Homer Durward Kirby

 Homer Durward Kirby (August 24, 1911 – March 15, 2000)

He was a television host and announcer. He is best remembered for The Garry Moore Show in the 1950s and Candid Camera, which he co-hosted with Allen Funt from 1961 through 1966. By 1936, Kirby was an announcer for WLW in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1937, an Associated Press news story reported that Kirby "made a name for himself" with his reporting on the Ohio River flood of 1937. He also worked at radio stations in Chicago and Indianapolis before the war. He served in the United States Navy during World War II. Following the war, Kirby hosted Club Matinee in Chicago with Garry Moore on the NBC Blue radio network before moving to television in 1949 as an announcer. Kirby was a regular on Moore's television shows from 1950 to 1968. (The Associated Press's obituary for Kirby gives his years of working with Moore's television show as 1950-1951, 1958-1964, and 1966-1967.) Kirby also appeared as a host, announcer, or guest on other television programs. He served as one of NBC Radio's Monitor "Communicators". His most embarrassing moment came during a Polaroid commercial, during which he forgot to pull the tab after taking a picture of Garry Moore holding his Christmas list. After nearly a minute of a Polaroid representative yelling, "Pull the tab!" from the audience, Kirby gave a mighty yank with his long arms and pulled all seven remaining pictures out of the camera. This required a fair amount of strength, not only to burst the developer pods but to rip through the stops on the film roll.

Kirby died of congestive heart failure in Fort Myers, Florida, on March 15, 2000, at the age of 88. He was buried next to his wife, Mary Paxton Young Kirby, in Coburn Cemetery in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where he had a summer home.