The Mourning Anchor

You have a whiz in the kitchen, a connoisseur of champagne, a global citizen, a 12-handicap golfer, a father of two (daughter Jillian, 5, and son Bradley, 9) and a multimillionaire by virtue of a contract with NBC that pays him some $7 million over the next three years, enough to keep him up to his thorax in cuff links.

And that doesn't include the biggest prize of all: his job as host of the most expensive TV undertaking ever—NBC's coverage of the Seoul Olympics. Over the 16 days of the Games, Gumbel's image will be projected by more prime-time cathode rays than any network anchor's in history. The assignment is the fattest enchilada ever handed out by NBC, and the ultimate testament to Gumbel's talent is that no one has yet mentioned that it went to a black man.

It's 98° in Chicago, and Rhea Gumbel, 68, has all the windows open in her seventh-floor apartment. She has an airconditioner in the bedroom, but it's not enough to cool the whole apartment. She would go somewhere cooler if she had the energy or a car, but she has neither. Sold the car. Too much trouble. So five mornings a week, she takes the bus to her job as a city clerk. Plenty are the days when she wishes she could afford to retire.

"Did you see what Oprah Winfrey bought her mother the other day?" one of the other clerks asked Rhea recently. "A brand-new beautiful mansion, that's what." Rhea knows what that woman would loooove to say next: And your son, the big-shot NBC man, host of the "Today" show, what does he give you? You live in a lousy apartment. You won't go out at night and get milk because you're afraid of walking in the streets. What kind of fancy son is this you have?

Still, she would never ask him for money. For one thing, she's too proud. For another, "It would hurt me like a knife if he said no. Besides, if he wanted to do something for me, he'd go ahead and do it on his own, wouldn't he?"

She knows what the trouble is. She has this one glaring fault. She's not his father.

Judge Richard Gumbel was a big man, 6'1", four inches taller than his younger son, Bryant. Richard, the child of a New Orleans gambler, was "one of the most amazing men I've ever met," says Dr. Norman Francis, president of Xavier.

As a student, Richard was nearly straight A. As a leader, he was the first black to hold office in a national Catholic student organization. As a father, he was both strict and kind. While rearing his four children in the racially mixed neighborhood of Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago, he not only wouldn't let them get away with bad grammar, but he also wouldn't let their friends get away with it. "He was very hard to impress," says Bryant's brother, Greg, 42, a sportscaster with the Madison Square Garden Network and, starting with football season, with CBS. "A C should have been a B, and a B should have been an A, and if it was an A, why wasn't it an A before this?"

Yet when the family went on a picnic, Richard would play pepper with his boys for two hours. Or they would go to the sandlot and work on grounders for three. On summer days Bryant rarely missed a Cub game at Wrigley Field and also saw plenty of the White Sox at night at Comiskey Park. What a life. In his day, he not only caught more than 100 batting practice balls and fouls, he wore them all out, too.

Greg lost that boyhood idolization of his father in high school, but Bryant never did. Greg was handsome and popular in high school; Bryant wasn't. Because racial attitudes then favored lighter skin, and his skin was the darkest of any in his family, including his cousins, Bryant felt ugly. Lacking social confidence, he stayed away from the dances and the back row at the Bijou, and held close to his hero. "I don't think I'll ever see a man as good," Bryant once said of his father.