George t. osterkamp 17 JunE 1943 - 3 MarCh 2026

CBS News producer George Osterkamp dies at 82

In Memorium

George Osterkamp, KQED and CBS news producer who raced to the biggest stories of his era, dies at 82

By Sam Whiting, Staff Writer

March 26, 2026

Emmy-winning television news producer George Osterkamp at the Marin Headlands in 2010.

Courtesy of CM Lewenz

George Osterkamp in the CBS newsroom, 2015.

[Correction - photo taken at a family event in Dresden 2012 ]

Courtesy of CM Lewenz

Minutes after the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk at San Francisco City Hall on Nov. 27, 1978, the phone rang in the Belmont home of KQED-TV reporter Rita Williams. It was a Monday morning — her day off — but Williams said she can still hear news director George Osterkamp on the line urging her to “get in here as fast as you can."

“Don’t worry about how you are dressed or how you look, just get in here,” he told her.

By the time she raced to the public television station South of Market, Osterkamp had worked the newsroom’s extensive contacts, including his own, to get her into City Hall, which had been closed to the public as an active crime scene. Williams said she was the only reporter to broadcast live that night from outside Milk’s office, with the coroner’s seal on the office door as her backdrop.

That hourlong show, anchored by Belva Davis, did not win an Emmy Award, but a dozen other Osterkamp productions did during his 40-year career in TV news, mostly as San Francisco bureau producer for the “CBS Evening News.”

During that time, he covered all the major regional stories, from the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping to the Unabomber. He was often pulled out of the bureau and sent overseas as an all-star producer on big international stories, most prominently the toppling of authoritarian Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos by the army-backed “people power” revolt over human rights abuses and massive corruption — which came to be symbolized by first lady Imelda Marcos’ infamous collection of hundreds of pairs of shoes.

George Osterkamp with one of the dozen Emmy Awards he won during his long career as a TV news producer.

Courtesy of Peggy Osterkamp

“He was the guy who found the story about all the shoes that Imelda Marcos had,” said Christine Weicher, who worked with Osterkamp at CBS News in New York. “George was tenacious. He did not let go. He always went that extra step. He just lived and breathed news.”

Osterkamp found the match for his tenacity in Dan Rather, with whom he traveled into war zones to produce news reports for “CBS Evening News” and the news magazine “48 Hours.”

Osterkamp worked extensively with Rather during his last five years as anchor, ending in 2005. Leaving his bay-view home in Sausalito, Osterkamp traveled with Rather to Russia, Haiti, China and South Africa, where they covered the historic presidential election of Nelson Mandela. Osterkamp also supplied segments to “CBS News Sunday Morning” and traveled four times to Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion, covering the initial days of the 2003 “shock and awe” campaign and the failed search for alleged weapons of mass destruction.

He retired from CBS in 2016, only to take on the longest and most in-depth documentary project of his career: a feature on pioneering Black newscaster Davis, whom Osterkamp had recruited to KQED and mentored. Osterkamp was in the middle of that project, with lengths of 16-millimeter film, VHS tapes and boxes of reports scattered about his home, when he contracted a respiratory virus that required hospitalization in late February. He died March 3 at Marin General of a virus-related illness, said Florence Higa, his partner of 25 years. He was 82.

“George was one of the good guys — and among the finest television newsmen of his time,” said Rather in a Facebook post. Osterkamp’s death was also reported on the “CBS Evening News” and “CBS News Sunday Morning,” hosted by Jane Pauley.

“George was always the man behind the scene calling the shots,” said Williams, who got her big break in 1977 when Osterkamp hired her for a temporary position at KQED, on her way to a 35-year career as a correspondent for KTVU. In 2004, she nominated Osterkamp for a Silver Circle Award issued by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to honor at least 25 years in the industry. She also introduced Osterkamp at his induction.

“I had to work on him for several years to get him to agree to do that,” said Williams, noting that Osterkamp hated to be the center of attention — though he won three national Emmy Awards and nine Bay Area Emmys.

“His ethics on journalism were impeccable,” said Williams. “He always made sure we told all sides of a story truthfully.”

George Thomas Osterkamp was born June 17, 1943, in Philadelphia, where he grew up on a farm outside town, the only child of Annemargret Lewenz Osterkamp, who raised him alone after emigrating from Berlin to escape persecution by the Nazis just months before the outbreak of World War II. She became what is known as “a convinced Friend” in Quaker tradition, and George attended George School, a Quaker boarding school in Newtown, Pa., where he became a reporter on the school paper.

A formative moment came when his uncle, Hans Lewenz, also a Jewish refugee, came up from Baltimore to take the teenage George to the NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants at Yankee Stadium in 1958. It was his first pro football game and went to sudden-death overtime in what is known as “the Greatest Game Ever Played.” He often talked about the impact witnessing a historic event had on him.

“George had that ability to be in the right place at a poignant and profound time,” said his cousin Lisa Lewenz, a Baltimore documentary filmmaker.

After graduation, he won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York but flunked out as a freshman. He returned to Philadelphia, where he took classes at both Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania to work his way back into Columbia’s School of General Studies, for adults. While finishing his bachelor’s degree, he held a full-time job as a copyboy at the New York Times.

By the time he graduated, he had worked his way up to copy editor. But he wasn’t ready to settle into a life at the paper.

“I'd studied film at Columbia and wanted to go west,” he said in a speech he later delivered at George School. “I was sort of headed to Hollywood, but in those days before GPS devices, I missed the mark and ended up in San Francisco. That was fine, but I could find no job at all doing anything.”

Amid that struggle, he was struck by another driver while behind the wheel of his VW Beetle — but the crash came with a silver lining. He was not seriously hurt but got enough of an insurance settlement to afford six months as a volunteer at KQED. During that time, a production assistant job opened up, and he was on his way.

In 1971 he met Peggy Lytle Nolt, a home economics teacher at Francisco Middle School in North Beach, who came to volunteer in the newsroom at KQED.

“He was extraordinarily romantic right from the start,” she recalled, stopping by her door in the Castro after a newscast soon after they became acquainted. “I think I fixed him a BLT or something, and things went on from there.”

They were married at City Hall in 1973, and Osterkamp left his San Francisco apartment to move in with her.

He left KQED for KPIX to head up a documentary unit that produced a monthly one-hour show called “Expanded Eyewitness News” in the early 1970s. Weicher, then an assignment editor at KQED, first noticed him at the Bay Area Emmy Awards. “It was a time when local television was still doing very serious reporting, and he just won award after award that night,” she said, and was “very humble about it.”

He left KPIX soon after to return to KQED as news director for the half-hour evening telecast originally called “Newsroom,” a prototype that re-created a newspaper newsroom, launched by the public TV station to fill a void during the newspaper strike of 1968. Weicher produced for “Newsroom” as Sacramento bureau chief for the California Public Broadcasting stations.

As budget cuts pushed “Newsroom” toward cancellation, Osterkamp again left for the commercial side of TV news: He was hired in 1980 to open a Washington bureau for KRON to cover the presidency of Ronald Reagan. But on Weicher’s recommendation, CBS News soon recruited him as a weekend producer.

“Having worked for and with George I just knew him to be a very reliable, steady as you go, dogged and determined journalist. I wasn’t doing him a favor by recommending him. I was doing the profession a favor,” said Weicher.

Osterkamp returned to San Francisco as the bureau producer for CBS national news. He and his wife had packed up their New York apartment and were ready to leave when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. He left for San Francisco ahead of his wife “and the cat and the silver,” Peggy recalled.

They had just moved to an Eichler in the Terra Linda neighborhood of San Rafael when a friend offered to sell them their Japanese-style home in Sausalito’s hillside “Banana Belt.” It was Osterkamp’s “dream house,” Peggy said, with views stretching from the San Francisco skyline to Mount Diablo. He lived there for the rest of his life, but Peggy moved out in 2000 and they were later divorced. A resident of Greenbrae, she is a well-known art weaver and author of instructional books.

Osterkamp was on assignment in Manila when he followed a hunch into the private quarters of the president. That’s how he was able to film the first lady’s shoe collection.

“On the first three days after a regime falls, you basically can go anywhere and do anything,” he later told his cousin, Lisa Lewenz. “With a person with that much wealth and power, I just wanted to see the closet.”

George Osterkamp, from right, at the November memorial for journalist Belva Davis at Grace Cathedral

in San Francisco with Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Bishop Austin Keith Rios.

Courtesy of Mariel Myers

As a producer, Osterkamp organized the stories, arranged the shoots and went everywhere the on-camera reporter went. According to John Blackstone, a CBS on-air correspondent, the job of producer also entails “taking the blame when anything goes wrong,” an assessment that Rather backed in his memoir “The Camera Never Blinks Twice.”

“George Osterkamp, one of the best field producers anywhere, had been sent ahead to advance the trip,” Rather wrote about a 1993 assignment in Shanghai. “I had given him three or four story ideas to pursue and he’d come up with a few more on his own.” But as soon as they got settled and were out shooting, they had to double back to the U.S. to chase the story of flooding in the Midwest.

“He never skipped a beat,” Rather wrote. “He stayed up all night, thinking ahead, arranging the pictures in his mind, planning and writing, making the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle all fit.”

The producer’s job also entailed driving the rental car from the airport to the assignment. Osterkamp was legendary in that regard. “He never would let anyone else drive because they didn’t go fast enough,” said Blackstone.

When the Crandall Canyon coal mine in Utah collapsed in 2007, burying six miners, Osterkamp was behind the wheel, racing from the Salt Lake City airport to be the first national news crew to the scene. He’d pushed the speedometer past 100 when a state trooper pulled them over.

“George talked himself out of a 100-mph speeding ticket, and we got the story,” said Blackstone. “I often describe George as a bulldog. Once he got his teeth into a story, he wouldn’t let it go until he got the goods.”

Osterkamp was known for his ability to earn the trust of crime victims and help them feel comfortable sharing their stories on camera. During the Unabomber attacks from the late 1970s into the 1990s, when fear made many reluctant to speak publicly, he approached sources with sensitivity and respect, helping them weigh the value of telling their stories.

Earlier this century, he learned of a young girl in the Central Valley who had survived horrific abuse by her parents with the help of her adoptive family. He waited until she had finished high school before reaching out, and then worked with her at her own pace. The result was “Mia’s Story,” a five-minute segment that aired on the CBS Evening News in 2009.

“The family had to go public, which it had not done,” said Blackstone, who did the on-camera interview. “George talked to them for months to tell them there would be value in telling their story on a national basis.”

“Mia’s Story” was nominated for an Emmy Award, and Mia and her adoptive mom became public speakers on the topic of child abuse.

That was one story among multitudes, and after Blackstone and Osterkamp had both retired, they met regularly for lunch at Le Garage in Sausalito to rehash them.

“We’d talk about how fortunate we were to have lived in the time that we lived and worked in the industry at the time that we worked in it,” said Blackstone. “We worked in a time when it was not unusual to hire a Lear jet to get someplace for a story.”

Those days were long gone by the time Osterkamp retired, in 2016, but he still had the story of his colleague Davis to tell. That documentary project, titled “Belva Davis Reporting,” is now being edited by Nik Heftman, a former associate producer at CBS News who runs his own documentary production company in Los Angeles.

“George kept things pretty close to the chest, but I learned a lot from him in the short time we worked together, and I’m grateful for his belief in me,” said Heftman, who hopes to complete the project for public television by early 2027.

In 2023, Osterkamp made a rare on-camera appearance in a CNN docudrama on the kidnapping in Chowchilla of a school bus full of children in 1976, a case he had long followed.

His last act as a newsman was to cover Davis’ memorial at Grace Cathedral, in November 2025. Afterward, Osterkamp and Heftman did on-site interviews with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee and actor Delroy Lindo.

By Williams’ math, the time spent on the Davis documentary counts toward his career, which would qualify him for the Gold Circle Award signifying 50 years in TV news. During their regular chats, she was trying to persuade him to allow her to nominate him again.

“He kind of chuckled,” said Williams, “but that was as far as I got.”

March 26, 2026

Sam Whiting

Reporter

Sam Whiting has been a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle since 1988. He started as a feature writer in the People section, which was anchored by Herb Caen's column, and has written about people ever since. He is a general assignment reporter with a focus on writing feature-length obituaries. He lives in San Francisco and walks three miles a day on the steep city streets.