23-05-2025
CBS News legend Martha Teichner travels the world, but a piece of her heart stays in Michigan
Last fall, Martha Teichner bought a house on Lake Leelanau in northern Michigan without having seen it in person.
Born in Traverse City, an only child who grew up loving the woods, trees, flowers and wildlife of her family's property on Lime Lake, Teichner says that when she visited the house for the first time – after scouring 'zillions of pictures' and getting an inspection – she noticed that the view across the lake seemed to be an undeveloped area.
After consulting a map of Leelanau County, she realized that there, in the distance, was a cemetery. The same one where Teichner's father, who died in 1957 when she was only 9, and her mother, who passed away in 1992, are at rest.
'Every time I look out the front windows across the lake … there's the cemetery where my parents are buried,' says the veteran 'CBS Sunday Morning' correspondent, speaking by phone from New York City during a break before her next meeting. 'It was almost fate, I guess. It just had this really, really emotionally overwhelming effect on me when I realized that. It was very comforting.'
Teichner has spent nearly 50 years covering wars, disasters, iconic figures and historic events across the globe for CBS News, but a piece of her heart always stays in Michigan.
Her determination and dedication to her profession have been evident since her Grand Rapids days, when she got her start in broadcast journalism and worked her way up a ladder just beginning to let in women.
At 77, Teichner is in the midst of receiving the sort of honors reserved for groundbreaking broadcast journalists who have had a long, enduring impact on the profession. She likes to say that if she wasn't the first woman to do something in network news, she probably was among the first.
'I didn't want to do anything easy. I wanted to be able to get and to thrive doing the same sorts of assignments they assigned all the men to do. I did not want to be assigned to trivia,' she says in the assured, calm voice that viewers hear as she covers politics, arts, culture, social issues and more for 'Sunday Morning,' which airs in the Detroit market at 9 a.m. Sundays on CBS Detroit (WWJ-TV) and is executive-produced by Rand Morrison.
'If I happened to be the only, or one of the only, women in an area, I wanted to position myself so there was no difference in the assignments I got and the pieces I did than the men around me.'
On June 18, Teichner will be presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 50th annual Gracie Awards luncheon in New York City, an event held by the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation. Teichner's colleague, Jane Pauley, the host of 'Sunday Morning' and a previous Gracie winner, will be there to give her an award also shared by Carol Burnett, Judy Woodruff and Marlo Thomas, among others.
Days later, on June 25, she will be inducted into the Gold Circle Honor Society by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Such recognition is reserved by the Emmys for those with more than 50 years of experience who have had a significant impact on the TV industry and set the bar for high quality with their work.
In the news release for the Gracie Awards, Teichner reflected on how a listener of the country music radio station where she started her broadcast journalism career complained that he didn't "want a woman cluttering up MY airwaves." Continued Teichner: 'I cried, but I've spent more than fifty years since then working to help bring about a major attitude adjustment. I'd like to believe that who I am and what I stand for have made a difference to women.'
A member of the 'CBS Sunday Morning' team since 1993, Teichner has reported on everything from the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the death of Princess Diana to the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis in Haiti for the weekly broadcast, while also interviewing notable figures ranging from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to 'The Handmaid's Tale' author Margaret Atwood.
First hired by CBS News in 1977, Teichner broke glass ceilings in past decades by covering dangerous conflicts in Lebanon, El Salvador, eastern Europe and elsewhere at a time when women were kept away from such beats. During the Gulf war in the early 1990s, she was embedded with a U.S. Army armored division in the Saudi desert. During her time as a foreign correspondent, she also covered epic political shifts like the fall of communism in East Berlin and the road to Nelson Mandela becoming president of post-apartheid South Africa.
Along the way, she has collected 16 Emmy Awards, six James Beard Foundation Awards and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and been inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.
Teichner's story begins in Traverse City, where her parents, Hans and Miriam Teichner, imprinted her with the spirit to overcome challenges.
The achievements of her father, Hans, nicknamed Peppi, endure to this day, as visitors to the Leelanau Historical Society Museum can learn from the current exhibit 'Sugar Loaf: A Retrospective,' which runs through December and is about the beloved former ski resort in Cedar.
One wall in the exhibit is devoted to photos of him and biographical details about his life and continuing reputation as 'the father of northern Michigan skiing,' as the text describes him.
'His legacy lives on, truly to this day, in people's memories and at these community ski hills still in operation,' says Leelanau Historical Society executive director, Kim Kelderhouse, noting that a Hans "Peppi" Teichner Town Slalom Race takes place annually at Traverse City's Hickory Hills.
A championship skier from Germany, Hans fled the country during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. He became coach of the Spanish Olympic ski team and, when the Spanish Civil War started, helped political refugees escape from fascist Spain by skiing them over the Pyrenees Mountains into France. After evading a Spanish patrol that tried to detain him as he was skiing, Hans decided to make his way to the United States in 1937. In America, he used his ski skills by volunteering for an army mountain division and training U.S. soldiers to ski and rock climb.
Hans spotted Teichner's mother, Miriam Greene, in the Marshall Fields department store in Chicago, where he was working in the sports section. Says Teichner, 'He saw her and said, 'I'm going to marry her' and did in 1945 after the end of the war.' The couple eventually put down roots in Leelanau County, buying a boarded-up house on Lime Lake after Miriam combed through old records and tracked down the owners in Chicago and convinced them to sell.
Hans was one of the founders of Sugar Loaf and trained generations of future skiiers in Michigan. He also was a faculty member at the Leelanau School, which honors him with a student award, the Peppi Teichner Award for outstanding improvement in skiing. He and Miriam also ran a seasonal business that involved importing ski equipment and apparel from Europe and selling products to ski shops across the Midwest and at a Peppi's Corner boutique inside the old Milliken's department store in downtown Traverse City.
After Hans died of cancer when he was just 49, Teichner (who was 9 at the time) remembers that having to sell their Lime Lake house was 'like a family tragedy, because we had no desire to leave.' Without her father there 'fitting ski boots on people and telling people what to buy in terms of ski equipment,' her mother could no longer sustain the import business.
After relocating to East Grand Rapids, Miriam supported herself and her daughter as personnel director of Wurzburg's department store and, later, as regional representative for the Scholastic company, an influential force in publishing and children's education. When she retired, Miriam moved to South Carolina and spent the rest of her days there in a house that Teichner bought for her.
Teichner graduated in 1969 from Wellesley College near Boston. Not yet knowing what she wanted to do, she applied to five different types of graduate programs. 'I thought to myself, 'If you don't know which kind of graduate school to go to, you don't belong in any (of them),'' she says. She was working in Boston at MIT's university press when she attended a journalism symposium themed to covering controversial events. At the time, she says, American politics was as polarized as it is today, only then it was divided by the Vietnam War, civil rights and, by the early 1970s, the Watergate scandal.
'Each political faction, just as today, seemed to be you were all or nothing. …. It was a very emotionally fraught time,' she says.
Teichner hoped the symposium would help her 'to figure out if there are any tools to use to judge what I'm reading and seeing and hearing, to figure out what I believe and what I understand to be true.' As she listened to a prestigious panel of newspaper and network journalists, she recalls: 'It was like a light bulb turned on. This is what I want to do. This is the vantage point that I find appropriate for me to determine what's real in the world.' From that moment on, she put all of her energy toward quitting her job, moving back to Grand Rapids and saving enough to go to journalism school.
That j-school goal never worked out because Teichner wound up becoming a seasoned reporter by teaching herself and learning from her colleagues. She started off working seven days a week at a restaurant in Grand Rapids, so she could afford to spend five days as a freelance writer for a group of small weekly papers. 'Every time I sat down, I'd fall asleep,' she says.
At one point, her little finger got caught between the sliding glass doors that covered the plates at the eatery. 'I had to stay home because the bandage on my smooshed finger fell into somebody's salad,' she says with a laugh. Browsing through the Grand Rapid Press newspaper, she saw a help wanted ad for 'a radio news man' and decided to apply. 'They said, 'Well, here are a whole bunch of wire stories and we'd like you to write a little newscast,' she says, describing how they showed her a microphone and told her that 'If the needle goes into the red, you're too loud.'
To her surprise, she became the first woman newscaster employed by what was then WJEF, a country station. 'I think that they hired me because it was so much cheaper to hire me than anyone else,' she says. 'Anybody with experience, they would have had to move them and had to pay them a considerably higher salary.'
Teichner sensed a huge opportunity to learn on the job. 'I was very lucky at the early stages of my career in Grand Rapids to have male bosses who believed in me and who liked me and were not resentful of women,' she says The producers at WJEF basically let her do whatever she wanted, with one caveat. 'They said: 'We know you're working about 110 hours a week. We can only pay you for about 50, maximum 60.' Like many journalists before her, she put in the hours that were needed, not the ones on the payroll clock.
At the radio station, Teichner got into the habit of transcribing national CBS News stories as she was placing them, along with her own reporting, into the news broadcasts. 'I would turn up the sound and read the transcripts for pacing. I was doing something almost like karaoke newscasts in order to learn how those people wrote and breathed and delivered the copy. It taught me an awful lot.'
She also made daily trips to local government offices in downtown Grand Rapids — city halls, courts, the police department, etc. — in order to track down new stories before her evening newscast. At the time, the Associated Press provided a summary of news reports from local TV and radio stations that included the names of the reporters. Teichner knew the editors of big media outlets in town weren't listening to her on WJEF, so she used AP to reach them.
'I thought, 'How can I get (other stations) to pay attention to stories that I'm breaking?,'' says Teichner. 'So I would put them on my newscast and then I would wait until it was too late for anybody at the other stations to go and call the city offices because they were closed by then, and I would contribute these stories to the AP broadcast wire with my name and call letters. And pretty soon, they had to pay attention.'
According to Teichner, she got hired by WZZM-TV as a city hall reporter once the station realized she was consistently beating them on breaking news. 'It was a wonderful way to learn because all the people I was competing against (on Grand Rapids TV) ended up going on to bigger and better things,' she says. 'There were a lot of young, on-the-make reporters who were extremely competitive and looking for ways to learn and grow, and so it was a lot of fun.'
After moving on to stints at WTVJ in Miami and WMAQ in Chicago, Teichner joined CBS News. In her early years with the network, she liked the variety of assignments she was given. What she didn't like were the barriers that kept women out of certain arenas, including combat reporting.
'It was very, very, very difficult,' she says. 'The first time I was based in London, all the men were required to rotate in and out of the war in Lebanon. The women were all told, 'You may not go.''
What finally got Teichner to Beirut, as she recounts, was lucky timing. The foreign editor in the London bureau, who opposed women being war correspondent, was away for a long weekend when the assistant foreign editor, who happened to be pro-women, needed someone to head to Beirut immediately. He phoned her in Rome and asked, 'How fast can you get to Beirut?' Teichner, who like the women producers at the bureau, had quietly gotten up-to-date visas to Beirut, told him she would rush back to London and pack a bag.
'I was in Damascus by the time the foreign editor got back from his long weekend,' she says. 'And even then he tried to stop me, but it was too late because we desperately needed somebody.' And with that, she notes, 'the dam had been broken.'
Teichner began rotating in and out of Beirut, where reporters faced huge risks. She says the first story she did in Beirut involved a real battle where she had to shimmy on her stomach along a street protected by a sand berm and then dodge bullets as she and her team ran to reach a building. 'I was told later that … the executives who were gathered in the president of CBS News' office at the time, their comment was that my hair was messy.'
She continues, 'And I was also told that all the women who worked at WBBM, the CBS-owned station at Chicago, when they saw the piece … and they recognized what was going on, that it was a woman for the first time, they all cheered.'
Teichner says her 25-year tenure at 'CBS Sunday Morning,' has been rewarding and allowed her to focus on a range of subjects in meaningful ways. 'Obviously, just like every other broadcast in television, there are budget issues and you struggle to get your pieces to the time they're allotted and all that, but we are — this may sound foolish — to the degree that it is possible to be a family in television, that's what we are. … It's a really good place to work because we like each other and we like the stories that we do.'
She considers 'CBS Sunday Morning' as 'kind of a safe space' where people from all viewpoints can come together on a weekend morning, at home, maybe sitting in their pajamas and having coffee, to see good stories well told. Some of her recent coverage has included interviews with actor David Hyde Pierce, former Secretary of State in the Biden administration Antony Blinken, actor Ralph Fiennes about the Vatican-themed movie 'Conclave' and a story on the Broadway debut of "Buena Vista Social Club."
Another safe space — one that ranks among her biggest career moments — is the Teichner Preserve in Leelanau County, a nature preserve named for Teichner and her family that includes 200 feet of Lime Lake shoreline and a boardwalk allowing visitors to explore the thriving ecosystem.
'Martha's heart and soul has always been rooted in Leelanau County, as are the memories of her beloved parents and childhood. Her donation of her family holdings as a natural landscape was the sole reason we were able to establish the Teichner Preserve in her family's honor. Martha was also the primary benefactor, along with a close neighbor, in doubling the size of the preserve a few years later," says Thomas Nelson, executive director of the Leelanau Conservancy, a nonprofit group with the stated mission of conserving the land, water and scenic character of Leelanau County.
"The Teichner Preserve not only protects the pristine waters of Lime Lake and an ecologically significant forested wetland complex, it preserves the memories of people like Martha, of those who came before us. Our gratitude is profound for Martha Teichner."
The preserve began with Teichner's initial 20-acre donation in 1996 of her family's property to the Leelanau Conservancy, a gift that paid tribute to her parents, Hans and Miriam. As she wrote in an essay (one of two posted on the conservancy's website), 'Once, not long before she died, I asked my mother if she remembered anything hopelessly romantic ... the most romantic thing she and my father used to do together. … She sat for a long time without responding, and then she said, very quietly, very simply, 'In the summer, when the moon was full, sometimes at night when you were in bed asleep, we would go down to Lime Lake. We would push out the raft and swim in the moonlight.''
About eight years later, Teichner visited her family's former home on Lime Lake and met the new owners, who informed her of a neighboring area for sale that was set to be cleared for new construction. Immediately, Teichner raised $200,000 from refinancing her New York apartment and teamed up again with the Leelanau Conservancy, which provided additional funds, to secure nine more acres along Lime Lake for the preserve. Another eight acres connecting the original and new parcels were donated by Jean Raymond of Grand Rapids and Lime Lake. The result was a doubling in size of the Teichner Preserve.
Borrowing $200,000 was scary for Teichner, but the reward of seeing the preserve thrive has been priceless. 'I've always said, in a funny way, it feels as if it's in my DNA,' she says of the land where the grew up. Since 2005, more than 300 truckloads of gravel and other debris from a road built to reach the lake have been removed, according to Teichner, and the protected area has been restored to its natural state.
'Over the years, the water has begun to flow again and the trees have created sprouts and grown into small and now medium-size trees, and the wildflowers and birds are back and the butterflies are back.'
Teichner plans to be buried at the same cemetery in Leelanau County as her parents. But it is the glory and beauty of her hometown that occupies her thoughts these days.
'Each year, when I've gone back visit, it's thrilling to see the rebirth,' she says. 'If I can have a hand in that, if I can say I've been instrumental in making that rebirth and preservation happen, then I've done one good thing in my life.'
This story has been updated with additional information.
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: CBS News legend Martha Teichner keeps a piece of her heart in Michigan
