Gene Rayburn

Gene Rayburn, born Eugene Peter Jeljenic on December 22, 1917, in Christopher, Illinois, was an American radio and television personality, actor, and Broadway performer who died on November 29, 1999. He was the younger of two children born to Croatian immigrants Marija "Mary" Hikec and Petar "Pero" Jeljenić. His father died when Rayburn was an infant, after which his mother relocated the family to Chicago, where she married Milan Rubessa on November 10, 1919, and gave her son the name Eugene Rubessa. Rayburn had an elder brother, Alfred, who died during Rayburn's childhood, and a younger half-brother, Milan Rubessa Jr.

Rayburn attended Lindblom Technical High School, where he served as senior class president and performed in productions of Robert of Sicily and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. He subsequently attended Knox College. Pursuing ambitions as an actor and opera singer, he relocated to New York City but was unable to secure stage work, and instead took a position as a page and tour guide at NBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. After three years there, he moved into radio announcing at various stations before returning to New York at WNEW. He enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and served during World War II. The surname Rayburn was chosen as a stage name by randomly selecting it from a telephone directory.

At WNEW, Rayburn co-hosted a morning drive-time radio program, first alongside Jack Lescoulie on a show called Anything Goes and later with Dee Finch on Rayburn and Finch, a pairing credited with helping to establish the morning drive radio format. During his time at the station, he lobbied for the airplay of certain songs, contributing to chart success for recordings such as Teresa Brewer's "Music! Music! Music!" in 1949. That same year, he co-authored the lyrics of "Hop-Scotch Polka" with Carl Sigman. From 1961 through 1973, Rayburn served as the longest-tenured host of NBC Radio's weekend broadcast Monitor, relinquishing the role when his duties on the CBS revival of Match Game created a scheduling conflict.

Rayburn broke into television as the original announcer on Steve Allen's Tonight and began a long association with game show producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman in 1953, first appearing on The Name's the Same, where he frequently substituted for regular panelist Carl Reiner. In 1955 he took over as host of the summer replacement program Make the Connection. He went on to host Choose Up Sides, Dough Re Mi, Play Your Hunch, and the daytime version of Tic Tac Dough. In an uncredited role in the 1959 film It Happened to Jane starring Doris Day, he played a television interviewer, reportedly declining to have his name listed in the credits. He was also a recurring panelist on What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth during the 1960s and 1970s.

His Broadway career spanned 1960 to 1962 and included two productions: the play Come Blow Your Horn and the musical Bye Bye Birdie. In Bye Bye Birdie, Rayburn assumed the lead role after Dick Van Dyke departed the production to star in The Dick Van Dyke Show. During his stage career, his stand-in was Charles Nelson Reilly, who would later become a regular panelist on Match Game.

Rayburn is most widely recognized as the host of Match Game, which he first helmed from 1962 to 1969 on NBC. The original version featured two panels, each composed of a celebrity and two audience members, answering straightforward questions. The show was canceled in 1969. Goodson-Todman revived it for CBS in 1973 with a new format in which two contestants attempted to match the answers of six celebrities, with writer Dick DeBartolo introducing a more comedic and often risqué style of question. The revived series became the highest-rated daytime program on television, ranking number one among all daytime network game shows from 1973 to 1977 and topping all daytime programming for three of those years. Regular panelists on the CBS version included Richard Dawson, Brett Somers, and Charles Nelson Reilly. The daytime run continued on CBS until 1979 and then for three additional years in first-run syndication. A concurrent nighttime version, Match Game PM, aired in syndication from 1975 to 1981. Rayburn received three Daytime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Game Show Host. During the Los Angeles taping years from 1973 to 1982, he lived in Osterville, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, commuting to California every two weeks to tape twelve episodes over a single weekend.

In 1983, Match Game was revived as part of the Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour on NBC, with Rayburn hosting the Match Game and Super Match segments while also serving as a panelist on the Hollywood Squares portion, which was hosted by Jon Bauman. The program lasted nine months. Also in 1983, Rayburn hosted a pilot for Reg Grundy Productions titled Party Line, which was later developed into Bruce Forsyth's Hot Streak. Among his other television appearances, he guest-starred on The Love Boat in 1980, competed in a tournament of game show hosts on Card Sharks that same year, appeared multiple times as a celebrity guest on Password Plus between 1980 and 1982, and guest-starred on Fantasy Island in a role as a game show host. He and his wife Helen appeared together on Tattletales, hosted by Bert Convy, and Rayburn also hosted some episodes of that program. He hosted a local New York City program called Helluva Town on WNEW-TV and returned to that station in 1982 and 1983 as host of a weekly talk and lifestyles program titled Saturday Morning Live.