Jack Barry (television Personality) - Move To Los Angeles

Move To Los Angeles

After being unable to find national broadcasting work for several years in the wake of the quiz scandal, Barry decided to purchase a Los Angeles-area radio station (KKOP 93.5 FM, Redondo Beach, later renamed KFOX, now KDAY). In later interviews, he stated that he bought the station specifically because it would require him to have a license from the FCC, and that if the FCC would be willing to grant him a license, it would decisively demonstrate that his reputation was no longer "tainted" by the game show scandals. Barry also owned a cable TV system in Redondo Beach.

In the mid-1960s, Barry was featured on KTLA (Channel 5 in Los Angeles) in a variety-format program dubbed The Jack Barry Show. This started as a weekly program but slowly became locally popular, because it featured celebrities performing in Los Angeles who wanted to promote their local appearances. The show continued for about a three-year period, during which at one point it became a daily program and was also, rather briefly, syndicated.

An interesting feature of this program was the appearance of a group of five children dubbed "The Juvenile Jury," later "The Paramount Panel" (KTLA was then owned by Paramount Pictures, who also served as the syndicator when Barry's show went national), who commented on news and other current events amusingly. Art Linkletter, at that time, had a popular program based principally on such a format, so in some sense, the Barry show was attempting to capture this audience segment (as well as revive the memory of one of Barry's popular 1950s TV creations).

Notable among the child actors on this panel was Gary Goetzman, today a well known director and producer of major films. Probably Barry's unfortunate game show experiences sensitized him to people ostracized by the Hollywood establishment of the time. As an example, he had a number of artists and comedians as guests on the show who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy period of the 1950s and were attempting to return to the American stage in the mid-1960s. The musical director of the program, Kip Walton, was responsible for bringing in major jazz artists with regularity, such as Lionel Hampton.

After a successful three-year run the show was canceled, mainly because of scheduling changes on the station brought into effect by a purchase of KTLA from Paramount by an investment group headed by Gene Autry, which later controlled the California Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim) baseball team and Channel 5.