Today is Milton Berle’s birthday. If he were still alive, he would be 118 years old, and probably very tired.<\/p>\n
“Uncle Miltie”, as he became known to millions of fans, has the distinction of creating mass popularity for a major new form of entertainment. By bringing a version of his wildly popular radio show to television in 1949, he caused a huge surge in popularity for the new medium.<\/p>\n
Because of his Tuesday night weekly show, sales of television sets more than doubled, and the show had an astounding Nielsen rating of 97% percent of the viewing audience. So many people stayed home to watch that theaters, restaurants and other businesses would shut down until after the show was over.<\/p>\n
I can’t think of another new medium whose popularity was so thoroughly associated with a single entertainer. Can you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is Milton Berle’s birthday. If he were still alive, he would be 118 years old, and probably very tired. “Uncle Miltie”, as he became known to millions of fans, has the distinction of creating mass popularity for a major new form of entertainment. By bringing a version of his wildly popular radio show to … Continue reading “Uncle Miltie”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28574"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28575,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28574\/revisions\/28575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}