Jack Harold Paar

Jack Harold Paar (May 1, 1918 – January 27, 2004)

He was best known for his stint as host of The Tonight Show from 1957 to 1962. Time magazine's obituary noted that: "His fans would remember him as the fellow who split talk show history into two eras: Before Paar and Below Paar." He got his first tastes of television in the early 1950s, appearing as a comic on The Ed Sullivan Show and hosting two game shows, Up To Paar (1952) and Bank on the Stars (1953), before hosting The Morning Show (1954) on CBS. He guest starred twice in 1958 on Polly Bergen's short-lived NBC comedy/variety show, The Polly Bergen Show. NBC asked Paar to succeed Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show, which had been renamed and replaced with various failed series in the interim after Allen had left the show for prime time.

Paar hosted the program from 1957 to 1962 during the peak of the series' national attention. At first, the show was called Tonight Starring Jack Paar; after 1959 it was officially known as The Jack Paar Show. Paar was often unpredictable, emotional, and principled. Paar's emotional nature made the everyday routine of putting together a 105-minute program difficult to continue for more than five years. As a TV Guide item put it, he was "bone tired" of the grind, although he confided in Dick Cavett later that leaving the program was the greatest mistake of his life. He signed off the show for the last time on March 29, 1962. He next appeared on "The Jack Paar Program" which ran for three seasons on NBC. Later, he purchased a television station in Poland Springs, Maine, and sold it several years later. In 1973 he signed with ABC to compete with his NBC successor, Johnny Carson, on a limited schedule of one week a month, but the show failed to garner the acclaim he was once famous for. Paar's health declined in the late 1990s. He died at his Greenwich, Connecticut home on January 27, 2004, age 85. He had long been in ill health, having undergone triple-bypass heart surgery in 1998. He also suffered a stroke a year before he died.