Gray, Barry

(b. 2 July 1916 in Red Lion, New Jersey; d. 21 December 1996 in New York City), New York City announcer credited with creating modern talk radio.

Gray, born Bernard Yaroslaw, was one of four children of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. His father, Manius Yaroslaw, was an insurance salesman and real estate speculator. Manius’s investments failed when he became overextended in Southern California property, anticipating too early the boom that eventually came. His mother, Dora Horowitz, was a homemaker.

Gray moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was seven years old. At age eighteen, while still attending Los Angeles High School, Gray began his career as a radio announcer and local sports reporter. He joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and then enlisted in the army in 1941, just days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Gray did not graduate with his high school class, but earned his degree later in life. He did not attend college.

After his army stint with the U.S. Signal Corps in Santa Barbara, California, he returned to the East Coast in 1945 to work for WOR Radio in New York City. At first he hosted live musical performances at various city locales, earning a salary of $59 dollars a week. He then worked as an in-studio, late-night disk jockey on the WOR program Moonlight Savings Time, earning $175 a week. As Gray later recalled, he soon realized that late at night, “none of the station executives were listening, so I could say anything I wanted.” He expressed his opinions on a wide variety of subjects and then began inviting guests, who also expressed their views. Many but not all were entertainment personalities. An on-air call from the bandleader Woody Herman is reputed to have begun the practice of taking calls from listeners, which he did sporadically; call-ins later became a staple of radio broadcasting. The sponsors believed that the program was becoming too controversial, so WOR dropped the show in the late 1940s.

Gray went to Miami Beach, where he did a program on WKAT Radio from the Copacabana, a famous nightclub. There he again expressed controversial opinions, including his support of civil rights. In 1950 Gray returned to New York City on radio station WMCA, where he entertained listeners for nearly forty years. In the early 1950s he broadcast from Chandler’s Restaurant but soon moved to WMCA’s studios, then at Fifty-first Street and Broadway. The interview program drew stars such as Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra, Clark Gable, Danny Thomas, Eddie Cantor, and Lenny Bruce to his microphone. He also featured political discussion, interviewing luminaries such as Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and later, John and Robert Kennedy. As the years went by, a growing percentage of his guests were political figures. By 1952 Gary was earning $4,000 a week and living with his family in a Fifth Avenue apartment; later that year he and his family moved to the wealthy suburb of Scarsdale, New York. In 1952 the talk show host locked horns with Walter Winchell, the celebrity columnist and Gray’s radio competitor, over an incident at the Stork Club involving Josephine Baker, the African American expatriate entertainer. After Baker was denied a seat at the club, where Winchell held court nightly, she complained on Gray’s show that the Stork Club was guilty of race discrimination and that Winchell was a party to it. Winchell, known for his ability to make and break celebrities, was outraged by the charge and fiercely attacked both Gray and Baker in his New York Daily Mirror column; he called the radio announcer a Communist sympathizer and orchestrated a campaign to drive sponsors from Gray’s show. The feud, in which Gray found an ally in Winchell’s competing columnist, Ed Sullivan, lasted for years, until Winchell’s influence began to wane in the new television era. In his autobiography, My Night People (1975), Gray hinted that thugs hired by Winchell were responsible for beatings he suffered.

Gray occasionally dabbled in television. For example, he was a newscaster on WNEW Channel 5 from 1951 to 1953. He even appeared for a short time in the lead role in an off-Broadway production of the play Harvey. But he made his greatest impact on the New York City radio scene.

A liberal early in his career, Gray once remarked self-deprecatingly that in the late 1940s he had regarded the Chinese Communists as agrarian reformers. As the years passed, though, he grew more moderate, his stands becoming a mix of conservative and liberal views. For example, while remaining a strong supporter of civil rights, he publicly backed the New York City police force in its opposition to the creation of a civilian review board to prevent alleged police abuses of minorities. Gray was an auxiliary New York City policeman and once received a commendation from the New York Police Department for coming to the rescue of a police officer during a shootout. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, he was a proponent of gun owners’ rights.

The image of Gray changed radically over the course of his career. From the perspective of the 1990s, the Washington Post journalist Marc Fisher observed that “a style that listeners had found shockingly frank and inquisitive back in the ‘50s and ‘60s seemed downright gentlemanly by the time Bob Grant, Howard Stern, and the Greaseman transformed radio a generation later.” Although often expressing his views vociferously, Gray maintained an urbane, intimate tone even as many late-twentieth-century talk radio hosts adopted bombastically ideological positions and used vulgarity and shrillness to shock their audiences. He viewed radio as communication not with a mass audience but as a means of talking to thousands of individual listeners. Summing up his broadcasting philosophy in his autobiography, Gary wrote, “Radio is for one pair of ears alone.” Gray’s style influenced radio and television interviewers such as Larry King and Ted Koppel, both of whom acknowledged his impact on them.

Gray’s show was an occasional forum for breaking news. For example, journalist Sidney Zion announced on Gray’s program that former Defense Department employee Daniel Ellsberg was the one who had leaked the controversial Pentagon Papers, the secret government study of the Vietnam War excerpted in 1971 by the New York Times, which convinced many Americans that the government was deceiving the public about the war. In 1989 Gray left WMCA because a religious broadcaster bought the station and changed the format. He returned to WOR Radio, where he worked until his death.

Gray was skeptical about the influence claimed by talk show hosts of the 1980s and 1990s as the format he pioneered blazed across the AM radio band. Many talk show hosts, Gray said, “take themselves far too seriously. They think they’re changing the world. They aren’t changing a damn thing.” What radio hosts can do, he emphasized, is provide a forum for ideas.

The slim, six-feet, three-inch Gray married Beth Serrao on 14 February 1946. The couple had two children. They were divorced in 1973. Gray married Judith Margot Morris on 24 September 1973; the marriage ended in divorce. He was married to his third wife, Nancy Kellogg, from 5 September 1986 until his death. They had one child.

Over the years, Gray earned considerable recognition for his work. Jack Gould, New York Times ’s television critic, called Gray’s show “a nightly kaffeeklatsch which frequently adds up to extraordinarily different and distinctive radio.” In 1996 he was selected Talk Show Host of the Year by the National Association of Talk Show Hosts. Gray died at the age of eighty of complications from back surgery and was cremated.

Gray’s autobiography, My Night People (1975), is short on personal details but vividly describes his radio career, including his long feud with Walter Winchell. His impact on the radio industry is described in Michael Barone and Joannie M. Schrof, “The Changing Voice of Talk Radio,” U.S. News and World Report (15 Jan. 1990), and Peter Goddard, “A Look into Broadcast’s Big Mouths Finds Some Dignity in the Wild West World of Talk Shows,” Toronto Star (26 July 1997). Upon his death, Gray’s impact was described in Marc Fisher, “Talk Radio’s Founding Father,” Washington Post (31 Dec. 1996), and David Hinckley, “Barry Gray: Knight of the Night,” New York Daily News (23 Dec. 1996). An obituary is in the New York Times (22 and 23 Dec. 1996).

Peter Feuerherd