Mike Wallace

Mike Wallace - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Mike Wallace

Myron Leon Wallace (May 9, 1918 – April 7, 2012) was an American broadcast journalist, and television personality. Known for his investigative journalism, he interviewed a wide range of prominent newsmakers during his seven-decade career. He was one of the original correspondents featured on CBS news magazine 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 broadcast journalist Chris Wallace.

This profile of Mike Wallace covers Early Life and Family Background, 1930s–1940s: Radio, 1940s–1960s: Television, 1960s–2000s: 60 Minutes and Personal Life.

Early Life and Family Background of Mike Wallace

Wallace was born on May 9, 1918, in Brookline, Massachusetts, as one of four children to Russian Jewish parents Zina (also Sina; née Sharfman) and Friedan "Frank" Wallik, who had left their home shtetl around 1900. His maternal uncle was economist Isaiah Leo Sharfman. He identified as Jewish and claimed it was his ethnicity (instead of religion) throughout his life. His father was a grocer and insurance broker. Wallace attended Brookline High School, graduating in 1935. Wallace attended University of Michigan, at the encouragment of his uncle, who was chair of the economics department, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1939. 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.

1930s–1940s: Radio of Mike Wallace

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. 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 was hired as a newscaster at the Chicago Sun in 1941.

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 patrolled 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, and The Spike Jones Show. It is sometimes reported Wallace announced for the The Lone Ranger, but Wallace said that he never had done so. 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

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.

Wallace hosted several 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?.

Wallace also hosted two late-night interview programs, Night Beat (broadcast in New York City during 1955–1957, only on DuMont's WABD) and The Mike Wallace Interview on ABC in 1957–1958. See also Profiles in Courage, section: Authorship controversy.

In 1959, Louis Lomax told Wallace about the Nation of Islam. Lomax and Wallace produced a five-part documentary about the organization, The Hate That Hate Produced, which aired during the week of July 13, 1959. The program marked the first time that most white people heard about the Nation, its leader, Elijah Muhammad, and its charismatic spokesman, Malcolm X.

By the early 1960s, Wallace's primary income came from commercials for Parliament cigarettes, touting their "man's mildness" (he had a contract with Philip Morris to pitch their cigarettes as a result of the company's original sponsorship of The Mike Wallace Interview).

Between June 1961 and June 1962, Wallace and Joyce Davidson hosted a New York-based nightly interview program for Westinghouse Broadcasting called PM East for one hour; it was paired with the half-hour PM West, which was hosted by San Francisco Chronicle television critic Terrence O'Flaherty. Westinghouse syndicated the series to television stations that it owned and to a few other cities. WFAA channel 8 in Dallas, Texas carried it, but viewers in other southwestern states, in the Deep South and in the metropolitan areas of Chicago and Philadelphia were unable to watch it.

A frequent guest on the PM East segment was Barbra Streisand, though only the audio of some of her conversations with Wallace survives, as Westinghouse wiped the videotapes and kinescopes were never made or were thrown away.

Also in the early 1960s, Wallace was the host of the David Wolper–produced Biography series.

After his elder son's death in 1962, Wallace decided to get back into news and hosted an early version of CBS Morning News from 1963 to 1966. In 1964 he interviewed Malcolm X, who, half-jokingly, commented "I probably am a dead man already." The black leader was assassinated a few months later in February 1965.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Wallace), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.