the credibility,” said Holtzman, who was KFMB’s news director from 1977 to 1993.
“They knew that he knew what he was doing and what he was talking about. The number of people who latched on to news anchors at that time was really amazing. And you had to be good night in and night out to hold on to them, because in that period, the other stations were really good as well. You couldn’t be on the air and simply calling it in. You had to deliver. And he did that for every station he ever worked in.”
Tuck’s survivors include his wife, Jill; his sons Collin and Jackson and his daughter Tyler; his brother Gene, and his sister, Elizabeth Olivia. A private service is being planned. In lieu of flowers, Jill Tuck requests that people offer “an unexpected act of kindness for the voiceless.”
Researcher Merrie Monteagudo contributed to this report.
