TV took the Radio star.

I never heard him on the radio, but Jim Lange worked behind the microphone for decades in California. His stints in Los Angeles and the Bay area brought him to the attention of the TV producers. And that’s how I became familiar with him.

Lange was the smiling host of the Dating Game from its debut in the sixties through the last of the seventies. The Dating Game was the show that ran just before the six o’clock local news, which I found myself doing back then.

Of course, if someone had asked me if I watched the show, I probably would have denied it. Not really high-brow entertainment (as though I would qualify for high-brow anyway). I didn’t see much of the start of the nightly episode since I was working on the news script, but I saw my share of the picking of the bachelor or bachorettes. By that time of the program, I was at the newsdesk, just waiting for Mr. Lange to give us our kiss goodbye (won’t go into that).

Pretty hokey, as I recall. Even by four-decade’s ago standards. Still, the show ran for ten years or so.

Jim Lange died earlier this week of a heart attack at the age of 81.

He auditioned and won a spot on a radio show while in high school in Minnesota. He served three years in the military following college, but caught a break in 1962 when he became the announcer for the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show. (I won’t try to explain who he was. That’s Google material.)

After The Dating Game, he hosted other game shows like The New Newlywed Game (the Old Newlywed Game was another KSWO-TV lead-in show), Hollywood Connection, and Name That Tune.

He told people his first love was radio, and even after his ‘official’ retirement from broadcasting in 2005, he served as the morning-drive guy on KABL-FM playing the oldies. I suppose that would have him as one of the few radio folks who worked all the way through radio’s Middle Ages (which, by my reckoning, was that period ushered in by Top 40 and ending with computer-driven programming, satellite broadcasts, and streaming internet).

May both Jim Lange and that era of radio: RIP.