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Robert Bendick was born on February 8, 1917, in New York, New York, the son of Louis G. Bendick, a businessman, and Ruth (Feis) Bendick. He attended New York University from 1936-1937, and the C. H. White School of Photography from 1938-1939.
On November 24, 1940, he married Jeanne Garfunkel, with whom he wrote seven books on television, filming, economics, and oceanography for young readers. These books include Television Works Like This (1965); Filming Works Like This (1970); The Consumer's Catalog of Economy and Ecology (1975); Finding Out About Jobs: Television Reporting (1976); Exploring an Ocean Tide Pool (1975); Eureka! It's Television! (1993); and Markets: From Barter to Bar Codes (1997).
From 1940-1942 he served as one of the first three cameramen at CBS-TV. With the advent of World War II, he took a break from his career to join the U.S. Army Air Forces, where he filmed combat documentaries from 1943-1945, and received an Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters. From 1945-1952, Bendick worked as the director of news, special events, and sports, and was the executive director of several individual programs at CBS. He co-produced and directed "This is Cinerama" and directed "Cinerama Holiday" from 1952-1953 for the Cinerama Corporation in New York. He then joined NBC as the producer of the "Today Show" from 1953-1955 and 1958-1960; "Wide, Wide World" in 1956; "Twenty-Five Years of Life" in 1961; "U.S. Steel Opening of the 1964 World's Fair" in 1964; and the children's series "The First Look" from 1966-1967. He continued as a producer and director until 1975, along the way founding and serving as president of Bendick Associates, an educational audio-visual company, in 1966. He is also a lecturer at New York University and the University of Oklahoma.
Robert Bendick has worked on films in Europe, Asia, Alaska, Southeast Asia, New Zealand, and Australia. He once commented that a subject of great importance to him is "the impact of television on society-the failure of television to understand or respond to its incredible responsibility."
(Source: Gale Literary Databases. "Robert Bendick." Contemporary Authors. 27 February 2002. 12 July 2005.)
The Robert Bendick papers consist of television production materials for America's Cup Races (1962); Opening Night at the New York World's Fair (1964); Seventeenth Annual Emmy Awards Show (1965); This is Cinerama (1952); "Today" In Rome (1960); Wide, Wide World ("Sunday Driver", "Land of Plenty," and "Two Ways to Winter," 1956); Merrily We Roll Along (1961); Twenty-Five Years of Life (1961); 1948 Republican Convention (1948); and Airtime Analyses (1946-1948). The collection also includes a folder of correspondence and several miscellaneous folders.