Frances Buss Buch, 92, a pioneer of network TV and the first female TV director, died Tuesday at a rest home near Hendersonville in western North Carolina, her great-nephew, Mark Spencer, said Saturday.
Buch joined CBS as a receptionist in July 1941 and was soon asked to be in front of the camera for various then-black-and-white programs, the family said.
Buch joined CBS Television — the fledgling video arm of the Columbia Broadcasting System — just two weeks after the Federal Communications Commission allowed commercial TV broadcasts. She appeared on TV’s first game show, “The CBS Television Quiz,” as a scorekeeper.
By 1945, CBS promoted her to be TV’s first female director. She directed and produced telecasts from Brooklyn Dodgers games to musicals to crime dramas, according to The Paley Center for Media, which inducted her into the “She Made It” class of 2007.
Daniel J. Freed, 82, a retired Yale law professor who was a pioneer in advocating for reforms of federal sentencing laws, died Sunday in New York of renal and congestive heart failure.
Yale colleagues said Freed devoted his life to making the criminal justice system more fair and effective. He was one of the first professors in the country to conduct workshops and seminars on criminal sentencing, which then was discretionary.
Freed was an early proponent of sentencing guidelines but favored those that allowed individualized sentencing.
The Associated Press
