Ray Forrest - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Forrest, then a 23-year-old junior radio announcer at NBC, was not present at the opening of the New York World's Fair on April 30, 1939, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and David Sarnoff, the president of the Radio Corporation of America, NBC's parent, inaugurated regular television programming with a broadcast over NBC's experimental station, W2XBS.

Indeed, for months the station employed no announcers, recruiting them as the occasional need arose from NBC's radio staff, a process that so irritated the radio network's crusty chief of announcers that by the fall he had persuaded the station to stop pestering him and take on one of his six junior announcers full time. Forrest won the job, and for the next two and a half years almost every time he opened his mouth he made American television history.

He was the on-board announcer for the first airborne telecast, from a U.S. plane flying low over New York City on March 6, 1940, and later that year he was the NBC announcer at the first televised political convention, in Philadelphia, where the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie. (CBS, which was racking up some firsts of its own, broadcast the convention in color.)

The next year it was Forrest who read the formal announcement on camera when W2XBS, newly licensed by the Federal Communications Commission and renamed WNBT (it later became WNBC), ushered in the era of commercial television on July 1, 1941.

The first commercial, a film showing a ticking Bulova watch, used no announcer, but three days later, on July 4, Forrest did the first live television commercial, for Adam hats, a chore that earned him no sponsor's fee unless you count the hat. Forrest was allowed to keep it.

Later that year, Forrest apparently became the first television announcer to break into a program with a news bulletin, interrupting a Sunday afternoon movie, The Playboy with Harry Richman, to announce that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

For Forrest, a native of Germany who came to the United States with his family in 1923 and began in broadcasting at 20 with a job in the NBC mail room in 1936, those were heady days.

World War II interrupted both the development of television and his own career, and by the time he returned from service in 1946, television was in the midst of its post-war boom and he was no longer the only kid on the block.