At his family’s dinner table, Jon Delano listened to his conservative father and liberal mother debate the merits of free trade and fair trade. Maybe that’s how he became “a flaming moderate.”

After 30 years of covering politics, government and money for KDKA-TV, Pittsburgh’s CBS affiliate, Delano, Longuevue Drive, retired at age 75 last December.

Friendly, funny and hard working, the Ivy League-educated lawyer talked on camera with every recent presidential candidate, interviewing Barack Obama eight times, twice at the White House.

“He told me that was a record for a local journalist,” Delano said. He also was the first Pittsburgh television reporter to interview Donald Trump after he left office in 2021.

His first memory of a presidential campaign is 1960, the year his mother, June, “put a Kennedy button on me when I was at Markham School,” adding that most of his classmates supported Richard Nixon.

Delano was a young litigator at the Reed Smith law firm in 1977 when Doug Walgren, a newly elected U.S. Congressman, recruited him to be his chief of staff.

From 1977 to 1990, Delano worked in Pittsburgh and on Capitol Hill, usually wearing a blue suit and a red tie. He managed an 18-member staff at Walgren’s offices in Washington, D.C. and Pittsburgh and also met with senators, representatives, mayors and Democratic leaders.

One day, Delano stood on the Speaker’s Balcony in the U.S. Capitol, looking at the National Mall and realizing how much his life had changed. Eight years earlier, as a Haverford College student, he had participated in several protests against the Vietnam War on the mall, a vast public park filled with museums and monuments.

So when he had a chance to right a wrong from the Vietnam era, he took it. After Pittsburgh newspapers published the names of veterans that would appear on the Vietnam War Memorial, which was unveiled in November 1982, KDKA-TV news producer Aviva Radbord heard from two local families because their sons’ names had been left off the wall.

For more than a year, Delano worked behind the scenes in Walgren’s office, “overcoming the bureaucratic nonsense that afflicts Washington” so that the names of Army Sp. 4 Charles D. McGonigle and Marine LCpl. Harold Brazen could be inscribed in the black granite monument.

“That opened the gates to many more names being added to the monument,” Delano said.

In 1994, KDKA-TV hired Delano to do political analysis. By 2001, he was KDKA’s full-time money and politics editor.

Reporter Harold Hayes, who is retired from KDKA, said he and his colleagues respected Delano because he knew how politics worked and “he was going to work relentlessly to get an interview that nobody else would get.”

Delano’s law degree from the University of Pennsylvania has helped him see both sides of an issue. “I don’t like to create conflict. I try to look for the middle ground. Most politicians are really decent people. They can be led astray,” Delano said.

Steve Willing, a KDKA cameraman for 30 years, will miss his colleague.

“I loved working with Jon. He’s such a nice man,” Willing said, recalling that together they covered four national political conventions, where media access has become increasingly restricted.

“Jon was so well connected that we always seemed to be able to get on the floor,” Willing said.

To Willing, covering politics with Delano was an adventure.

“It was energizing to be there. He made it easy. He knew everybody. He lives, eats and breathes politics. His mental rolodex of politicians and business leaders is unprecedented. You couldn’t go 20 feet without someone recognizing Jon,” Willing said.

In 1996, they covered the Republican convention in San Diego. In 2000, they covered the Democrats in Los Angeles. Next came New York City in 2004 for a GOP convention and finally to Cleveland in 2016, again with the Republicans.

Once, Willing said, he called his mother to tell her, “I’m on the front lawn of the White House. We’re doing a live shot with Jon Delano!”