Ray Forrest

Forrest was born in Germany, the son of a watch maker, who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1923. He attended Staunton Military Academy, where he was made cadet major in his senior year. Following his schooling he went abroad for a year to study foreign languages, then returned to the U.S., where he planned to take up his father's trade until a friend of the family who was associated with radio broadcasting invited him to visit Radio City. His career in broadcasting began at 20 with a job in the NBC mail room in 1936.[2]

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 from NBC Radio staff as the need arose, a process that so irritated the radio network's chief announcer that, by the fall, he persuaded the station to stop pestering him and make one of his six junior announcers the full-time TV announcer. 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.

Forrest 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,[3] and later that year he was the NBC announcer at the first televised political convention, in Philadelphia, where the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie.

The next year, Forrest 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 WNBT test pattern outfitted to look like a clock with Bulova Watch Time in the lower right hand quadrant[4] 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.

On December 7, 1941, Forrest apparently became the first television announcer to break into a program with a news bulletin, interrupting a Sunday afternoon movie, The Playboy (1938) with Harry Richman, to announce that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

World War II interrupted both the development of television and his own career, though the televised weekly show, “The War As It Happens," debuted in New York City on February 21, 1944. Produced by NBC, the show followed a newsreel format with several minutes of government film about the war effort, interspersed with Forrest in the studio explaining the latest developments with the use of maps on an easel. By April 1944 the broadcast was being fed to Philadelphia and Schenectady, NY, becoming the first newscast to be seen in multiples cities.

Forrest created and hosted New York City's earliest and one of the most distinctive children's TV variety series called Children's Theater,[5] which was seen on Saturday mornings on New York's WNBT/WRCA TV Channel 4 (even before it became WNBC) from 1949 to June 1961. A veteran radio broadcaster, Forrest created a TV series that encouraged children to explore many places of interest, to read books, and showed them how to care for animals and become involved in local activities.

"Children's Theater" shared the 1957 NYC Emmy award for "Best Children's And Teenage Program" with WCBS TV's "On The Carousel!". (Info about "Children's Theater" sharing the 1957 NYC Emmy with "On The Carousel" can be found in "The NYC Kids Shows Round Up" section of "The TV Party" website at www.tvparty.com).

During its long run, Children's Theater also showed the 1958 color versions of Crusader Rabbit TV cartoons. Children's Theater remained on WNBC-TV Channel 4's Saturday morning line-up until Saturday, June 17, 1961.

If Forrest is better remembered among older New York television viewers for the acclaimed educational program Children's Theater, which he produced and hosted for WNBC-TV from 1949 to 1960, there is a reason his earlier work has been virtually forgotten.

In the earliest days, wearing a tuxedo to intone the formal sign-on when WNBT went on the air each evening, Forrest announced every station break and every program. He covered wrestling, boxing, ice hockey, horse racing and movie premieres. He interviewed men and women on the street, introduced dramatic productions, was a quiz show announcer and variety show host and even became the network's first full-time news presenter after Lowell Thomas, whose radio news had been simulcast on television, decided to do his broadcasts from his upstate home.[6]

In those pre-World War II days, he became the most visible presence on television, when there were fewer than 5,000 television sets in America, mostly concentrated in the New York City vicinity.

Forrest wrote, produced and narrated his own nature films as well. Often he shot his shows on location (using primitive videotape technology), as early as September 24, 1960.

Other notable location broadcasts with Forrest included a series of pre-taped shows from the now defunct Freedomland U.S.A. amusement park in the Bronx. It gave his young viewers a chance to not only see the park but to experience vividly events that were a part of America's history.[7]

A resident of Kinnelon, New Jersey, Forrest died on March 11, 1999.[8]

• Ray Forrest at IMDb
• Ray Forrest at The Interviews: An Oral History of Television