Robert Earle, 93, TV ‘College Bowl’ Moderator, Is Dead

[Y2kTheNewOldies]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/obituaries/robert-earle-dead.html

Robert Earle, who tested the wits of hundreds of students and countless television viewers as moderator of the long-running quiz show “The General Electric College Bowl,” died on Wednesday in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 93.

His family said the cause was cancer.

Mr. Earle was moderator of the show from 1962 until it went off the air in 1970. A version of the program had begun on radio in 1953 under the title “College Quiz Bowl,” and in 1959 it moved to television with Allen Ludden as host.

On the show, teams of four students from two universities would compete to answer quiz questions, with scholarship money at stake. The show, which started on CBS, then moved to NBC, was broadcast live on Sundays from New York.

How Mr. Earle, an unknown, came to succeed Mr. Ludden was, as TV Guide put it in a 1964 article, “a classic example of how a young man can succeed in business by really trying.

Complications from cancer was one of the factors mentioned n the article.

 

[Kemosabe]

GE College Bowl was required viewing in our household. Robert Earle, R.I.P.