Sonny Fox

Irwin "Sonny" Fox was born on June 17, 1925, in the Parkville section of Brooklyn, New York, to Gertrude (Goldberg) and Julius A. Fox, a Jewish family in which his father worked in the textile business and his mother brokered theater tickets. He attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn's Midwood neighborhood before enlisting in the army in 1943. During World War II he served in England and France and was captured by German forces during the Battle of the Bulge. His survival as a Jewish prisoner of war was attributed in part to Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, who declared to Nazi officers, "We are all Jews here," and separately to an American camp clerk who recorded Fox's religion as Protestant at a moment when Jewish prisoners were being identified and transferred to a slave labor camp in Berga, Germany. After the war Fox returned to the United States and earned a bachelor's degree in television and radio production from New York University in 1947.

Fox launched his professional career as a producer on The Candid Microphone, Allen Funt's radio program that later evolved into Candid Camera. He subsequently spent three years at Voice of America, first as a reporter and then as a war correspondent during the Korean War. His entry into children's programming came in 1954 with The Finder, a children's news and travelogue program on KETC-TV in St. Louis. CBS brought him to national television in 1955 as co-host of Let's Take a Trip, a children's travelogue that ran for three years and featured live remote broadcasts with no studio audience or sponsors.

In 1956, Fox became the original host of The $64,000 Challenge, a spinoff of The $64,000 Question. He was initially introduced on air as "Bill Fox" before adopting the name "Sonny Fox" when the former name was found to be registered by another entertainer. He was replaced by Ralph Story within weeks of the show's debut. His brief tenure on the program preceded the quiz show scandals of the late 1950s, and Fox later described being disturbed by Congressional testimony related to those scandals, including admissions by child performer Patty Duke, who had appeared on The $64,000 Challenge and later acknowledged having been coached to mislead investigators. Fox subsequently served as an occasional substitute host for Bill Cullen on The Price Is Right and for Bud Collyer on Beat the Clock and To Tell the Truth, and he hosted the first season of The Movie Game from 1969 to 1970.

In 1959, the Metromedia station group hired Fox to host Wonderama on its New York flagship station WABD, later known as WNEW-TV, where he succeeded hosts Bill Britten and Doris Faye. Fox remained Wonderama's sole host until 1967. During his tenure the program ran four hours on Sunday mornings and incorporated Shakespearean dramatizations, magic demonstrations typically performed by James "The Amazing" Randi, art instruction, spelling bees, and appearances by guests including John Lindsay and Robert Kennedy. That same year Fox also created and hosted Just for Fun!, a Saturday morning program on WNEW-TV structured around team competitions modeled on the color war format common at children's summer camps. Guests on Just for Fun! included Yogi Berra, Tim Conway, Huntz Hall, Charlotte Rae, and Soupy Sales. Fox hosted the program until 1965. In 1960 he hosted On Your Mark, ABC's first original Saturday morning program, a game show in which children answered questions about various professions. Because Fox held an exclusive contract with WNEW-TV, On Your Mark aired on that station in New York rather than on ABC's local outlet; the program lasted one season.

Fox appeared in the 1966 film The Christmas That Almost Wasn't and co-hosted the adult talk and variety program The New Yorkers on WNEW-TV in 1967 alongside Penelope Wilson, Gloria Okon, and newsman Stewart Klein. He had earlier declined an opportunity to host The New Yorkers because doing so would have required him to leave Wonderama. In 1976 he hosted Way Out Games, a California-based program, and in 1977 he oversaw children's programming for NBC. During the 1970s he also served as a lecturer at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Fox appeared on Broadway in 1959 in The Littlest Circus, a credit that reflected his roots in New York performance. He received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Musical in 1984.

In the later phase of his career Fox worked as a producer of television films, including And Baby Makes Six in 1979, Mysterious Two in 1982, and Brontë in 1983. In the mid-1980s he joined Population Communications International, a New York-based nonprofit focused on promoting changes in attitudes toward family planning through popular media, including by collaborating with domestic and international soap opera producers on story lines addressing family planning. He eventually became chairman of the organization's board. In September 2012 Fox published his memoirs under the title But You Made the Front Page! Wonderama, Wars and a Whole Bunch of Life.

Fox married Gloria, née Benson, with whom he had three sons and one daughter; the marriage later ended in divorce. He died from COVID-19 on January 24, 2021, in Encino, California, at the age of 95.