Milton Berle

Before most Americans knew what television could be, Milton Berle showed them. Born Mendel Berlinger on July 12, 1908, in a five-story walkup in Harlem, Manhattan, he grew up in a Jewish family with roots in German-Jewish and Polish-Jewish ancestry. His father, Moses Berlinger, sold paint and varnish; his mother, Sarah Glantz Berlinger, later changed her name to Sandra Berle when her son became famous. By the time he was 16, Mendel had chosen the professional name Milton Berle, a neat show-business name for a life already moving fast.

Berle entered entertainment almost as soon as childhood allowed. In 1913, at age five, he won a children’s Charlie Chaplin contest. He worked as a child model, appeared as “Buster Brown” for Buster Brown shoes, and took child roles in silent films, though some of his later claims about specific appearances have been disputed. In 1916, he enrolled in the Professional Children’s School. Around 1920, at 12, he made his stage debut in a revival of the musical comedy Florodora in Atlantic City, a production that later moved to Broadway. By 16, he was already working as a master of ceremonies in vaudeville.

That early training mattered. Berle learned timing, noise, costume, interruption, and direct contact with an audience in the rough-and-ready world of stage comedy. By the early 1930s he had become a successful stand-up comedian, patterning himself after vaudeville comic Ted Healy. He starred in Earl Carroll’s Vanities on Broadway in 1932, then appeared in the 1933 theatrical featurette Poppin’ the Cork, for which he also co-wrote the score. He continued to write songs, including the title song for the 1940 RKO film Li’l Abner with Ben Oakland and Milton Drake, and a Spike Jones B-side, “Leave the Dishes in the Sink, Ma.”

Radio gave Berle a wider field to play on. From 1934 to 1936 he appeared frequently on The Rudy Vallee Hour, and he became a regular on The Gillette Original Community Sing on CBS in 1936 and 1937. In 1939, he hosted Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, built around listener-submitted jokes. In the 1940s he canceled well-paying nightclub work to expand his radio career, moving through programs such as Three Ring Time, Let Yourself Go, Kiss and Make Up, and The Milton Berle Show. He later called that last series “the best radio show I ever did,” and it helped prepare him for the medium that would make him a household name.

Berle first appeared on television in an experimental Chicago broadcast in 1929, but he returned to the medium in force nearly 20 years later. On June 8, 1948, he hosted NBC’s Texaco Star Theatre, bringing with him the structure, routines, slapstick, and outlandish costumes of vaudeville. He was not made permanent host immediately, but that fall the job became his. For the next several years he dominated Tuesday night television, reaching the top of the Nielsen ratings with as much as a 97 percent share of the viewing audience. To millions, he became “Uncle Miltie” and “Mr. Television,” the first major American television star of the first Golden Age of Television.

Milton Berle died on March 27, 2002, after a career that had stretched across more than eight decades, from silent film and stage to radio, movies, and television. He was honored with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for radio and one for TV. His words still carry the punch of a performer who knew that luck favored motion. “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door” sounds less like a slogan than a working comic’s rule: keep moving, keep trying, and if the room is not ready for you, find a way onto the stage anyway.