Early life Henry was born during the
baby boom generation in 1945 in Canton, Ohio, the son of a local
hardware store owner and his wife. As a student at
Central Catholic High School, Henry actually got his first job in broadcasting - recording a commercial for his father's hardware store (an ad Henry admits was "really bad"). Following graduating high school in 1963, Henry attended
Walsh University (then Walsh College) and a year later transferred to
Kent State University, studying telecommunications. He would graduate from KSU in 1968. After graduating college, Henry was in graduate school at Kent State University, and later at Cleveland State University. At one point in his early twenties Ted entered the
Peace Corps, serving overseas for over two years in a tiny third world country village, Caazapa, in Paraguay.
Broadcast career Shortly after college, Henry worked as a reporter and weather forecaster for
Akron, Ohio TV station
WAKR-TV 23, and upon returning home from his Peace Corps service, Henry then worked at sister stations
WKBN AM 570 and
WKBN-TV 27 in
Youngstown, Ohio as a government reporter. In 1972, Henry came to Cleveland and began work at WEWS. First he served as the weekend weatherman (Henry would admit in later years that as he didn't have a background in weather reporting, he would use forecasts from a Detroit radio station to base his forecast off of). He would work his way up the ranks to reporter, 11 pm news show producer, then weekend news anchor, and in 1975 became the weeknight news anchor, serving in that post for 34 years until his retirement in 2009, working with 13 different co-anchors over that time frame. Henry would make numerous international trips during his WEWS career to cover stories, including to
Germany to cover the fall of the
Berlin Wall, to
Rome to cover the death of
Pope John Paul II, and six trips to
Israel. Henry played himself in various episodes of
The Drew Carey Show.
Retirement Henry announced his retirement on April 23, 2009, and his final newscast was on May 20. In his retirement, Henry and his wife Jody have traveled abroad, filming freelance interviews with religious and spiritual leaders, including followers of
Sathya Sai Baba. ==Awards and honors==