John Cameron Swayze
| John Cameron Swayze | |
|---|---|
Swayze on the NBC Camel News Caravan in 1955.
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| Born |
April 4, 1906 Wichita, Kansas, U.S. |
| Died | August 15, 1995 (aged 89) Sarasota, Florida, U.S. |
| Occupation | News presenter/reporter Game show panelist |
| Years active | 1940–1985 |
John Cameron Swayze (April 4, 1906 – August 15, 1995) was a news commentator, spokesperson and game show panelist in the United States during the 1950s.
Swayze was born in Wichita, Kansas, the son of a wholesale drug salesman. He attended schools in Atchison, Kansas, and then the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There he was a fraternity brother of the subsequent film and television actor Frank Wilcox.
Swayze first sought to work as an actor, but his activity on Broadway ended when acting roles became scarce following the .
Swayze returned to the Midwest and worked for the Kansas City Journal Post as a reporter.
From there he graduated to radio, doing news updates for Kansas City's KMBC in 1940 and, reportedly, an experimental early television newscast. In Kansas City, Swayze broadcast news items prepared by United Press Kansas City bureau overnight editor Walter Cronkite. Four years later, Swayze went farther west, to Los Angeles and Hollywood, where NBC hired him for its western news division before moving him to its New York City news operation in 1947.
During 1948, Swayze provided voiceover work for the Camel Newsreel Theatre, an early television news program that broadcast Movietone News newsreels.
At the same time, Swayze proposed and obtained a radio quiz program, Who Said That?. The radio version lasted only a year, but Swayze was an occasional panelist in the television version of the program, which was broadcast on NBC from 1948 to 1955. In the series, celebrities tried to determine the speaker of quotations taken from recent news reports.
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