R.I.P.: Late Night Radio/TV Pioneer Joe Franklin

Joe Franklin

Joe Franklin, who became a New York institution by presiding over one of the most compellingly low-rent television programs in history, one that even he acknowledged was an oddly long-running parade of has-beens and yet-to-bes interrupted from time to time by surprisingly famous guests, died on Saturday in a hospice in Manhattan.

He was 88, according to The NY Times. The cause was prostate cancer.

A short, pudgy performer with a sandpapery voice that bespoke old-fashioned show business razzle-dazzle, Mr. Franklin was one of local television’s most enduring personalities. He took his place behind his desk and in front of the camera day after day in the 1950s and night after night in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.

Celebrities like Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby and John F. Kennedy were making their way to the dingy basement studio on West 67th Street — a room with hot lights that was “twice the size of a cab,” Mr. Franklin recalled in 2002.  Ronald Reagan was on the show five times before he was president.

“My show was often like a zoo,” he said in 2002. “I’d mix Margaret Mead with the man who whistled through his nose, or Richard Nixon with the tap-dancing dentist.”

Born March 9, 1926 as Joseph Fortgang,  he had a new name, a radio career, and a publicist by the age of 21.

He had been the writer for the singer Kate Smith’s 1940s variety program, which featured guests like Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and Edward G. Robinson — “all my childhood heroes” — when the radio personality Martin Block hired him to choose the records played on Block’s “Make-Believe Ballroom” on WNEW 1130 AM. Block arranged for Mr. Franklin to go on the air with a program called “Vaudeville Isn’t Dead.” After stops at several other stations in the 1950s, Mr. Franklin settled in at WOR in the mid-60s with his “Memory Lane” program — “that big late-night stroll for nostalgiacs and memorabiliacs,” as he described it.



The NY Post reports Franklin hosted the first-ever TV talk show, back in 1950 on WJZ, the forerunner of WABC/Channel 7. In 1962, the show moved to WOR-TV, the forerunner of WWOR. “The Joe Franklin Show” stayed on WWOR until 1993, when Franklin quit to begin a second career as a restaurateur and pursue some other ideas for TV shows.

He promised his restaurant would include “Eddie Cantor hamburgers” and “Al Jolson matzoh balls” — perhaps made like the Streits matzoh balls he promoted on live ads on his show.

Franklin never really quit working, and was still interviewing celebrities for Bloomberg Radio earlier this month, and he also wrote 26 books.