Ronald H. MacDonald, known to local audiences as a TV news anchor and to decades of journalism students as professor, died in Lexington on Thursday. He was 75.

He was a career newsman, from WDBJ (Channel 7) to the classroom at Washington and Lee University, who was remembered for his ironclad ethics.

"Get the story right. Take notes. And when you go on the air, don't be flowery. Say it," his wife, Pat MacDonald, said Monday afternoon, repeating one of her husband's lessons.

The Vermont native started at Roanoke's CBS affiliate, WDBJ, in 1956, after working radio jobs in New England. He was one of the station's first on-air personalities.

MacDonald rose through the newsroom from reporter to anchor of the "6 O'Clock Report" to news director over 13 years at WDBJ.

In 1969, he joined the journalism department at Washington and Lee. He taught students for three decades until his retirement in 2001.

He had been in declining health in recent years, including troubles with his heart, his wife said.

Brian Richardson, one of MacDonald's students in the early 1970s, recalled a professor who spoke with authority, not the "hem-and-haw school of lecturing."

Richardson returned to the journalism program in 1990 and taught a class with the carefully prepared MacDonald. "I would go in with notes. Ron would go in with a script," said Richardson, who heads the school's department of journalism and mass communication.

MacDonald's alumni took jobs with major TV networks and the largest newspapers. His resume boasted multiple broadcast awards from his WDBJ years, and he was the journalism department head at W&L from 1974-84. He wrote the book "A Broadcast News Manual of Style."

"He was ethically and morally uncompromising, and he was unbending in his belief that the search for the truth mattered," wrote another former student, Tom Mattesky, former deputy bureau chief for CBS News in Washington.

MacDonald smoked a pipe, enjoyed amateur radio and sailing with his wife. Pat MacDonald recalled a visit to Smith Mountain Lake in the 1960s, when the young lake was still filling, and they guided their boat around the roofs of houses.

She has kept a scrapbook of the letters former students sent her husband, full of thanks for his instruction.

"I get ready to do something," Pat MacDonald said, paraphrasing from one letter, "and I hear your voice saying, 'Dammit, that's not what I taught you.' "

Ronald MacDonald is also survived by a son, Bradley; daughter-in-law, Sandra; and step-granddaughter, Sara. At his request there will be no funeral service.