Teen idol. Avalon was a child prodigy trumpet player, earn- ing an appearance on the Jackie Gleason Show and making records for RCA Victor's subsidiary, 'X' Records. He was discovered by local impresario Bob Marcucci while playing backup trumpet in a local band. Eight months later, Avalon's first single, Cupid, came out on Marcucci's Chancellor label, and his third release, Dede Dinah, hit the Top Ten. His first number one single was 1959's Venus, and he placed no fewer than six records in the Top 40 in that year alone. Although Avalon was the first of the manufactured teen idols, he had a music background to go along with the looks, and it was that talent that helped him succeed. In 1962, he teamed up with Annette Funicello and reinvented himself as a clean- cut, pretty-boy surfer in a wildly successful batch of Beach Party movies.
Before his comedian days, Bob Hope boxed, under the name of Packy East.
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Novelist Jacqueline Susann once hosted the TV game shows, Your Surprise Store and Ring the Bell.
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The doomed TV series, Turn On, hosted by Tim Conway, established a record on February 5, 1969: it was aired and canceled on the same day.
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For many years, the globe on the NBC Nightly News spun in the wrong direction. On January 2, 1984, NBC finally set the world back in the proper direction.
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On the night of October 31, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe provided "the panic broadcast that shook the world," when they performed 'The War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells as a terrifying real-life episode.
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Mary Tyler Moore had an early acting role playing a woman at an answering service. You could only see her legs and hear her voice.
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" Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else."