First host of television’s Dating Game
SAN FRANCISCO - Jim Lange, the first host of the popular game show The Dating Game, has died at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 81.
He died Tuesday morning after a heart attack, his wife, Nancy, said Wednesday.
Though Lange had a successful career in radio, he is best known for his television role on ABC’s The Dating Game, which debuted in 1965 and on which he appeared for more than a decade, charming audiences with his mellifluous voice and wide, easygoing grin.
Lange was born on Aug. 15, 1932, in St. Paul, Minn., where at 15 he discovered a passion for local radio after winning an audition at a local station.
“They wanted a boy and a girl,” he said in a 1992 interview with the Bay Area Radio Digest. “They wanted the boy to do sports and the girl to do the dances and stuff that was going on in the Twin Cities - very sexist - and play music once a week.”
He hosted that show for two years before attending the University of Minnesota and doing a three-year stint in the Marines, according to the Bay Area Radio Museum.
His big break on network TV came in 1962 when he was made an announcer and sidekick on The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show.
Later, after The Dating Game gave him national recognition, he also hosted the game shows Hollywood Connection, $100,000 Name That Tune and The New Newlywed Game.
Lange also worked as a disc jockey for decades in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, and upon his retirement from broadcasting in 2005, he was the morning DJ for KABL-FM, which specializes in playing classics from the Big Band era to the 1970s.
A top hand to Castro in Cuban revolution
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MIAMI - Huber Matos Benitez, who helped lead the Cuban Revolution as one of Fidel Castro’s key lieutenants before his efforts to resign from the burgeoning communist government landed him in prison for 20 years, has died. He was 95.
Matos died around 4 a.m. Thursday at a Miami area hospital after a heart attack two days before, his grandson Huber Matos Garsault said. He was to be buried in Costa Rica after a memorial service Sunday, his family said.
Matos was a 34-year-old rice farmer and teacher - and an opponent of Cuban dictator Gen. Fulgencio Batista - when Castro led a failed uprising in 1953. An inspired Matos later joined Castro and served as a commander in the Sierra Maestra mountains. The two clashed on occasion, but Matos claimed that at one point Castro named him third in line for leadership after Castro’s brother Raul. The Argentinean Ernesto “Che” Guevara was fifth, Matos maintained.
In a May 2009 interview at his home in Miami, Matos said he joined the revolution hoping to restore democracy to his country. Matos, who had been a professor of education, first traveled to Costa Rica to obtain weapons and ammunition for delivery to Castro’s forces before eventually joining the rebels in the mountains.
The revolution overthrew Batista on New Year’s Day 1959, and Matos rolled into Havana at Castro’s side. But within months a disillusioned Matos wanted out of the new government, fearing the Castros and Guevara were steering the country toward communism, and that Fidel Castro had no intention of holding free elections as he had promised.
Arkansas, Pages 14 on 02/28/2014