Brelis, Dean 1924-2006

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Brelis, Dean 1924-2006

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 1, 1924, in Newport, RI; died of complications from throat cancer, November 17, 2006, in Santa Monica, CA. Journalist, broadcaster, educator, and author. Brelis was a news correspondent and broadcaster who was also a novelist and nonfiction author. During World War II, he served in Burma with the Office of Strategic Services and earned a Bronze Star. Upon returning home, Brelis worked for the Boston Globe while completing his journalism degree from Harvard University in 1949. He then joined Time-Life as a correspondent in the early 1950s, and taught college courses at Radcliffe and Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Brelis joined the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) as a correspondent in 1963, filing reports from Cyprus, North Africa, Vietnam, and the Middle East for several years. He then settled down to anchor the CBS evening news in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1974. His last professional years were spent back at Time as a correspondent from 1974 until his 1988 retirement. Brelis's experience as a foreign correspondent, often covering wars and other dramatic events, influenced both his fiction and nonfiction. He was the author of the novels The Mission (1958), Shalom (1959), and My New-Found Land (1963), and the nonfiction titles Run, Dig or Stay?: A Search for an Answer to the Shelter Question (1962), Behind the Burma Road: The Story of America's Most Successful Guerilla Force (1963), which he wrote with William R. Peers, and The Face of South Vietnam (1967). A recipient of the Overseas Press Club Award in 1964 for his radio reporting, Brelis also won an Emmy in 1970 for a program called "Odyssey House."