Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,530

This is the grave of Jack Barry.

Born in 1918 in Lindenhurst, New York, Jack Barasch grew up in a Jewish immigrant family. He was a good student and went to the University of Pennsylvania for college. It was the Wharton School, a plague upon humanity by combining the Ivy League with business “school” nonsense.

Let’s take a moment and point something out. One of the things that bugs me about modern higher education is that while there is no professor in the humanities who would say we don’t need a great engineering program and great science programs and great nursing programs, there are plenty of people in engineering and nursing (far less in the sciences) who don’t see any value in the humanities, want to ensure that their students never have to take humanities classes, and actively tell administrators they don’t know why money goes to these programs. However, I legitimately do not see why there should be a business major. There are a few things that business schools do that I admit do have value–we need good accountants, of course. But the business school primarily exists for one reason–students who have no interest in actually learning a higher education but need a degree to go onto their awful corporate job. And companies can train their own damn employees. Rant over.

While Barry was at Penn, he began to work on the radio and found he was very good at it. Radio voice and all. This reminds me, in my master’s program, I once took a graduate seminar with a guy who had come back for a degree after a long career in radio and every time he spoke, it was in Radio Voice. Man it was weird to hear Native American history discussed in Radio Voice. Also, I guess this is digression day in the grave series.

Anyway, Barry went into the radio professionally. He realized he was good at hosting game shows. He and his business partner Dan Enright formed a production company while they both worked for WOR in New York. They started making a few shows. Some were for kids, others for the elderly. In 1953, they made their first game show–Back That Fact–but it didn’t last long. But they felt they had a good idea. So they made more. In 1956, they created Twenty-One and Tic Tac Dough. They were successful.

The problem with the shows though is that they were rigged. There was a reason for it–regular people sucked at drama, or at least this was the justification. The initial episode of Twenty-One was a complete disaster because the people on the show had no clue about anything and so couldn’t answer any of the questions. There was no drama. This was the period as well when corporations sponsored shows. This was sponsored by Geritol and the people who ran the company were furious and demanded a better product for their money. So Barry and Enright provided one–they would create fake drama. Twenty-One was soon a huge hit, with players being handed answers ahead of time, big drama created, and Geritol quite happy about it all.

Three months later, Herb Stempel, a guy who actually did know a lot and had a nice run, was told to lose the game to Charles Van Doren, the wealthy writer and editor who could provide a cleaner and more wholesome (read, WASPier) image than Stempel. Now, Stempel actually had done well mostly on his own. He was furious that he was forced to lose. So he blew it up. Stempel went to the journalist Jack O’Brian and told the story. No one really believed him. He couldn’t provide evidence, he was a schlub, and people just didn’t see it as credible. But then, later in 1958, cheating in the show Dotto was publicized and this brought new light to Stempel’s claims.

Soon, an investigation was taking place in New York. Congress, always happy to go after Hollywood to get themselves in the spotlight, started to investigate as well. The ratings for quiz shows plummeted. The reputation of Barry and Van Doren were completely ruined. It was Enright rather than Barry who was really in charge of rigging the show. But they were all basically finished. They generally told the truth before Congress. The politicians then amended the Communications Act of 1934 to include game shows and the networks cancelled most of them, realizing that without the fix, you are just inviting idiots onto TV to create bad television. Obviously shows such as Jeopardy later figured out how to do this, by engaging in such crazy things as tryouts ahead of time. But that was too much for most network heads in the late 50s.

This of course was all memorialized in Quiz Show, which I haven’t seen since the theaters when it came out thirty years ago. I wonder if it holds up. Anyway, Christopher McDonald played Barry in it.

Barry was determined to come back. In 1957, he and Enright bought a small AM station in Florida. In 1961, they moved to Florida and used it as an experiment–Barry would run game shows on the radio and see if he could make a comeback. It didn’t really work that well, but he wasn’t going to give up. By the mid 60s, he was in LA, working on various game shows, hosting a few, even acting a little bit, appearing on both Batman and The Addams Family. By 1966, he and Enright were working on game shows in Canada. But the money was bad, his family was breaking apart, and his wife told him to get a real job or she was outta here.

Wanting to save both his career and his marriage, Barry borrowed $40,000 from his father-in-law and bought radio station KKOP in Los Angeles. The reason was that it required him to have a federal license and thus he could tell the media world that the government had given him the OK to be part of the industry again. It worked. He started to substitute for game show hosts when they were on vacation. No one minded. He then developed the idea for Joker’s Wild and while he didn’t host it, he sold it to CBS. Then he not only sold The Generation Gap to ABC, but that network was fine with him coming back and hosting. Finally, Barry was back.

Now, Barry was never going to reach the heights he had in the 50s. But he was now a respectable member of the game show host establishment again, one an executive would at least hear out. His money situation improved dramatically and even when ABC cancelled one of his shows, Break the Bank, he had the money to run the syndication himself and keep it going.

Barry died in 1984. He was 66 years old. Heart attack while jogging in Central Park. I guess the lesson is to never work out.

Jack Barry is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

If you would like this series to visit other game show hosts, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Bob Barker is in Hollywood and Monty Hall is in Culver City, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.