Joseph Glover had a voice that captivated the room.
The former UF professor, who died from stage 4 lung cancer Oct. 5 in Mobile, Alabama, at 79, taught his students to develop their voices — strong with a neutral accent, said his daughter, Tracey Winter Glover.
Glover taught broadcast journalism at UF from 1995 to 2005, UF spokesperson Steve Orlando said.
Glover taught TV news to then second-year student Harrison Hove. Today Hove, a multimedia news manager at the UF College of Journalism and Communications, teaches the same class Glover did.
In his first project on the Student Government election for Glover’s class, Hove said he made a jump cut, an abrupt film transition, and had to hear him critique it in front of the class.
He learned to never make that mistake again.
“So many other successful Gators can say the same exact thing, that he taught us things that we still use in life and in this business on a very fundamental level, and that is awesome to think about,” Hove said.
Before coming to UF, Glover spent his an over 30-year career as a newscaster at more than seven news stations in New York to San Francisco, Tracey Winter Glover said. He spent over a decade as a newscaster solely in Detroit.
“Doing news was just so engaging and exciting, and it just connected him to the world and so many people,” she said.
When David Ostroff worked at Bowling Green State University in Ohio in the 1980s, he said he’d watch Glover on the 11 p.m. news routinely.
He never thought he would work with Glover at UF.
“It was unusual because he had been an anchor for so long,” Ostroff said. “But, he just got interested in becoming an academic.”
He hosted the station’s annual 24-hour telethon fundraising for research in muscular dystrophy, Tracey Winter Glover said. She said she remembers playing and growing up alongside the children affected by the disease when her dad would host annual pool parties for them after the telethon.
“It was so beyond work,” she said. “He put his whole heart into it and really loved all the kids so much.”
In the early 1990s, Glover decided to retire from the TV business in Detroit, but grew bored of retirement after just two years, she said.
“Though he knew how to live and have fun, he never really knew how to relax,” she said.
This is when Glover enrolled in UF to pursue a doctorate degree in broadcast journalism and eventually began to teach aspiring broadcast students, she said. He went on to teach at University of South Alabama after he left UF in 2005 until he got sick in late 2017.
Besides his passion for storytelling, Glover also had a love for animals, which inspired him to become vegan, she said. After his death, he left behind 11 cats and two dogs. When he was well, he would spend his weekends driving across state lines to take animals from shelters to no-kill facilities.
In his classes, she said he would use clips from animal rights documentaries to teach his students about investigations in film.
“He just had the most compassionate, sensitive heart,” she said. “He instilled that in me so much.”
Contact Gillian Sweeney at gsweeney@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter at @gilliangsweeney
Joseph Glover hosting the annual Muscular Dystrophy telethon while working in Detroit. Glover would host the annual 24-hour television event during his time in the city.
