‘Uncle Miltie’ dies at age 93

By Bob Thomas

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES – Milton Berle, 93, the acerbic, cigar-smoking vaudevillian who eagerly embraced a new medium and became “Mr. Television” when the technology was in its infancy, died Wednesday.

Berle was diagnosed with colon cancer last year and had been under hospice care for the past few weeks. Berle’s wife, Lorna, and several family members were at his side when he died at home after a lengthy illness, his publicist said.

“Uncle Miltie” was the king of Tuesday nights in the late 1940s, and store owners put up signs: “Closed tonight to watch Milton Berle.”

At 8 p.m., four Texaco service attendants sang the “Texaco Star Theater” theme, and then came Berle, dressed for laughs: a caveman introduced as “the man with jokes from the Stone Age”; a man in a barrel “who had just paid his taxes.”

If the audience thought he looked funny in a dress, Berle was happy to oblige, and skits in drag became a trademark. The NBC program’s popularity spurred sales of television sets and helped make TV a medium for the masses.

In his debut season in 1948, Berle’s show was watched on four out of every five sets in the nation, and he was the new medium’s highest-paid funny man.

The magic faded in the ’50s, and in recent years, Berle played fairs, night clubs, college campuses and the private Friars clubs in Beverly Hills and New York. In 1983, he was among the first seven inductees into the TV Hall of Fame of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Born Mendel Berlinger in New York’s Harlem on July 12, 1908, Berle remembered his mother, Sandra, bouncing him on her knee and telling him, “Make me laugh.”

Berle’s first taste of show business came at age 5, when he won a vaudeville contest by imitating Charlie Chaplin. Soon he was doing child leads in films with Mary Pickford and Mabel Normand, and was the kid rescued from the railroad tracks in the nick of time in the Pearl White movies.

His Broadway debut came in 1920 in “The Floradora Girl.”

In 1936, Berle was a headliner with the Ziegfeld Follies. He played a long run with Earl Carroll’s Vanities and began bringing his brand of humor to radio with guest spots on humor shows. He also appeared in several minor film comedies, such as “New Faces of 1937” and 1949’s “Always Leave Them Laughing” (based on his autobiography). But he never really made it on the big screen.

Then came the advent of television.

Berle’s hour-long “Texaco Star Theater” began June 8, 1948, and was renamed “The Milton Berle Show” before it ended in June 1956.

Berle married, divorced and remarried show girl Joyce Matthews, and they adopted a daughter, Vicki. Their second marriage lasted six years. In 1953 Berle married former publicist Ruth Cosgrove. They had an adopted son, Bill. She died in 1989, and Berle married fashion designer Lorna Adams in 1991.