Hugh Downs, genial presence on TV news and game shows, dies at age 99
NEW YORK (AP)— Hugh Downs, the genial, versatile broadcaster who became one of television’s most familiar and welcome faces with more than 15,000 hours on news, game and talk shows, has died at age 99.
Downs died of natural causes at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Wednesday, said his great-niece, Molly Shaheen.
“The Guinness Book of World Records” recognized Downs as having logged more hours in front of the camera than any television personality until Regis Philbin passed him in 2004.
He worked on NBC’s “Today” and “Tonight” shows, the game show “Concentration,” co-hosted the ABC magazine show “20/20” with Barbara Walters and the PBS series “Over Easy” and “Live From Lincoln Center.”
His signature signoff at the end of “20/20” told viewers: “We’re in touch, so you be in touch.”
“I’ve worked on so many different shows and done so many shows at the same time,” Downs said in a 1986 Associated Press interview. “I once said I’d done everything on radio and television except play-by-play sports. Then I remembered I’d covered a boxing match in Lima, Ohio, in 1939.”
Downs began his broadcasting career at the age of 18 as a $12-a-week announcer on a small Ohio radio station. When television came along, he at first looked on it as a gimmick, but quickly realized “it was probably a juggernaut, and I’d better be in on it.”
He was an announcer in Chicago, which was a television incubator in the 1950, for “Kukla, Fran & Ollie” and “Hawkins Falls,” which he said was television’s first soap opera. In 1954, he went to New York for “The Home Show.”
In 1961, Newsweek described him as “a gluttonous reader with a first-rate brain that he keeps curried and exercised like a prize poodle.”
His reputation was such that he even won the right to approve any commercial he was assigned to read, striving to keep dubious claims off the air.
“My loyalty was with the person tuning in,” he said. “It was expedient. If I lost my credibility, what use would I be to a client?”
He showed his principled side again in 1997, when he took a vacation day on “20/20” rather than be part on a show that included an interview with Marv Albert after the sportscaster was caught in a lurid sexual assault scandal.
On Twitter Thursday, CBS News political correspondent Ed O’Keefe noted: “He retired from ‘20/20’ in 1999 and died at age 99 in the year 2020. Sweet symmetry. Rest easy, Hugh Downs. One of the best.”