Remembering a Legend

Remembering a Legendary Newscaster 

Former Today Show Anchor and co-host of ABC's 20/20 died July 1st at age 99

ARIZONA ---- Hugh Downs otherwise known as the "founding voice in modern American media", died at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona at the age of 99. His career had a span of 60 years in broadcasting, anchoring, and hosting.  According to From Yesterday to TODAY: Six Decades of America's Favorite Morning Show, written by Stephen Battaglio, an author, Hugh began his broadcasting career in 1939 as a radio announcer in Lima, Ohio before serving in the army during World War I. When he worked at the NBC Chicago station WMAQ at the age of 22, it was then when he met another legend Dave Garroway, a WMAQ personality. Dave, later on, became the first anchor of TODAY on January 14, 1952.  After many years doing local inserts for TODAY, out of the WMAQ Chicago station, Hugh eventually moved to New York where he was an announcer, co-host, and sidekick on other shows at NBC, which includes Home, a talk show, and Tonight Starring Jack Parr, which he helped to establish, in the 1950s and the early 1960s. Before arriving at TODAY as an anchor on September 10, 1961, Hugh emceed a top-rated daytime game show on NBC called Concentration, which he hosted from 1958 until January 1969 as the original. While Hugh was on TODAY, he covered many stories with some that became profound moments in American History. Some of these moments include the assassination of both President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. When Walters covered President Kennedy lying in state, it was at that moment Hugh pushed for Barbara to be promoted from a writer to an on-air anchor, which she began her time as a reporter/Today Girl in 1964 followed by co-host in 1966. Hugh left the show on October 8, 1971. Seven years later in 1978, Hugh became the host of the ABC News Magazine 20/20, which began on June 6, 1978. Barbara later joined him as co-host beginning in 1984 after being a correspondent in 1979. They would be a team until Hugh decided that it was time to retire in 1999, which would make it be 15 years as co-hosts. This was when he received an Emmy.  Hugh was also part of the PBS series Over Easy, and Live From Lincoln Center. Other than his time in television and radio, Hugh composed music, sailed a boat, was seen in infomercials, wrote memoirs like Yours Truly (1960) and On Camera: My 10,000 Hours on Television (1986), and a series of books about aging gracefully. Hugh also was inducted in the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air & Space Museum the same year as he set a record for the greatest number of hours on network commercial television at 15, 188 hours in the Guinness Book of World Records in 1984. Twenty years later, in 2004, Regis Philbin beat that record. Hugh also was one of the first inductees into the American TV Game Show Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, Nevada; was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois, and was awarded the Order of Lincoln (1967), the state's highest honor, by the Governor of Illinois in the area of Communications. 

According to The Washington Post, Hugh Malcolm Downs was born on Valentine's Day of 1921 in Akron, Ohio. Hugh attended what is known now as Bluffton University in Ohio. Hugh also attended Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and later attended Columbia University in New York. Hugh married his wife of 75 years, Ruth Shaheen in 1944, after meeting as co-workers, three days after his 23rd birthday. She died on March 28, 2017, at age 95. Hugh leaves behind his two children, a brother, two grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Today we remember the life of the "founding voice in modern American media" Hugh Downs who died Wednesday at the age of 99. 

Hugh Downs in the 1960s
 (from Google Images for noncommercial use)