Tom Shales, reviewing the premiere in The Washington Post, said that watching it “was like being trapped for an hour at the supermarket checkout counter and having to read the front pages of blabby tabloids over and over again.”
Some blamed late meddling by Roone Arledge, president of the network’s news division, for the fiasco. “Everyone was behind Bob Shanks,” one anonymous staff member told Newsweek. “Then King Kong came down from the trees, mashing bananas in people’s faces and exercising his male dominance.”
By Week 2 Hugh Downs was in the host’s chair, and the program began to find its footing. It remains on the air, more than four decades later.
Robert Horton Shanks was born on Oct. 8, 1932, in Sullivan, Ill. His father, W. Glenn Shanks, worked for an oil company, and his mother, Deveta (Benoit) Shanks, was a homemaker.
Mr. Shanks grew up in Lebanon, Ind., and attended Indiana University in Bloomington, where he sometimes called basketball games on the campus radio station, WFIU. He graduated in 1954 with a degree in radio and television, then spent two years in the Army, where he produced training films and a weekly TV show.
John Shanks said his father went to New York thinking he might become an actor, but soon found himself working in television. In 1957 he secured “a coffee pour job,” as he later described it, on “America After Dark,” a short-lived NBC experiment in late-night programming. One of the people he met there, John Carsey, went on to work on Mr. Paar’s show and asked him to come aboard as talent coordinator.
Anne Edwards, in her biography “Streisand” (1996), told the story of Mr. Shanks’s role in booking Barbra Streisand on the Paar show in 1961 for her first national television appearance. She had been lobbying for a slot, the book said, but Mr. Paar wasn’t interested because he thought she looked and sounded too Jewish.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/business/media/bob-shanks-dead.html
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