Don Farmer began at CNN in 1980, his son reported, remaining there until he left along with Curle for WSB-TV in 1987.
He began his career as a teenager, reporting for his hometown newspaper in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Farmer graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri in Columbia, said the obituary.
ABC News hired him in 1965, where Farmer was based in New York at age 26. A few days later, the network sent him to Alabama to cover civil rights demonstrations. He would go on to cover the civil rights movement and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.