Smooth ‘20/20’ host was TV fixture for decades
NEW YORK — Hugh Downs, the genial, versatile broadcaster who became one of television’s most familiar faces with more than 15,000 hours on news, game and talk shows, died of natural causes at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz.
He was 99 when he died Wednesday.
“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,” and cohosted the ABC magazine show “20/20” with Barbara Walters, to name a few.
“I’ve worked on so many different shows and done so many shows at the same time,” Downs said in 1986. “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 saw 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 of a show that included an interview with Marv Albert after the sportscaster was caught in a lurid sexual assault scandal.
Downs had a particular interest in science, once launching into a monologue on the “Tonight” show on the science underlying water-skiing. His interest in problems of the aging — he even earned a postgraduate degree in gerontology — was highlighted in his Public Broadcasting Service series “Over Easy” as well as many of his “20/20” pieces.
“We all suffer in our culture from the idea … that youth was the big thing,” he said. “There has been kind of a loss of respect for older people, and we lose gleaning wisdom from older people. We lose the ability to see that impairment and decrepitude don’t necessarily go along with age.”
His work on “20/20” also showed his adventurous spirit, such as the time he rode a killer whale, and the time he put on breathing apparatus to swim near a great white shark.
“I’m interested in science, the environment, medicine and certain personalities,” he said. “I just do the stories I want to do. I don’t want to be just the anchor.”
In June 1978 Downs got a call from ABC News chief Roone Arledge asking him to take over “20/20.” Its debut just a week earlier had been a disaster.
“Hugh Downs knows how to lead into a news piece and put it into perspective,” Arledge said. “I think it will all start to settle down now.”
It did, and it has been a staple of the ABC primetime lineup ever since. Downs was the sole host until 1984, when Walter became his co-host. He remained with the program until retiring in 1999.