H. Austin Hoyt

Born in Buffalo, New York, on June 20, 1937, Herbert Austin Aikins Hoyt was named after his maternal grandfather, a professor of philosophy and psychology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Nichols School in Buffalo and was a graduate of The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and Yale University where he earned a bachelor of arts in English in 1959.

Hoyt never enjoyed writing, he said, until he worked as a reporter for the Niagara Falls Gazette in 1963, a posting that began his long career as a writer and producer. A resident of Cambridge for almost forty years, Hoyt took a job at Boston’s PBS station WGBH in 1965 “to pay the rent,” he said, though he had scarcely watched television. From 1966 to 1967, he was a reporter on WGBH’s first local news program, The News at 10. In the end, he stayed on as an employee at WGBH for thirty-eight years, then continued for another seven as an independent producer.

He was one of the reasons WGBH grew from a regional educational television station in 1969 to the national public television powerhouse it is today. At the dawn of public television, his documentary “Multiply and Subdue the Earth” alerted audiences to the dangers to the planet from pollution, climate change, and population growth - pressing concerns today. Hoyt brought the rigor and discipline of journalism to the stories of the past.

In 1969, Hoyt helped to create The Advocates, and he served as the executive producer of ZOOM, in 1974. His credits include “LBJ Goes to War (1964 to 1965),” which won an Emmy and a Writers Guild of America Award, and “Crisis in Central America,” which Hoyt produced for Frontline, PBS’s premier public affairs documentary series, and for which he won a Peabody Award.

He produced two of the thirteen programs in Vietnam: A Television History, a widely acclaimed series that by its example of rigorous inquiry led to the creation of the on-going series American Experience, for which he produced more than a dozen films, including presidential portraits of George Bush, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. He was awarded a Primetime Emmy in 1999 for his biography of Douglas MacArthur.

His favorite program for American Experience, "Victory in the Pacific," a two-hour film on the final year of the war in the Pacific, was nominated for three Emmy Awards. Its recognition led to a tour of the United Kingdom organized by the U.S. Department of State and to Hoyt chairing a

panel on the atomic bomb in 2005 at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, the largest symposium to date on World War II.

At the PBS annual meeting in 1997, historian David McCullough told attendees “I have worked with the best documentary filmmakers of our time,” and he included Hoyt and his film “The Richest Man in the World: Andrew Carnegie” in that number.

Peter McGhee, WGBH’s manager of national programming, commented about Hoyt, “If producing historical documentaries on controversial subjects is a high wire act, Austin rode the wire many times and never fell off.”

An avid paddler, Hoyt organized an ascent of the South Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories of Canada in 1959 and a descent of the Back River to the Arctic Ocean in 1962, the first made since the descents of Captain George Back for the Royal Navy and the Hudson’s Bay Company in the mid-nineteenth century. His account of that journey was published in Sports Illustrated in 1963.

With his cousin Corning Townsend, Hoyt joined paddlers from Toronto on the first recorded descent of the Nottaway River in Quebec to Rupert House on James Bay in 1964. Hoyt was on one of the early kayak trips down the Grand Canyon organized by legendary kayaker Walt Blackadar of Salmon, Idaho, in 1970. He followed the advice of acclaimed Toronto paddler Roger Parsons, as they contemplated running Lava Falls: “A good general knows when to retreat.”

Hoyt’s fiftieth birthday present to himself was a seventeen-foot gaffe-rigged lapstrake sloop, which he sailed across Buzzards Bay to Cuttyhunk Island and Penikese. He named her The Chief after his friend David Greenway, whom Hoyt called The Chief when Greenway was acting bureau chief at TIME’s Boston bureau during Hoyt’s early years in the city. Greenway introduced Hoyt to sailing on Buzzards Bay in The Sadie, the twenty-six-foot 1914 Herreshoff sloop that belonged to his father.

An original owner at The Lodge at Snowbird, Hoyt enjoyed skiing there and at Alta Ski Area in Utah. Hoyt served on the resort’s management committee for more than two decades, but he never confused the grandeur of his playgrounds with his ability to cope. His Eskimo roll failed on four trips on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho, and he had to be rescued. This led to a lifelong concern by Hoyt of being a social nuisance.

In 2011, he published Bill Levitt in His Own Words, an oral history of the owner of the Alta Lodge. In 2025, he published The Haunting Nahanni, the story of his 1959 ascent of that river

with John Wadsworth and Henry Blagden in a canoe and a kayak, as well as the river’s mysteries and legends.

He met Felicity (Forbes) at the Alta Lodge on Valentine’s Day 2000 and married her in 2004. He treasured their life together in the house and boathouse they built on an estuary in South Dartmouth. Hoyt was happiest when entertaining friends and family in the dining room of their home, which he designed with care to display his mother’s antiques, and in his boathouse where he was surrounded by pictures of his parents and grandparents in their boats and boathouses in the Muskoka lakes in Ontario. Hoyt was an active member of the Somerset Club of Boston, the New Bedford Yacht Club, and the Yale Club of New York City.

He was predeceased by his father, Capt. John D. H. Hoyt, who died in World War II; his mother, Amie Dean Stimson (née Aikins); two sisters, Albertine Hill Hoyt and Polly Aikins Allan Kimberly; and a twin brother, William B. Hoyt II.

Hoyt is survived by his wife, Felicity; her children, Isabel Tinkham (Barber) of Dallas, Texas, and J. Forbes Barber of Marblehead, Massachusetts; his step-grandchildren, Sawyer F. Barber and Austin L. Barber of Marblehead; nieces and nephews Francesca B. Allan of Palo Alto, California; Douglas G. Allan III of Olympia, Washington; John H. Hoyt of Seattle, Washington; Whitney S. Hoyt of San Rafael, California; Sam Hoyt of Buffalo, New York; and Carolyn Hoyt Stevens of Buffalo, New York; five grandnieces and grandnephews; two great-grandnephews; and a stepson, Franklin King IV of Boston, Massachusetts.

A life celebration will be held on September 12th. Donations in Austin’s memory may be made to the WGBH Educational Foundation or to the Dartmouth National Resources Trust (DNRT).

Hoyt’s book The Haunting Nahanni is available on Amazon.