Huell Howser, Folksy Public TV Host, Is Dead at 67

There was the beauty parlor owner who won a whistling championship; the woman who picked roses every day and delivered them to her local post office; the artist who made portraits out of clothes-dryer lint.

Huell Howser, who roamed the highways of the Golden State as the folksy host of “California’s Gold,” perhaps the most popular public television show in the state, died on Monday at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 67.

Ryan Morris, his assistant at Huell Howser Productions, said he died of natural causes.

Over 27 years, Mr. Howser, a barrel-chested former Marine who spoke with a Tennessee-bred twang, hosted more than 2,000 travelogue-type shows for public television in his adopted state. Besides “California’s Gold,” his series over the years bore titles like “Videolog,” “Road Trip with Huell Howser” and “Visiting with Huell Howser.”

He interviewed orchid growers, steelworkers, sky divers and regulars at the weekly Friday night vintage car show in the City of Garden Grove, along Route 22 in Orange County, Calif.

“Look at this!” he would exclaim, or, “That’s amazing!”

Mr. Howser’s homespun ebullience resonated with viewers and interviewees.

“He paid attention to the California of farms, ranches, small businesses — the California of ordinary Americans,” Kevin Starr, a former state librarian and the author of a seven-volume history, “Americans and the California Dream,” said Wednesday.

“He had an almost ministerial or rabbinical effect on people,” Mr. Starr continued. “They would hug him, touch him. People forgot that the camera was there.”

Mr. Howser achieved a measure of national fame when he was parodied on “The Simpsons” in 2005. A character named Howell Huser, after visiting the Simpsons’ hometown, Springfield, went on television to declare it the “Worst Town Ever.”

Huell Burnley Howser was born in Gallatin, Tenn., on Oct. 18, 1945, to Harold and Jewel Howser. (Huell is a combination of their first names.). His father was a lawyer. He graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in history and served in the Marines. After working as an aide to Howard H. Baker Jr., who was then a Republican senator from Tennessee, Mr. Howser was hired as a reporter by WSM-TV, the NBC affiliate in Nashville.

He joined WCBS-TV in New York in 1979 as host of “Real Life,” a weekly magazine show in which he interviewed plain folks, like a window washer at the Empire State Building. KCBS, the CBS station in Los Angeles, hired him as a feature reporter in 1980. But several years later, frustrated at doing two-minute segments, he moved on to KCET and came up with the concept for “Videolog” — the predecessor to “California’s Gold” and his other series.

Mr. Howser is survived by a sister.

“TV ain’t brain surgery,” Mr. Howser told The New York Times in 2001. “I attribute any success I may have in television to the fact that I never took any courses in it.”

In 1988, in one of his most famous segments, Mr. Howser reunited an 80-year-old animal trainer, Charlie Franks, with Nita, the prized elephant he had turned over to the San Diego Wild Animal Park upon his retirement 15 years earlier.

Despite the long separation, Nita followed Mr. Franks’s orders: sitting with her front legs raised and picking up his cane with her trunk. He fed her jelly beans.

Closing the segment, Mr. Howser intoned: “What a glorious day when two old friends, Charlie and Nita, were reunited, spent some time together reliving the good old days and then said their last goodbyes.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/arts/television/huell-howser-folksy-public-tv-host-is-dead-at-67.html?partner=rss&emc=rss