Hugh Downs, former 'Today' show anchor and broadcasting icon, dies at 99
He was number 234 on the list.
Downs, an Ohio native, joined NBC in Chicago after he served in the Army and soon became a fixture in American households. The Emmy Award-winning broadcaster served as a “Today” show anchor for nine years from 1962 to 1971, one of the country's most turbulent periods.
Downs spoke on air during some of the most profound moments in American history, such as the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President John F. Kennedy.
One of Downs’ first producers has also become a household name in America: Barbara Walters. The duo worked together again years later when Downs joined her on ABC’s “20/20” in 1978, where Downs remained until his 1999 retirement from broadcast.
Walters and Downs were briefly reunited in Studio 1A at Rockefeller Center in 2012 for the 60th anniversary of “Today.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, Downs had a hand in some of the programs that have transformed NBC and worked to shape the network's history. He helped establish “The Tonight Show” franchise with Jack Parr in 1957, a show now hosted by Jimmy Fallon more than 60 years later.
Almost simultaneously with his run on “Today,” Downs also hosted an NBC game show called “Concentration” from 1958 to 1969, a memory game where contestants tried to find matching pairs of cards on a game board.
The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University has a page dedicated to Downs, where it says Down personifies the school’s mission with his “nuanced understanding of human communication across a wide array of contexts.”
“We in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication feel very fortunate that Mr. Downs was generous enough to share his name with our school,” the website says.
Downs started in live television in 1945 in Chicago, where he became a regular on several nationally broadcast programs over the next decade. He moved to New York City in 1954, when he was invited to do a program there. Among other shows during his career, he also hosted the PBS talk show Over Easy, and was the sometime co-host of the syndicated talk show Not for Women Only.
Downs made his first television news broadcast in September 1945 from the still experimental studio of WBKB-TV (now WBBM-TV) in Chicago, a station then owned by the Balaban and Katz theater subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. Downs later recalled that when he went for his first job, he had never seen a television before, and he was unsure whether television would last. Downs became a television regular, announcing for Hawkins Falls in 1950, the first successful television soap opera, which was sponsored by Lever Brothers Surf detergent. He also announced the Burr Tillstrom children's show Kukla, Fran and Ollie from the NBC studios at Chicago's Merchandise Mart after the network picked up the program from WBKB.
In March 1954, Downs moved to New York City to accept a position as announcer for Pat Weaver's The Home Show starring Arlene Francis. That program lasted until August 1957. He was the announcer for Sid Caesar's Caesar's Hour for the 1956–57 season, and one of NBC Radio's Monitor "Communicators" from 1955–1959. Downs became a bona fide television "personality" as Jack Paar's announcer on The Tonight Show from mid-1957, when he replaced Franklin Pangborn, until Paar's departure in March 1962, and then continued to announce for The Tonight Show until the summer of 1962, when Ed Herlihy took the announcing reins. Herlihy held that post until October 1, 1962, when Johnny Carson took over the show, and brought Ed McMahon as his announcer.
On August 25, 1958, Downs concurrently began a more than ten-year run hosting the original version of the game show Concentration. Also, he hosted NBC's Today Show for nine years from September 1962 to October 1971, plus co-hosting the syndicated television program Not for Women Only with Barbara Walters in 1975–76. Downs also appeared as a panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth and played himself in an episode of NBC's sitcom Car 54, Where Are You?
Downs earned a postgraduate degree in gerontology from Hunter College while he was hosting Over Easy, a PBS television program about aging that aired from 1977 to 1983. He was probably best known in later years as the Emmy Award-winning co-anchor — again paired with Walters — of the ABC news TV show 20/20, a primetime news magazine program, from the show's second episode in 1978 until his retirement in 1999.
Downs was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in 1984. In that same year, he was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as holding the record for the greatest number of hours on network commercial television (15,188 hours), though he lost the record for most hours on all forms of television to Regis Philbin in 2004.
A published composer, Downs hosted the PBS showcase for classical music, Live from Lincoln Center from 1990–96. Downs made a cameo appearance on Family Guy in addition to other TV shows.
Downs was seen in infomercials for Bottom Line Publications, including their World's Greatest Treasury of Health Secrets, as well as another one for a personal coach. He did an infomercial for Where There's a Will There's an A in 2003. His subsequent infomercial work aroused some controversy, with many arguing the products were scams.
Downs appeared in regional public service announcements in Arizona, for that state's Motor Vehicles Division; for Hospice of the Valley, a Phoenix-area non-profit organization specializing in hospice care, as well as in many public, short-form programs in which he serves as host of educational interstitials.
On October 13, 2007, Downs was one of the first inductees into the American TV Game Show Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Downs was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the State's highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois in 1967 in the area of communications.
Film appearances
A Global Affair (1964) starring Bob Hope – Hugh Downs as Himself
Survival of Spaceship Earth (1972) interviewed along with Rene Dubos, Margaret Mead, and John D. Rockefeller, III in a documentary on the Earth's environmental crisis.
Nothing by Chance (1975) executive producer and narrator – a documentary about the biplanes that barnstormed across America during the 1920s
Oh, God! Book II (1980) newscaster
Someone Like You (2001) as Himself
No comments:
Post a Comment