Ray Forrest

Ray Forrest (b. 1916? - March 11, 1999) was a radio staff announcer for NBC, pioneering TV announcer, host and news broadcaster from the very earliest TV era (pre-WW II) through the 1960s.

Early life and career

Forrest, then a 23-year-old junior radio announcer at NBC, was not present at the opening of the New York World's Fair on April 30, 1939, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and David Sarnoff, the president of the Radio Corporation of America, NBC's parent, inaugurated regular television programming with a broadcast over NBC's experimental station, W2XBS.

Indeed, for months the station employed no announcers, recruiting them as the occasional need arose from NBC's radio staff, a process that so irritated the radio network's crusty chief of announcers that by the fall he had persuaded the station to stop pestering him and take on one of his six junior announcers full time.

Forrest won the job, and for the next two and a half years almost every time he opened his mouth he made television history.

He was the on-board announcer for the first airborne telecast, from a U.S. plane flying low over New York City on March 06, 1940, and later that year he was the NBC announcer at the first televised political convention, in Philadelphia, where the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie. (CBS, which was racking up some firsts of its own, broadcast the convention in color.)

The next year it was Forrest who read the formal announcement on camera when W2XBS, newly licensed by the Federal Communications Commission and renamed WNBT (it later became WNBC), ushered in the era of commercial television on July 01, 1941.

The first commercial, a film showing a ticking Bulova watch, used no announcer, but three days later, on July 04, Forrest did the first live television commercial, for Adam hats, a chore that earned him no sponsor's fee unless you count the hat. Forrest got to keep it.

Later that year Forrest apparently became the first television announcer to break into a program with a news bulletin, interrupting a Sunday afternoon movie, "The Playboy" with Harry Richman, to announce that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

For Forrest, a native of Germany who came to the United States with his family in 1923 and got his broadcasting start at 20 with a job in the NBC mail room in 1936, those were heady days.

But World War II interrupted both the development of television and his own career, and by the time he returned from service in 1946, television was in the midst of its postwar boom and he was no longer the only kid on the block.

1947-1949

Still, he was almost as busy as ever, among other things serving as the announcer for "In the Kelvinator Kitchen", an early cooking show, in 1947, and as the announcer and eventually the host of "TV Screen Magazine", one of the first television magazine shows, in 1948 and 1949.

Then he was asked to produce and be the host of "Children's Theater", and Forrest made what he regarded as his most important contribution to television.

"Children's Theater"

Ray Forrest hosted NYC's earliest and one of the most distinctive kids TV variety series called "Children's Theater", which was seen Saturday mornings on New York's WNBT/WRCA TV Ch. 4 (even before it became WNBC) from 1949 to June 1961. "Children's Theater" first went on the air in 1949. Ray Forrest, a veteran radio broadcaster, created a TV series that encouraged the kids to explore many places of interest, read books, how to care for animals and become involved in local activities.

During its long run, "Children's Theater" also screened the 1958 color versions of "Crusader Rabbit" TV cartoons. "Children's Theater" remained on WNBC-TV Ch. 4 Saturday morning lineup until Saturday, June 17, 1961.

If Forrest is better remembered among older New York television viewers for the acclaimed educational program "Children's Theater", which he produced and hosted for WNBC-TV from 1949 to 1960, there is a reason his earlier work has been virtually forgotten.

tyle

Wearing a tuxedo to intone the formal sign-on when NBC went on the air each evening, Forrest announced every station break and every program. There he was, covering wrestling, boxing, hockey, horse racing and movie premieres; interviewing men and women on the street; introducing dramatic productions; serving as quiz show announcer and variety show host and even becoming the network's first full-time news anchor (after Lowell Thomas, whose radio news had been simulcast on television, decided to do his broadcasts from his upstate home).

At the time he became the most visible presence on television, there were fewer than 1,000 television sets in existence.

Nature films

Forrest would write, produce and narrate his own nature films as well. Often he would shoot his shows on location (using primitive videotape technology), as early as September 24, 1960.

Other notable location broadcasts, with Ray Forrest, included a series of pre-taped shows from the since defunct, "Freedomland Amusement Park" in the Bronx. It gave his young viewers a chance to not only see the park but to experience vividly, events that were a part of America's history.

Ray Forrest died on March 11, 1999. [cite news |first= |last= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title= Ray Forrest Is Dead at 83; Nation's First TV Personality |url= |quote=Ray Forrest, who worked for many years at his family's jewelry store in Paterson, N.J., died on March 11 at a hospital near his home in Kinnelon, New Jersey. He was 83 and all but forgotten as the man who became a hero to hundreds in 1939 as the nation's first television personality. |publisher=New York Times |date=March 21, 1999 |accessdate=2007-07-21]

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