Obits

The television business lost one of its technological giants yesterday, as Eugene Polley died at the age of 96. Polley, as a young engineer at Zenith Radio Corporation, patented (along with fellow inventor Robert Adler) technology that would become the “Flash-Matic” in 1955. The Flash-Matic was the world’s first wireless TV remote control, and would change the way people watched TV.

Polley would garner 18 patents over the course of his career, nearly all of them related to the television field.

Born in Chicago in 1915, Polley joined Zenith in 1935. For the next 47 years, he would hold numerous roles at the company, developing technology for radios, black and white TVs and eventually color sets.

You can read more about Polley in an obituary from Zenith and his family, here.

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Michael Rosenbaum, CBS News producer and one-time Tel Aviv bureau chief has died. Rosenbaum, who spent 27 years at CBS News, died at home in Manhattan last night of a brain tumor diagnosed last September. He was 64.

“Michael was a great friend to so many of us at CBS News. He was a real newsman who was naturally curious and skeptical of almost everything. He was also fun to be around, a caring friend, and a beloved member of our family at CBS News,” said CBS News Chairman and 60 MINUTES Executive Producer Jeff Fager, who worked with Rosenbaum for many years.

Rosenbaum worked with correspondents Bob Simon and Dan Rather on breaking stories in the Middle East while he was bureau chief in Tel Aviv from 1989 to 1995.  After leaving Tel Aviv, Rosenbaum returned to New York where he worked on the “CBS Evening News,” “60 Minutes” and “60 Minutes II.” In recent years, he also worked with Rather on his HDNet series “Dan Rather Reports.”

More on Rosenbaum’s life and accomplishments after the jump…

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The death of singer Donna Summer is being remembered on the cable news channels this afternoon. (Even ESPN News made mention, calling Kobe Bryant “the Donna Summer of the NBA. He works hard for the money.”)

Summer, 63, died of lung cancer this morning in Florida.

Summer, known as the Queen of Disco for her songs including “Last Dance,” “Hot Stuff,” and “I Feel Love,” shared her own playlist with ABC’s “Nightline” a few years ago. It includes the first song she ever sang publicly: “I Found the Answer” by Mahalia Jackson.

“I opened my mouth and this voice just shot out of me,” she said. “It shocked me and it shocked everyone in the room. I started crying and everyone in the room started crying and I heard the voice of God say, ‘You’re going to be famous and this is power and you are never to misuse this power.’”

Former CBS News correspondent Ben Silver, who covered monumental events like school integration and the race riots for The Eye network, has died at 85. After retiring, Silver became a professor at Arizona State University, home of the Walter Cronkite school of journalism and Mass Communication. Silver worked with Cronkite.

More details from the AP’s obituary, here.

He is survived by his wife, six children and 11 grandchildren.

If the news business was like football, Mike Wallace would be its MVP. But if news was a beauty contest, Wallace would never have been Mr. Congeniality.

That’s what hundreds of Mike Wallace’s friends, colleagues and family — four generations of them — learned as they gathered at the Rose Hall at Time Warner Center to remember the “60 Minutes” original who died April 8 at age 93.

Morley Safer and Steve Kroft remembered Wallace’s unrelenting competitive streak. When Kroft had set up an interview with Gov. Bill Clinton in 1988, amidst accusations of an extra-marital affair, Kroft says, “Mike offered me encouragement, while trying to take the story away from me.”

Safer admitted months would go by without the two reporters even speaking to each other. In a taped piece, the late Ed Bradley echoed the sentiment, after Wallace stole a Manuel Noriega interview from him. “You and I didn’t talk for  six months,” Bradley says to Wallace who is unmoved.

“He brought the same zeal to a story as he did to a penny ante poker game,” said Safer.

Wallace even stole a story from his own son, Chris Wallace who, at the time, was working for ABC’s “Primetime.” In the Fall of 1997, young Wallace had set up an interview with comedian Chris Rock. Rock canceled not long before the shoot. Wallace later found out why.

“My old man had stolen the interview!” said Wallace. “And he knew he’d stolen it from me!” Bradley ended up conducting the Rock interview, mostly to make amends for the Noriega theft, but also to keep in good stead with his son.

“He was so exasperating and yet so endearing,” said Wallace choking back tears.

“It took many years for us to find our path to each other,” the Fox News anchor admitted. “He had a good heart. He could be naughty. But he was never mean.”

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Television legend Dick Clark has died of a heart attack at the age of 82.

Clark was a prolific television host, helming game shows such as “Pyramid,” the famous variety show “American Bandstand” and of course “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” which has been a New Year’s television staple for 40 years.

Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Clark first gained national attention as the host of “American Bandstand,” which made the jump from a local Philadelphia station to ABC in 1957.

“New Years Rockin’ Eve” first appeared on NBC in 1972, moving to ABC in 1974, where it has remained ever since. Clark has led the countdown to the new year every December 31, with the exception of 2004, when he was recovering following a stroke.

Leading that New Year’s countdown was incredibly important to Clark, as he recounted in a 1999 interview:

“The key is, it is very nice to be welcomed into people’s celebrations,” Clark said. “Though we are probably wallpaper in the background for a lot of people, when that five minutes to midnight hits, it is for all the people, counting down with you.”

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In addition to last night’s hour-long look back at the life and work of Mike Wallace, “60 Minutes” Overtime has dozens of extras, including the thoughts of producers, editors, assistants and even the show’s make-up artist who worked alongside the “60 Minutes” original, including this from Josh Howard, who spent 13 years at “60 Minutes,” six of them producing for Wallace.

I was sitting at my desk one day when Mike walked into my office and said, “How about doing a piece about Willie Nelson?” At least, that’s what I thought he had said. It wasn’t the kind of story I usually produced, but I figured it would be a nice change from the more serious stuff. I said, “Sure, but what got you interested in Willie Nelson?”

He looked at me like I was a fly in his soup (one of his favorite expressions.) “WILLIE NELSON? WHY THE F— WOULD I WANT TO DO WILLIE NELSON? WHAT I SAID WAS, ‘WINNIE’ AND ‘NELSON.’ YOU KNOW, MANDELA. POSSIBLY YOU HAVE HEARD OF THEM?”

FishbowlDC reports on what — or rather who — was left out of the “60 Minutes special.

As “60 Minutes” begins its hour-long look at the life and work of founding correspondent Mike Wallace, Wallace’s son Chris shared his own thoughts on his father this morning on “FOX News Sunday.” Chris Wallace shared a picture of his own grand-daughter Caroline Wallace, then age one, “taking the first step of her life reaching out to her great-grandfather.”

You know about Mike and about Chris, but did you know there’s a third generation of the family who also works in news. TVSpy has the story of Eames Yates, a reporter at WCTV in Tallahassee and the never-before-broadcast interview Yates did with his step-grandfather, Mike Wallace, six years ago. Wallace is candid about the sacrifices he made: “I was more interested in my work than in my family,” Wallace says in the interview.

Eames Yates is the grandson of Mary Yates Wallace who was Mike Wallace’s fourth wife, whom he married in 1986.

If you’re in Chicago and have the time, head down to The Museum of Broadcast Communications which is holding a day-long Mike Wallace retrospective today, showing some of Wallace’s most important works from “60 Minutes,” “You Are There,” “CBS Reports,” and a little-known early 1960s show Wallace hosted called, “Biography.”

Chicago TV critic Robert Feder writes about Wallace’s connection to Chicago and about that show.

Wallace was at a low point in his career when he hosted Biography, according to television historians Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh. It was between his earlier phase as an actor, announcer, game show host and commercial pitchman, and his later ascendancy as a CBS News correspondent and eventual 60 Minutes icon.

“Wallace had made his name in news as a fire-breathing interviewer in the late 1950s, but was made to tone down his approach by nervous network executives, and eventually forced out of network news work altogether,” Brooks and Marsh wrote. “The considerable success of Biography helped reestablish his name.”

Wallace died Saturday night at age 93.