Up for auction "News Commentator" John Cameron Swayze Hand Written Letter.

ES-9291

John Cameron Swayze (April

4, 1906 – August 15, 1995) was an American

news

commentator and game show panelist during the 1940s and 1950s

who later became best known as a product spokesman. Swayze returned to the Midwest and

worked for the Kansas City Journal Post as a reporter. From there he

graduated to radio, doing news updates for Kansas City's KMBC

in 1940 and, reportedly, an experimental early television newscast. In Kansas

City, Swayze broadcast news items prepared by United Press

Kansas City bureau overnight editor Walter

Cronkite. Four years later, Swayze went farther west, to Los Angeles

and Hollywood, where NBC

hired him for its western news division before moving him to its New York City

news operation in 1947. During 1948, Swayze provided voiceover work for the Camel Newsreel Theatre, an early

television news program that broadcast Movietone

News newsreels. At the same time, Swayze proposed and obtained a

radio quiz program, Who Said That?. The radio version lasted

only a year, but Swayze was an occasional panelist in the television version of

the program, which was broadcast on NBC from 1948 to 1955. In the series,

celebrities tried to determine the speaker of quotations taken from recent news

reports. NBC, meanwhile, made Swayze the host

of its national political convention coverage in 1948, the first commercial

coverage ever by television. (NBC Television did broadcast the Republican

National Convention from Philadelphia during 1940 on a noncommercial,

semi-experimental basis, seen in just three cities: Philadelphia, New York City

and Schenectady, NY).