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Each March, Women’s History Month is observed and celebrated for the vital roles women have played in American history and beyond. Each week throughout the month of March The K-V Dispatch will highlight women who have made significant impacts and accomplishments in their lifetime.

Dorothy Fuldheim was an American journalist and anchor is credited with being the first woman in the United States to anchor a television news broadcast as well as to host her own television show, a role she held for 37 years.

She has been referred to as the “First Lady of Television News.”

Fuldheim spent the majority of her career working for The Cleveland Press and WEWS-TV.

In 1959, Fuldheim, who worked with WEWS before it even went on air, began to develop her own newscast.

Fuldheim centered her newscast around her interviews, a general overview of the news and her commentaries.

According to Biography Today in the beginning of her time with the station Fuldheim was hired to read the news for 13 weeks before being replaced by a man; she ended up staying with the news program for 37 years.

She anchored the news for 10 years.

WEWS also used her as a roving reporter on assignments ranging from the Mideast to Northern Ireland, and an interview she did in Hong Kong with two American prisoners released by Communist China in 1955 brought her a National Overseas Press Club award.

At age 91 she still conducted interviews and read commentaries on-air three times every day – which ended when she suffered a stroke on July 27, 1984, shortly after interviewing U.S. President Ronald Reagan via satellite.