Hugh Downs

Will someone be able to find a match to “A hundred box” on the puzzle board that was behind number 24? We watched to find out. And so did the man who hosted this particular TV game show.

Hugh Downs had many jobs over his career on TV, but I think of him most as the host of Concentration, where Paul Taubman’s Wurlitzer organ cheerfully doodled out tunes under descriptions of “a hundred box,” a trip to Bermuda, golf clubs and other prizes contestants had won. And everything was held together by the smooth, low-key Downs, who never seem to be bothered by anything during his long career on television.

He may have been relaxed but he once caused a panic back in his radio days. Billboard reported on July 11, 1942:

He Believed It
DETROIT, July 4.—Memories of Orson Welles’s “Invasion from Mars” were involved in the Detroit Police Department Saturday when an inspector tuned in to WWJ’s Yawn Club in time to hear announcer Hugh Downs tell the world, “Somebody has stolen studio A.” Said inspector promptly sent two detectives to the station to investigate, and they had the staff badly puzzled till an engineer recollected the phrase over the air.
Check-up showed Downs had come in early for his show, got off the elevator at the wrong floor, found Studio A wasn’t there when he tried to walk into it—and later mentioned the incident over the program.

Downs’ road to Concentration, thence to the Today Show, 20/20 and other ventures began in humble small-town radio. In 1940, he was chief announcer at WLOK, Lima, Ohio¹ before making his way to WWJ. He ended up in the Army briefly in 1943² then signed up with WMAQ, the NBC station in Chicago, after his discharge.³ During his time there, Downs caused another unexpected panic. Here’s the Chicago Tribune’s version from July 5, 1947.

Fourth Brings a Star Gazer Down to Earth
Hugh Downs, 26, spent a quiet Fourth yesterday in his apartment at 1644 Farwell av., wishing that his neighbors would [1] learn the difference between a telescope and a bazooka, or [2] mind their own business.
Downs, an announcer for the National Broadcasting company, said the pitfalls in the path of an amateur astronomer are many—chiefly bashful ladies and irate husbands who don’t realize that the telescope is focused on infinity and is useless as an aid to boudoir glimpses.
It Does Ulcers No Good
“But this was the first time I’ve become tied up in the bazooka angle,” Downs said. “And, believe me, I trust it is the last! These encounters with the law during the middle of the night neither help my hobby nor my ulcers.”
About a year ago he took up astronomy as a hobby and started building his own telescope, which has a six foot tube tube, bound with brass.
About 1 a.m. Thursday he lugged the contraption into his yard and started studying the craters of the moon. “There I was, minding my own business, 238,857 miles away from Farwell av.,” he said.
“The next thing I knew there was a flashlight in my eyes. I caught a glimpse of a policeman’s uniform and star, and he yelled, ‘Don’t fire that thing!’”
There’s a Limit
“Don’t fire what thing?” Downs asked.
“That bazooka,” said the cop. “That’s going too far with this celebration business. A bazooka packs the wallop of a 155 mm. cannon. You’re not going to fire it on my beat.”
After a confused discussion of the destructive power of a bazooka, the proper way to celebrate independence day, the craters of the moon, and the nosy neighbors who had complained about the bazooka firing in the first place, Downs convinced the policeman and then spent 30 minutes explaining heavenly wonders to him.
“My wife, Ruth, and our year and a half old son, Hugh Raymond, have nicknamed my scope ‘The Bazooka’ and they aren’t giving me much peace about it,” Downs said. “When all the furore dies, maybe I can go back to my hobby.”

Television was being developed in Chicago in the 1940s and the NBC radio people found themselves doing double-duty on the new medium. Downs was one; he had experience at the city’s first station, the independent WKBK. In 1951, he was hosting a half-hour, daily noon-time sustainer called Your Luncheon Date ⁴. Chicago had been a big network radio hub, so why not be the same for television? Starting January 1952, Downs’ show was seen across NBC⁵ for about 13 months before being chopped during a revamp of daytime programming.⁶ Downs carried on on local television.

In the meantime, NBC programming mogul Pat Weaver was fiddling and fussing with a daytime show that finally made its debut on March 1, 1954 as Home. Downs wasn’t on it at the beginning; the show starred Arlene Francis and experts on gardening, shopping and other around-the-house concerns. But the show broadcast the first network colorcast originating from a Chicago station on June 23, 1954 with Downs conducting the interview.⁷ It wasn’t long before he was in New York as a permanent member of the Home team.

Next was Concentration. Then came Jack Paar. Downs was Paar’s announcer on the Tonight show and left in the lurch when Paar got into a hissy fit with NBC and walked out on his audience on February 12, 1960. Downs had to take over and straddle the line of not siding with one against the other (though Downs explained that evening he had not been an NBC employee for some time).

Here are a couple of puff pieces that found their way into newspapers at the time. The first is a syndicated column dated March 26, 1961, the next a United Press International story dated July 24, 1960.

Hugh Downs Attains 'Personality' Status
By MARGARET McMANUS
Hugh Downs, a regularly featured attraction on the Jack Paar show, is a member in good standing of the Paar Family Plan.
One of the rudimentary requirements is loyalty to the leader and here the genial Downs scores well.
Naturally Downs was a quietly agreeable aide in Paar's army in the recent war between Paar and Ed Sullivan concerning the inflammable matter of guest fees.
• • •
DOWNS, HIMSELF, is no slouch in the matter of money. It is reliably reported that from his duties on the Paar show, from his daily NBC daytime television show, Concentration, and from the weekly nighttime version of the same show, which begins on Monday, April 17, he accumulates close to $250,000 a year.
Born in Akron, O., raised in Lima, Hugh Downs began his career at the age of 18 on a 100-watt radio station in Lima. Before he was 20, he saw the station increased to 250 watts, became its program manager with three announcers working for him.
• • •

IN 1941, he moved on to Detroit, and after Pearl Harbor he attempted to enlist in the Navy, the Coast Guard and the Air Force. Nobody would take him because he is color blind. Just as he accepted that fact, he was drafted, 123d Infantry, heavy weapons company.
Downs had a brief, unfortunate career in the Army. He was a part of that ill-fated experiment, at Ft. Louis, Wash. [sic], to condense the 13 weeks basic training into four weeks. Downs and half the trainees collapsed from exhaustion and, after several weeks in the hospital, he was medically discharged without ever really seeing any service at all.
"My career in World War II seemed doomed to disaster," he said. "It was quite disturbing. When I was on my way home, I thought I was glad to be out of it. When I got home, I found I wasn't. For about a year I kept having psychosomatic illnesses," Downs says. "I thought I was completely shot physically."
• • •
HE RETURNED briefly to Detroit at the end of his Army service, but then went to Chicago where he was an NBC staff commercial announcer for 11 years. He was in Chicago when NBC was looking for a new face for the "Home" show with Arlene Francis. He was one of a number of out-of-town announcers called in to audition.
Downs won the audition; was on 900 hours of Home until it went off the air in July 1957. On a hot, muggy, midsummer's night, the same month, same year, he started with Paar on his opening show. He started as the show announcer and in months had made the elusive transition from announcer to "personality."
• • •
HUGH DOWNS, at the age of 40, is no longer an announcer. He is a "personality," precisely what he wants to be.
"It is my theory that to be a 'personality' is the best thing you can be on television," he said. "A 'personality' is not talent, so it can't burn out, nor can it be overexposed.
"There is a fantastic kind of security in it. They can always find somebody who is better looking than I am, or who has a better voice, but who can they find who is a better Hugh Downs? I don't want to be anything but myself."
• • •
DOWNS, WHO loves the water and boats and sailing, has been married for 17 years to the former Ruth Shaheen, who was a radio producer for NBC when they met in Chicago. They live in an eight-room apartment on Central Park West in New York and have a 15-year-old son, named Hugh, but called H. R., and an 11-year-old daughter, Deirdre, called Deedee.
Hugh Downs is an intelligent man, very knowledgeable, practical, tolerant and kind.
"I call myself an unreasonably happy man," he said.

Varied Interests Keep 'Civilized' Downs Busy
By DOC QUIGG
NEW YORK (UPI)—"Some men are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some have greatness thrust upon them, as in the cases of Caesar Augustus, Harry S. Truman, and Hugh Downs."
Downs, a character so highly civilized that he's sometimes referred to as "TV's renaissance man," threw back his head and chortled mightily when told the jape quoted above. It was inserted by British comedian Michael Flanders into his recent Broadway hit show as a commentary on the Jack Paar February television walkout that left Downs all alone by the microphone.
"That's really funny," Downs said. "I'll have to tell it to Jack."
Although Downs catapulted to fame in recent years as the side-kick of the star on the Jack Paar show, he actually entered the broadcasting business 22 years ago as a radio announcer in Lima, Ohio.
"It's kind of weird," he recalled, "but the fact is that I was looking for a job all over town—they were hard to find then—and there was nothing for me and I finally stopped at the radio station and asked them what you had to do to become an announcer.
Gets the Job

"They told me to come back Friday and I said I couldn't, so they handed me a piece of copy and asked me to read it right there. I did and the boss, who had been listening, came out and said: 'You know, that was very bad, but—and he actually said this—'Big oaks from little acorns grow.' So I was hired." Downs leads a life so full of great number of interests that it's hard to see how he crams himself into a 24-hour day. He skin dives. He reads books on history and science in conveyances and while eating. He builds hi-fi sets, keeps up with astronomy and other weighty sciences (in the past years he build two telescopes himself), and composes music.
He has a record album out called "An Evening With Hugh Downs" on which he sings folk songs. His book "Yours Truly, Hugh Downs," which he wrote over the last 2½ years and which contains his ideas on broadcasting, will be published in October by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He's working on a magazine article on conservation.
He frequently makes speeches at dinners and other affairs ("everybody knows I like to talk"). This week he gave the opening lecture in a New York University series for graduate students and teachers on "Culture and America," speaking on the role of communications.
Next month he will be doing summer stock for a week, appearing in "Anniversary Waltz" in Warren, Ohio.
16 Hours a Week
In addition to these things, and others like taking care of a wife and two children, he works. Nobody in this country exceeds his present average 16 hours a week of commercial broadcasting on a major network. His own daily NBC-TV game-quiz show "Concentration' accounts for 2 1/2 hours, the Paar show nine hours, and his weekend stint on the NBC radio "Monitor" lasts four hours. That's the regular schedule, and his extra appearances average a half to one hour a week.
Perhaps the Downs quiet good nature in the midst of the hectic life is helped along by knowledge that his income tops $100,000 a year.
Perhaps, also, it is due to his immersion in study. His yen for learning began when he was 5.
"My father told me the distance to the moon, instead of saying it was made of green cheese. That's why I always answer kids seriously when they ask me things."

All this would be enough of a career for anyone, but Downs had a lot more ahead; 20/20 may have been the biggest part of it. He really was an anchor of not only Today, but network television’s early years. And he probably saw puzzles solved and gave away more “hundred boxes” than anyone else on TV.

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1 Broadcasting, May 1, 1940, pg. 55^↩
2 Broadcasting, Jan. 11, 1943^↩
3 Broadcasting, May 24, 1943^↩
4 Variety, May 23, 1951, pg. 41^↩
5 Variety, Dec. 26, 1951, pg. 29^↩
6 Variety, Feb. 20, 1952^↩
7 Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1954, pg. C6.^↩