Tops of ’23 – Newsman ‘Mark Davis’ Was Wheeling’s Walter Cronkite

(Publisher’s Note: Joe Tarantini wasn’t from here. He knew few people on his first day of work. By the end of his career, though, everyone in the Wheeling area was well aware of the newsman albeit by a different name. And history judges Tarantini as one of the valley’s best new reporters of all time, and this is why.)

He was a mixture between the legendary Walter Cronkite and the fictional Ron Burgundy, but for more than half of his life, not many in the Upper Ohio Valley knew Joe Tarantini.

Radio listeners and television watchers throughout the tri-state region, however, were quite aware of “Mark Davis,” a stage-named news director who was weaponized with a matter-of-fact voice, “I care about you” eyes, and a gentleman’s genuine sincerity. Davis didn’t just deliver the news as one of the prominent anchors on WTRF TV-7, but he collected it, fact-checked it, and he stayed on it until he discovered the end of the story.

Tarantini, or “Davis,” was an American newsman, and that mattered during the days when Ohio River communities between Steubenville and Benwood were engulfed by the soot of steelmaking and manufacturing of everything from a child’s Big Wheel to a grandmother’s favorite candy dish. Davis told the region’s residents about coal mine explosions, infrastructure expansions, campaign promises and election decisions, and so much more.

“When the information is given to the people, on radio, television or in print, it must be accurate. I could never stress that enough. Always check the fact as though your job depends on it. Because the truth is, it does.”‘

Joseph Tarantini, aka “Mark Davis,” narrated a story composed by people experiencing industrial prosperity in a blue-color culture surrounded by religious posturing and a sense of survival. He told the people the good news as readily as he offered the bad, but most importantly, he told the truth.

“I realized my father was the real deal in the news business and I was intimidated by it, actually,” explained Gina Baker, one of Tarantini’s three children. “I had a sister five years younger and when I was in high school she was very much into the journalism part of the industry. She wanted to be on the school’s newspaper staff, and all of that stuff.

“I didn’t want to any of those things because I felt, I knew then, I could never match what my dad had did and what he was doing then,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to be compared like the other reporters who tried. My Dad was the news, and he was proud of it.”

Just the Facts, Ma’am

Tarantini was born in Pittsburgh on January 19, 1931, to parents very proud of their Italian heritage.

In fact, when he began his career with WHJB in Greensburg, the station manager order him to change his name was because Tarantini was “too ethnic.”

“After first I said that I couldn’t because it would upset my mother,” he wrote in 2006. “He asked me of my mother was going to feed my wife and child. So, we compromised. He chose the last name and I insisted that I spell it my way to reflect by Italian heritage. So, Joe Terri was born.”

Then he included, “My mother was livid. I told her I spelled it with an “i” at the end. She didn’t speak to me for two months.”

“My Dad would tell that story pretty often and just laugh about it,” Baker said. “But he would tell people his real name because of how proud he was. He would get this look on his face and you could just tell how proud he was.

“After that, he took a job with WOMP in 1961, and then he moved to WWVA quickly in 1962, and that’s when he changed his on-air name again,” she said. “But it wasn’t until 1965 when he went to WTRF when people really got to know ‘Mark Davis.’

“It wasn’t until high school when my friends and classmates started making a big deal about who my dad was. No one cared when we were younger because we didn’t really care about the news back then,” Baker explained. “They would ask me if he was nice, and if he was always that serious. I remember someone asking me if he ever smiled, and my dad smiled a lot. He loved when he got to do for a living.

“He was Wheeling’s Walter Cronkite. He never said that, but I know he knew it,” she insisted. “I know people told him that, too, and that made him proud. He took it very seriously and he was the best.”

An Honest American

He married Edna in 1954 and they reared three children, Gina, Angela, and the late Joseph Tarantini Jr.

Edna divorced Tarantini in 1965, though, and then she departed Wheeling on a motorcycle with a boyfriend two years later.

“We ran to the corner store where there was a pay phone so we could call our Dad at work, and when we told him he said, ‘We’re going to make it work, don’t worry,’” Baker remembered. “And that’s what we did. We made it work. And then, after he married his girlfriend (Peggy Potts Spurlin), there were seven of us kids (Phil, Susie, Joan, and Jackie), and he made sure it worked then, too.

“When it came to affection, he didn’t do a whole lot of that, especially in public,” she said. “But we knew he loved us. He did tell us sometimes that he loved us, but he showed it all the time. He was the quiet type, though.”

The journalist also stayed mum about the money made – or didn’t make depending on one’s professional perspective.

“My father never really made the money people thought he did, and he was never paid what he felt he deserved either,” Baker revealed. “But he didn’t care either and that’s why you didn’t hear him talk about it. He loved this valley, and he loved the people here. I don’t think he ever regretted moving to this area from where he was from in Pittsburgh because Wheeling used to be just a smaller version of Pittsburgh to him. The people were the same hardworking people.

“When I think of my Dad, I remember the respect I’ve always had for him and for what he did,” she continued. “He worked his rear end off trying to provide for all of us, and it all worked out really well. Honestly, he was talented at what he did every single day that I forgot that he had never graduated from high school let alone from college. He was very smart, very honest, and he learned his craft on his feet, that’s for sure.”

Tarantini, or “Mark Davis,” was proud to have “discovered” on-air personalities like Frank O’Brien, Brenda Danehart, and Faith Daniels, an anchor who took her talents to the national level, and he was a veteran of the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War and was interred in Section 4 or the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies following his passing on April 18, 2011.

His daughter wished for his epitaph to read, “An Honest American.”

“When I have spoken to people from Wheeling who are older than 40, they’ve always asked about my father because they’re old enough to remember him, but if they ‘ve been younger than 40, forget about it,” Baker reported. “When people do realize I’m his daughter, at first they don’t believe it for whatever reasons, and then they have a lot of different questions. And a lot of people think I have my dad’s eyes. I hear that a lot.

“They talk to me about how different the news was back then, and that they could believe the news and the people delivering it. It’s not like it is today and they recognize that,” she said. “My father wasn’t politically motivated in any way when he reported the news because he was such a believer in truth. He got the facts, and he always go it right,” Baker added. “That’s what he cared about the most, and what loved the most. The people of Wheeling were lucky to have the real thing.”