NBC boss, producer Tinker dies aged 90

Big Mac inventor dead

NEW YORK, Dec 1, (Agencies): Grant Tinker, who brought new polish to the TV world and beloved shows including “Hill Street Blues” to the audience as both a producer and a network boss, has died. He was 90.

Tinker died Monday at his Los Angeles home, according to his son, producer Mark Tinker.

Though he had three tours of duty with NBC, the last as its chairman, Tinker was perhaps best-known as the nurturing hand at MTM Enterprises, the production company he founded in 1970 and ran for a decade.

Nothing less than a creative salon, MTM scored with some of TV’s most respected and best-loved programs, including “Lou Grant”, “Rhoda”, “The Bob Newhart Show” and, of course, the series that starred his business partner and thenwife, Mary Tyler Moore.

“I am deeply saddened to learn that my former husband and professional mentor Grant Tinker has passed away,” Moore said in a statement. “Grant was a brilliant, driven executive who uniquely understood that the secret to great TV content was freedom for its creators and performing artists. This was manifest in his ‘first be best and then be first’ approach.” Tinker summed it up with typical self-effacement in a 1994 interview with The Associated Press: “I just had the good luck to be around people who did the kind of work that the audience appreciates. The success just rubbed off on me.”

In 1981, Tinker flourished with that low-key approach in a last-ditch effort to save NBC, which was scraping bottom with its earnings, ratings, programs and morale. Five years later, when Tinker left to return to independent production, the network was flush thanks to hits such as “The Cosby Show” and “Hill Street Blues.”

Tinker, who had come to NBC as a management trainee in 1949 with legendary founder David Sarnoff still in charge, left the company for the last time at the end of an era, as NBC, along with its parent RCA, was about to be swallowed by General Electric.

In 2005, he won a prestigious Peabody Award honoring his overall career. In receiving his medallion, he called himself “a guy of no distinct or specific skills (who) always needed a lot of help.” He also had received the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Tinker

Indelible

“Grant Tinker was a great man who made an indelible mark on NBC and the history of television that continues to this day,” said Steve Burke, CEO of NBCUniversal, sole owner of the network since 2013. “He loved creative people and protected them, while still expertly managing the business. Very few people have been able to achieve such a balance.”

“His level of class set him apart from everyone else in our business,” said Bob Greenblatt, Chairman of NBC Entertainment, “and all of us at this company owe him a debt of gratitude. In fact, TV watchers everywhere do.”

Bob Newhart said in a statement that MTM created “this magical place where creativity and individuality (were nurtured). I was one of the people who was lucky enough to enjoy that freedom for 14 years on television.”

He “set the bar high both as a television executive and as a father,” said Mark Tinker. “I’m proud to be his son, and especially proud of the legacy he leaves behind in business and as a gentleman.”

Born in 1926, the son of a lumber supplier, Tinker had grown up in Stamford, Connecticut, and graduated from Dartmouth College before his first short stint at NBC.

Then he moved into advertising. At a time when ad agencies were heavily responsible for crafting programs its clients would sponsor, Tinker was a vice president at the Benton & Bowles agency when he helped develop “The Dick Van Dyke Show” for Procter & Gamble. There he met, and fell for, the young actress the whole country was about to fall in love with: Mary Tyler Moore.

Soon after the new CBS sitcom had begun its fiveseason run in fall 1961, Tinker returned to NBC, this time as vice president of West Coast programming.

Meanwhile, he and Moore became TV’s golden couple and, in 1962, they wed. (His first marriage had ended in divorce.)

Tinker stayed at NBC until 1967, after which he had brief stays at Universal and Twentieth Century Fox.

Then, with an itch to run his own shop, Tinker founded MTM and began developing its first series: a comedy to revive the flagging career of his wife.

The man who invented the quintessential American fast-food burger, the Big Mac, and inadvertently set off a race to create ever more expansive fast-food menus, has died.

Michael “Jim” Delligatti passed away Monday surrounded by family at his home in a Pittsburgh suburb, according to his family. He was 98 years old.

Delligatti laid claim to one of the most indelible inventions in American cuisine since sliced bread -- a double hamburger with two beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, which is covered in a special sauce.

As owner of a McDonald’s restaurant in western Pennsylvania nearly half a century ago, Delligatti convinced the company to venture away from its brief menu of simple burgers, fries and drinks, according to a 1993 profile of the Big Mac in the Los Angeles Times.

He got permission to try his new burger in 1967 and sales jumped 12 percent, the Times said. Within a few years, McDonald’s was advertising the Big Mac nationwide.

Discovering

“This wasn’t like discovering the light bulb,” he said. “The bulb was already there. All I did was screw it in the socket.”

He said the idea came from rival burger restaurants in the mid-1960s.

After the Big Mac’s invention, the company expanded its menu further, creating an age of new menu items such as the Egg McMuffin and Filet-o-Fish. But, it was the Big Mac that became a cultural icon. In a statement, McDonald’s said Delligatti was a “legendary franchisee” who made a “lasting impression” on the company.

“We will remember Jim as an insightful franchisee, a knowledgeable businessman,” the company said.

McDonald’s says it sells hundreds of millions of the oversized burgers globally, although sales have slowed in recent years as millennials reportedly show less interest in super-sized fast food.