Ben Grauer

Benjamin Franklin Grauer was born on June 2, 1908, in Staten Island, New York, to Adolph and Ida Grauer. After completing his secondary education at Townsend Harris High School, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the City College of New York in 1930. He is remembered primarily as one of American broadcasting's most prominent radio and television personalities, a reputation built over a forty-year career at NBC following an earlier period as a child actor on stage and in film.

Grauer's performing career began in childhood, with an early stage role in David Warfield's production of The Return of Peter Grimm. His Broadway appearances spanned the years 1918 to 1928 and included Penrod and Betty at Bay, both in 1918, followed by The Blue Bird in 1923, Processional in 1925, and Carnival in 1928. Alongside his stage work, he appeared in a number of silent films during the same period, among them The Idol Dancer, directed by D.W. Griffith, in 1920, as well as Annabel Lee, The Town That Forgot God, My Friend the Devil, and Does It Pay.

In 1930, at the age of twenty-two, Grauer joined the staff of the National Broadcasting Company, initially working as an actor before transitioning into broadcasting. He rose to become a senior commentator and reporter, and his name at NBC was sometimes recorded as Bennett F. Grauer, a name he gave at the time of his hiring. Beginning in 1932, he covered the Olympic Games, presidential inaugurations, and international events. His reporting assignments over the following decades encompassed the Morro Castle fire, the Second World War, the Paris Peace Conference, and the United States occupation of Japan.

Among his most enduring associations at NBC was his role as announcer for the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Conductor Arturo Toscanini personally selected Grauer for the position, and Toscanini identified him as his favorite announcer. Grauer assumed the role in late 1942 and continued until the orchestra was disbanded in June 1954, covering both the radio and television broadcasts of the ensemble. Years after Toscanini's death, Grauer collaborated with composer and producer Don Gillis, who had produced the NBC programs from 1947 to 1954, to create the radio series Toscanini, the Man Behind the Legend. The series, which began in 1963 and continued through the centennial of Toscanini's birth in 1967, received a Peabody Award. It aired on NBC Radio and subsequently on other stations into the early 1980s. Grauer's announcing work for the Toscanini concerts has been preserved on several CD reissues, which retained his introductions to recreate the experience of the original broadcasts.

Grauer also served as the designated announcer for Walter Winchell's Jergens Journal during the 1940s and was one of NBC Radio's Monitor communicators from 1955 to 1960. He was one of four narrators, alongside Burgess Meredith, of NBC's public affairs television series The Big Story, which centered on the work of courageous journalists. In 1948, working alongside anchor John Cameron Swayze, he provided the first extensive live network television coverage of the national political conventions. He hosted The Ben Grauer Show, an NBC television talk program focused on books and their authors, for five months in 1950. His television credits also included the American history quiz show Americana, Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge, the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts featuring the New York Philharmonic, and the 1960 miniseries The Sacco-Vanzetti Story.

Grauer provided commentary for NBC's first television special, the 1939 opening of the New York World's Fair. That same year he began covering New Year's Eve celebrations live from Times Square, a role he continued for nearly forty years on both radio and television. From the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, his New Year's reports were incorporated into NBC's The Tonight Show, where he worked with hosts Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson. He subsequently covered New Year's Eve for Guy Lombardo's specials on CBS in the mid-1970s, with his final appearance on December 31, 1976. In 1957, Grauer was the first to speak the words "The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC" alongside the network's Peacock logo. He also narrated the first installment of The First Fabulous Fifty, a five-part NBC Radio documentary series broadcast during the network's fiftieth anniversary in autumn 1976, covering the years 1926 through 1936.

Grauer received recognition for his international reporting when he was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour in 1956. He also narrated Two Hundred Years Ago Tonight: The Battle of Lexington, a Voice of America series that received a Peabody Award in 1975. After retiring from NBC in 1973, he hosted the weekly international radio program New York, New York with Ben Grauer on the Voice of America.

Outside of broadcasting, Grauer maintained an interest in the graphic arts and printed his own Christmas cards. In the decade before his death he gathered material for a projected history of prices and pricing, with particular attention to book prices, and was active in several professional journalistic organizations as well as the Grolier Club. On September 25, 1954, he married interior designer Melanie Kahane. Grauer died of a heart attack at New York University Medical Center on May 31, 1977, two days before his sixty-ninth birthday, and is interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.