Mike Wallace
Myron Leon Wallace (May 9, 1918 – April 7, 2012) was an American journalist, game show host, actor, and media personality. Known for his investigative journalism,[1] he interviewed a wide range of prominent newsmakers during his seven-decade career. He was one of the original correspondents featured on CBS news program 60 Minutes, which debuted in 1968. Wallace retired as a regular full-time correspondent in 2006, but still appeared occasionally on the series until 2008. He was the father of Chris Wallace.
For other people named Mike Wallace, see Mike Wallace (disambiguation).
Mike Wallace
April 7, 2012 (aged 93)
- Television personality
- radio announcer
- journalist
- game show host
- actor
1939–2008
60 Minutes (1968–2008)
2, including Chris
Wallace interviewed many politicians, celebrities, and academics, such as Tina Turner, Joseph Bonanno, Vladimir Horowitz, Bobby Fischer, Luciano Pavarotti, Malcolm X, Richard Nixon, Pearl S. Buck, Deng Xiaoping, Ronald Reagan, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Jiang Zemin, Ruhollah Khomeini, Kurt Waldheim, Frank Lloyd Wright, Yasser Arafat, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Louis Farrakhan, Manuel Noriega, John Nash, Gordon B. Hinckley, Vladimir Putin, Maria Callas, Barbra Streisand, Salvador Dalí, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, William Carlos Williams, Mickey Cohen, Roy Cohn, Dean Reed, Jimmy Fratianno, Aldous Huxley, and Ayn Rand.[2][3][4]
Early life[edit]
Wallace, whose family's surname was originally Wallik, was born on May 9, 1918, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents.[5][6] He identified as Jewish and claimed it was his ethnicity (instead of religion) throughout his life. His father was a grocer and insurance broker.[7] Wallace attended Brookline High School, graduating in 1935.[8] He graduated from the University of Michigan four years later with a Bachelor of Arts degree. While a college student, he was a reporter for the Michigan Daily and belonged to the Alpha Gamma Chapter of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity.[9]
Career[edit]
1930s–1940s: Radio[edit]
Wallace appeared as a guest on the popular radio quiz show Information Please on February 7, 1939, when he was in his last year at the University of Michigan. He spent his first summer after graduation working on-air at Interlochen Center for the Arts.[10] His first radio job was as a newscaster and continuity writer for WOOD radio in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This lasted until 1940, when he moved to WXYZ radio in Detroit, Michigan as an announcer. He then became a freelance radio worker in Chicago.
Wallace enlisted in the United States Navy in 1943 and during World War II served as a communications officer on the USS Anthedon, a submarine tender. He saw no combat but traveled to Hawaii, Australia, and Subic Bay in the Philippines, then patrolling the South China Sea, the Philippine Sea and south of Japan. After being discharged in 1946, Wallace returned to Chicago.
Wallace announced for the radio shows Curtain Time, Ned Jordan: Secret Agent, Sky King, The Green Hornet,[11] Curtain Time,[11] and The Spike Jones Show.[11] It is sometimes reported Wallace announced for The Lone Ranger,[12] but Wallace said that he never had done so.[13] From 1946 through 1948, he portrayed the title character on The Crime Files of Flamond on WGN and in syndication.
Wallace announced wrestling in Chicago in the late 1940s and early 1950s, sponsored by Tavern Pale beer.
In the late 1940s, Wallace was a staff announcer for the CBS radio network. He had displayed his comic skills when he appeared opposite Spike Jones in dialogue routines. He was also the voice of Elgin-American in the company's commercials on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life. As Myron Wallace, he portrayed New York City detective Lou Kagel on the short-lived radio drama series Crime on the Waterfront.
1940s–1960s: Television[edit]
In 1949, Wallace began to move to the new medium of television. In that year, he starred under the name Myron Wallace in a short-lived police drama, Stand By for Crime.[14]
Wallace hosted a number of game shows in the 1950s, including The Big Surprise, Who's the Boss? and Who Pays?. Early in his career, Wallace was not known primarily as a news broadcaster. It was not uncommon during that period for newscasters to announce, to deliver commercials and to host game shows; Douglas Edwards, John Daly, John Cameron Swayze and Walter Cronkite hosted game shows as well. Wallace also hosted the pilot episode of Nothing but the Truth, which was helmed by Bud Collyer when it aired under the title To Tell the Truth. Wallace occasionally served as a panelist on To Tell the Truth in the 1950s. He also made commercials for a variety of products, including Procter & Gamble's Fluffo brand shortening. In the summer of 1959, he was the host on the NBC game show Who Pays?.[15]
Death[edit]
Wallace died at his residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, from natural causes on April 7, 2012.[5][47] The night after Wallace's death, Morley Safer announced his death on 60 Minutes. On April 15, 2012, a full episode of 60 Minutes aired that was dedicated to remembering Wallace's life.[48][49][50] He was buried at West Chop Cemetery in Tisbury, Massachusetts.[51]
In 1989, Wallace was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Pennsylvania.[52] Wallace's professional honors included 21 Emmy Awards,[5] among them a report just weeks before the September 11 attacks for an investigation on the former Soviet Union's smallpox program and concerns about terrorism. He also won three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, three George Foster Peabody Awards, a Robert E. Sherwood Award, a Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Southern California School of Journalism, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement,[53] and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in the international broadcast category. In September 2003, Wallace received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy, his 20th. Most recently, on October 13, 2007, Wallace was awarded the University of Illinois Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism.
Fictional portrayals[edit]
Wallace was played by actor Christopher Plummer in the 1999 feature film The Insider. The screenplay was based on the Vanity Fair article "The Man Who Knew Too Much" by Marie Brenner, which was about Wallace caving in to corporate pressure to kill a story about Jeffrey Wigand, a whistle-blower trying to expose Brown & Williamson's dangerous business practices in the manufacture of cigarettes. Wallace disliked his on-screen portrayal and maintained that he was in fact very eager to have Wigand's story aired in full.
Wallace was played by actor Stephen Rowe in the stage version of Frost/Nixon, but he was omitted from the screenplay of the 2008 film adaptation and thus the movie itself. In the 1999 American broadcast television movie Hugh Hefner: Unauthorized, Wallace is portrayed by Mark Harelik. In the film A Face in the Crowd (1957), Wallace portrayed himself. In 2020, Greg Dehm played Wallace in episode 6 of the second season of Manhunt, re-creating Wallace's 1996 interview on 60 Minutes with Richard Jewell, the security guard who discovered a bomb at Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park in July 1996.