Roone Arledge

Roone Arledge (July 8, 1931 – December 5, 2002) was an American sports broadcasting pioneer who was chairman of ABC News from 1977 until his death.

Roots

Arledge was born the son of a North Carolina lawyer who moved to New York City in search of opportunity. He grew up a smart, but sheltered upper middle class kid. In school on Long Island, he wrestled, and played baseball. Upon graduation, he decided that sportswriting was what he wanted to do in life, and applied to Columbia University.

Related Topics:
North Carolina - New York City - Long Island - Columbia University

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There, he discovered that Columbia's journalism program was a graduate program -- not an undergraduate one. Even so, Arledge liked what he saw, and enrolled in a liberal-arts program. His classmates included Max Frankel, who would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his work as editorial page editor of the New York Times; Larry Grossman, who became president of the Public Broadcasting System in 1976, and later went on to head NBC News; and Richard Wald, another president of NBC News that Arledge would later persuade to come over to ABC News as a senior vice-president.

Related Topics:
Max Frankel - Pulitzer Prize - 1973 - New York Times - Larry Grossman - Public Broadcasting System - 1976 - NBC - Richard Wald

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After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1952, Arledge enrolled in graduated studies at Columbia's School of International Affairs. Restless with graduate studies, he went looking for a job where he could use his college degree, and obtained an entry-level job at the DuMont Television Network. Military service intervened, and after Arledge's discharge, he learned the network had folded and he had no job to return to.

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Contacts he made at DuMont paid off with a stage manager's job at NBC's New York City station, WRCA (later WNBC). One of his assignments there was to help produce a children's puppet show hosted by Shari Lewis. In 1958, the program won a New York City Emmy award.

Related Topics:
WNBC - Shari Lewis - Emmy award

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Even with that success, Arledge wanted to tinker with programming ideas. With what was then the avante-garde magazine Playboy as his model, Arledge convinced his superiors at WRCA to let him film a pilot of a show he called, "For Men Only." While his superiors liked the pilot, they told him WRCA couldn't find a place in the programming schedule for it. But the WRCA weatherman, Pat Hernon, who hosted the pilot episode of "For Men Only", began showing the kinescope to people around New York City who might want the program. One of them was a former account executive at the ad agency Dancer Fitzgerald & Sample, Edgar J. Scherick, who as far as Hernon knew, was doing something at ABC.

Related Topics:
Playboy - Kinescope - Edgar J. Scherick

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