Editor's Note: This story was originally published June 18, 2015, when Lester Holt was named as the anchor of NBC Nightly News. He is set to moderate the first presidential debate on Monday between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and businessman Donald J. Trump.
CRIMINAL COURTS — Lester Holt has been named to replace Brian Williams as the anchor of the "NBC Nightly News" but he's been a hit for years at 26th Street and California avenue.
Holt was a CBS2 Chicago newsman from 1986 to 2000 but he has been on endless video loop at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse for years instructing would-be jurors on how the whole thing works.
“That thing was recorded in like in 1960,” Holt once joked (though the funky mustache he’s rockin’ in the video puts it sometime in the '80s.)
Holt told Pete McMurray on WGN radio a couple of years back that “it’s kinda hilarious.” (The video, he meant, though he might have been talking about the ‘stach, too.)
“I almost want to call them and say I'll do [the film over] as a freebie. We have to change this out. I won’t charge you,” Holt said, adding that “not a month goes by” that someone doesn’t see the video at the courthouse and tweet about it.
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Holt's son Stefan Holt was a morning anchor at NBC5 Chicago. Holt wrote a letter to Stefan and another son, Cameron, for Time magazine timed to Father's Day. In it, the father recalls sledding in Oz Park and other events when they lived in Lincoln Park. Read the letter here.
As for the mustache, he shaved it before starting a job at MSNBC in 2000.
"Not to get too deep on shaving my mustache, but it was kind of symbolic of, ‘This is a moment of liberation, a chance to reinvent yourself.' That's kind of what I did,” he said.
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