In 1986, after two decades in Chicago television news, Jim Ruddle traded an anchor desk for a 35-foot cutter named Zarzuela and made the boat his home. Ruddle, a WGN, WTTW and WMAQ anchor, NBC News correspondent and investigative reporter, died on August 27, 2026, at 94, his daughter Brey Sloan said in an announcement reported by CBS Chicago.

The change returned him to waters he had known before television. Ruddle had served three years as a United States Coast Guard radio operator aboard vessels in the Atlantic and Pacific. After leaving broadcasting in 1986, he took Zarzuela through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River and into the Atlantic, replacing nightly deadlines with the demands of a boat underway.

His route into broadcasting began in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he grew up. In 1949, Ruddle appeared on television in a University of Tulsa musical comedy program carried by KOTV. The following year, he called Pittsburg Browns baseball games for KSEK in Kansas, recreating the action from ticker reports. A foot-long bat and a xylophone mallet supplied the crack listeners imagined coming from the ballpark.

After the Coast Guard, Ruddle returned to KOTV. His early assignments ranged from morning news and a daily song program to playing the helmeted "Zeta on Satellite Six" on a children's show. He later worked in Mexico City and Albuquerque while pursuing graduate studies at the University of New Mexico. From 1963 to 1965, he co-anchored the early evening news at WTVT in Tampa and taught American Studies at the University of South Florida.

Chicago became his principal newsroom in 1965. Ruddle and Gary Park formed the city's first two-person anchor team at WGN-TV, according to Chicago media reporter Robert Feder. Ruddle moved to WMAQ-TV in 1967, first reporting and then anchoring the Midnight Report and the 5:00 News. In 1975, he joined John Callaway at WTTW's Public News Center. A turn as a network correspondent for NBC News followed before Ruddle returned to WMAQ in May 1978 as a reporter and co-anchor of NewsCenter5's 6:00 Report.

Ruddle's work at WMAQ extended well beyond the desk. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Chicago/Midwest Chapter credited him with several Chicago Emmy Awards in general and investigative reporting. It also identified him as a reporter on the Unit 5 investigation "Strip and Search." The Peabody Awards said the 1979 documentary exposed routine strip searches of women detained for minor offenses and helped bring new police restrictions and stricter legislation. The television academy later included Ruddle in its 2003 Silver Circle class and noted his earlier service as president of its Chicago/Midwest chapter.

By the time Feder interviewed him in Rye, New York, in 2014, Ruddle had added novelist to his list of pursuits. In 2014, he published "My Name Is Luke," a maritime adventure about a 15-year-old boy caught aboard a hijacked schooner in 1858. Asked whether he considered himself a sailor or a journalist first, Ruddle answered, "Some would probably question either." Sloan's tribute joined the roles without choosing among them, describing her father as a "trusted newsman, marvelous conversationalist, sailor, adventurer, protector, epic storyteller, loving PawPaw" with a beautiful baritone voice.

The concrete record of Ruddle's work includes the Chicago broadcasts that carried his reporting, the reforms associated with "Strip and Search," and the sea story he finally put between book covers. The newsroom and the water were not competing chapters in his life. They were places where a practiced voice learned how to tell a story and when to let the facts steer.