Commodities veteran Jerry Bieszk retires after 43 years with Reuters

After four decades of covering Chicago commodity markets, Jerry Bieszk (photo)​, has retired at the end of a week of being feted by friends, long-time colleagues and traders from across the United States.

Peter Bohan, editor, Reuters America Service, said Bieszk’s career read like an evolution of the company since the Vietnam era. “He joined as a price clerk at the old Chicago Mercantile Exchange in August 1968, when LBJ was President. He had to work his way through streets full of cops called in for the Democratic Convention in order to get to the CME floor. He copied down prices, phoned them in, and they appeared as tables on a narrow yellow ‘tape’ that clattered away on printers - the Reuters wire.

“From snail time to real time, clerk to teletypist, news assistant to journalist, Jerry was devoted from the first to collecting facts - and he became the best beat reporter at the Exchange. Over the years, covering US agriculture, Jerry became part of the market, a tenacious prober and fact-checker who, as CME chairman emeritus Leo Melamed told him this week, ‘got it right’.”

Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief, said: “That is a remarkable legacy: to be seen as the epitome of the beat reporter, a byline that clients, colleagues and all our readers trusted.” ■