Ray Forrest

Raymond "Ray" Forrest (January 7, 1916 in German Empire – March 11, 1999), born Raymond Feuerstein, was a radio staff announcer for NBC. He was a pioneering American TV announcer, host. and news broadcaster from the very earliest days of TV pre-World War II through to the 1960s.

Forrest was born in Germany, the son of a watch maker, who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1923. He attended Staunton Military Academy, where he was made cadet major in his senior year. Following his schooling he went abroad for a year to study foreign languages, then returned to the U.S., where he planned to take up his father's trade until a friend of the family who was associated with radio broadcasting invited him to visit Radio City. His career in broadcasting began at 20 with a job in the NBC mail room in 1936.

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 from NBC Radio staff as the need arose, a process that so irritated the radio network's chief announcer that, by the fall, he persuaded the station to stop pestering him and make one of his six junior announcers the full-time TV announcer. Forrest won the job, and for the next two and a half years almost every time he opened his mouth he made American television history.

Forrest was the on-board announcer for the first airborne telecast, from a U.S. plane flying low over New York City on March 6, 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 Television, which was racking up some firsts of its own, broadcast the convention in color.)

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