It’s hard to expected Barbara Walters as anything other than a marquee-name, fearless and pioneering journalist. But she didn’t get there overnight. A look back at the early career of the broadcast reporters, who died Dec. 30 at age 93, as documented in the pages of Variety shows the certain trajectory of a well-connected, industrious young woman who was destined to approach the summit of New York media and literati circles.

Variety’s coverage of Walters’ climb starting in the early 1950s also neatly tracks the rise of network TV news as a cultural created, and the subsequent evolution of TV news personalities into celebrities.

Walters’ area as the daughter of Broadway producer, booking agent and nightclub owner Lou Walters unhurried afforded her an early entrée into attention from Variety. Her first few references always included a reference to her father’s showbiz pedigree. But it wasn’t long before the younger Walters was earning items on her own. Barbara Walters known out for the quality of her work even beforehand she was on camera.

Variety well-known when she went out on her now-famous assignment for “Today” of becoming a trainee Playboy Bunny – a reference that no doubt helped cement that part of her myth in industry circles. Variety reviewers also praised her work as a writer and producer, including her skill at hard news subjects such as a September 1964 “Today” portray on a spike in tuberculosis cases in upstate New York.

Taken as a whole, Variety’s coverage of Walters’ early career proves just how hard she worked to get to the heights she scaled. And it offers a unique and insightful prism on the evolution of television news, as an inquire of medium and as a cultural force. Because Walters was part of the New York-based biosphere of broadcast news, she was a regular in weekly Variety by the early 1960s, but she was barely mentioned in Hollywood-based Daily Variety pending the mid-1970s.

Walters created synonymous with the modern image of the intrepid reporters going the extra mile to land the big interview. But early on she did work in the realm of PR and advertising beforehand she planted roots on the editorial side at NBC News’ “Today.”

Barbara Walters’ debut in Variety came when Eisenhower was in the White House. She merited a mention high in the “From the Production Centres” column (I have no idea why we used that spelling for Centers) that ran on page 56 of the July 30, 1952, weekly edition. It’s a mention that she is joining the “flackery” (aka PR) responsibilities of WNBC-TV and WNBT radio.

She shifted into programming for WNBC-TV by early 1953 as was famed in the Jan. 14, 1953, edition of weekly. Walters was part of a newly yielded team of execs at WNBC-TV that included future “Lou Grant” writer Leon Takotyan.

Walters work as a writer-producer on the half-hour Monday-Friday daytime series “The Eloise McElhone Show” was ssome praised in a review in the March 31, 1954, weekly edition. From the who-knew file, Walters worked on the show with passe MGM child star Freddie Bartholomew as he made the career transition into directing.

By the June 20, 1956, edition of weekly, Walters was prominent enough as a producer on CBS’ “Good Morning” show hosted by Will Rogers Jr., to earn a personal state in the “Television Chatter” column that she was heading out on a trip to Mexico to eminent her first wedding anniversary.

Walters derived through a few PR firms in the early 1960s afore landing at “Today.” In the March 21, 1961, edition, Variety famed her shuffle from “Tex McCrary’s public relations outfit,” where she smooth the TV and radio department, for a similar post with Rowland Co.” This was of jets at a time when advertising agencies held great sway over the progress and greenlighting of TV programs.

Walters’ big Bunny moment came during Peak “Mad Men” era. The Dec. 26, 1962, edition of weekly teased her special narrate to come for “Today.” It aired five days later on Monday, Dec. 31.

Walters also had a front-row seat to Camelot thanks to her prominence as a journalists. As noted in the June 27, 1962, edition of weekly, she traveled with first lady Jacqueline Kennedy for a feature for Ladies Home Journal – all at what time working still long hours for “Today.”

Her 1963 marriage to producer and exclusive Lee Guber (grandfather of Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman) grabbed two mentions in 1963, one in June 1963 for the engagement and one in December of that year at what time the knot was tied.

The after year, Walters’ work for “Today” on a tough narrative about tuberculosis was singled out as “expertly handled” in a study in the Sept. 30, 1964, edition of weekly.

The same year, Walters was featured in one of Variety’s signature oddball news items that our predecessors loved to run in a dinky box at the top of a page.

As someone who kept her finger on the pulse, Variety noted in the Dec. 9, 1964, edition that Walters of jets showed off her football chops in her probing interview with the wife of then-embattled New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle.

Walters took novel great leap the following year as her star truly begins to rise. In the Sept. 8, 1965, edition of weekly, a long-ish item on “the busy Miss Walters” captures the languages when Walters became a celebrity in her own radiant. The blurb notes that the woman “who usually does the interviewing,” would be featured the behindhand week on the popular syndicated daytime series “The Mike Douglas Show.” She was set to be interviewed and sing on the show — just one of many passions Walters beleaguered throughout her extraordinary life.