Byline: DENNIS HEVESI New York Times
George Page, the creator and resonant on-air voice of the award-winning public television series "Nature," died Wednesday at his home in Equinunk, Pa. He was 71.
The cause was cancer, said Roz Kay, a spokeswoman for Channel 13, the PBS station in New York at which Page worked from 1973 to 1998.
From the ice fields of Greenland to the African savanna, from the Australian outback to the beaches of Polynesia, the tall, sturdily built Page guided viewers to the variety of wildlife: a tiny fig wasp in Central America, a hulking Komodo dragon in Indonesia. From 1982, when "Nature" was first broadcast, until his retirement, Page was the host and narrator of nearly 300 episodes.
In 1987 and 1988, the program received Emmy Awards for outstanding informational series.
"It was George's idea to put on a weekly natural history series where the subject matter was far more esoteric than anything that had ever been on TV," said Fred Kaufman, executive producer of "Na ture" for the last 15 years.
George Henson Page was born on March 31, 1935, in rural Hartwell, Ga., the son of William and Maude Page. His father owned a funeral home, and at 14 Page used his deep voice and his connections to get a job at a local radio station as host of a show called "Obituary Column of the Air."
In 1957, Page graduated from Emory University. Two years later, he was hired by WSB-TV, the NBC affiliate in Atlanta, where he reported on the civil rights movement. He was then promoted to foreign correspondent for NBC News and covered the Vietnam War. In 1968, he directed and narrated "We Won't Go," an examination of the growing resistance to the draft.
In 1972, Page moved to PBS headquarters in Washington, where he worked as assistant to the network's president until joining Channel 13 a year later. There, he served as director of science and natural history programming, supervising shows like "Travels" and "Medicine at the Crossroads."
Page is survived by his companion, Dennis De Stefano.
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