Louis Rukeyser dies of cancer at 73

[RebLem]

May 3, 2006 | New York times
Louis Rukeyser, Television Host, Dies at 73
BY JAMES GRANT

Louis Rukeyser, the exquisitely tailored and pun-loving television host who helped millions of Americans believe that they could get rich in the stock market, or at least begin to understand it, died yesterday at his home in Greenwich, Conn. He was 73.

He died of multiple myeloma, said his brother Bud Rukeyser.

When "Wall Street Week" was broadcast for the first time on Nov. 20, 1970, probably nobody, not even the always self-assured Mr. Rukeyser, dreamed that the show would run for 32 years while attracting the biggest audience on public television and making its host a celebrity in the improbable field of light-hearted, free-market-oriented financial commentary. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was then languishing, and the population of American mutual funds numbered a scant 323.

And though the Dow continued to languish (not until 1982 did it push above 1,000, a mark it had first set in 1966), "Wall Street Week" prospered. "I invented the job of economic commentary on television," Mr. Rukeyser said in 1980. He was already well along in inventing the medium of investment broadcasting.

"Fridays at 8:30 find me — amply fed, digestive organs ruminating contentedly to the rhythmic sloshing of martini juice — sitting in my Louis Quinze armchair awaiting another installment of 'Wall Street Week,' " wrote Russell Baker in The New York Times at the beginning of the show's second decade. "By 8:33 my mind is reeling so wildly with gyrations of the Dow Jones average and the pinwheeling of money funds, Treasury bills and gold markets that I often require a calming infusion of brandy."

The show attained its biggest audience, some six million viewers, in the mid-1980's.

Mr. Rukeyser, though he prodded the financial gurus who appeared on the program to forecast the stock market (the rosier the outlook, the better he liked it, as a rule), he usually kept his own predictive counsel.

But when, in 1980, he uncharacteristically ventured part way out on a limb — "I think we have entered the decade of the common stock," he said — he proved only partly correct. In fact, the market had embarked on a nearly two-decade up-cycle, and Mr. Rukeyser was started on his own professional bull market.

"Wall Street Week" had as its point of origin not the beating heart of American finance in Lower Manhattan but the leafy Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills, Md. The show was the brainchild of Anne Truax Darlington, a producer with Maryland Public Broadcasting, and the original corps of panelists was recruited from the Baltimore financial community, not previously noted for its telegenic possibilities.

Mr. Rukeyser's supporting cast members (later augmented by experts from outside Baltimore) became little celebrities in their own right. "I get recognized in bus lines," one long-serving panelist, Monte Gordon, remarked in 1990. "I get recognized when I'm eating in restaurants. There's a lot of psychic satisfaction to being on the show."

There was money at stake, too. The value of an appearance on "Wall Street Week" to each week's "special guest"— mutual-fund portfolio manager, bank trust officer, economist — climbed as the bull stock market went higher and higher.

"So how badly do people want to get on?" The Times asked a New York publicist, Len Kessler, in 1990. "It's spelled k-i-l-l," said Mr. Kessler.

Louis Richard Rukeyser was second of four sons of the financial journalist Merryle S. Rukeyser, who wrote a syndicated column in the Hearst newspapers.

Louis Rukeyser graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University in 1954. He took a reporting job at The Baltimore Sun and, within five years, was made London bureau chief, an unusually swift rise through the newsroom ranks. He joined ABC News in 1965 as a correspondent and commentator. Not until 1973 did he judge it safe to quit his day job for a still-unproven "Wall Street Week."

It was a decision that he never regretted. After 20 years on the air, Mr. Rukeyser was earning $300,000 a year from the show and $1 million or more in annual speaking income, each speech bearing the same title, "What's Ahead for the Economy" — the echo of the title of a book he wrote for Simon & Schuster in 1983.

He produced, in addition, a thrice-weekly newspaper column and a book on investing ("How to Make Money in Wall Street," Doubleday, 1974). Later he added a pair of newsletters, Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street and Louis Rukeyser's Mutual Funds. He flew first class, loved to gamble, slept in the best and gaudiest suites in the finest hotels and dressed every inch the sybarite he was. In 1991, The Fashion Foundation of America pronounced him the "best-dressed man in finance."

The host of "Wall Street Week" ("with Louis Rukeyser," he never failed to add to the show's title) and self-described champion of the "little guy" could be openly contemptuous of professional investors, a sentiment many of them warmly reciprocated. Mr. Rukeyser reserved his most withering scorn for the "gloomy Guses" and "Wrong-Way Corrigans" who warned of financial troubles that, during the prosperous 1990's, never transpired.

An eternal bull on the stock market, the more bullish, and less tolerant of dissenting bears he became, the higher the averages climbed. On the program of Nov. 5, 1999, Mr. Rukeyser announced the firing of the veteran panelist Gail Dudak for her 156 consecutive weeks of bearishly errant forecasting. Ms. Dudak heard the news from her neighbors the next morning. The stock market peaked four months later.

Though "Wall Street Week" never fell from the top of the heap of TV financial programs (a pile that owed much of its impressive height to Mr. Rukeyser's success), viewership slipped as stock prices fell and as competition from other financial media increased. In March 2002, Maryland Public TV announced that the snowy-haired Mr. Rukeyser would be eased out to make room for a youth movement led by the staff of Fortune Magazine.

Mr. Rukeyser would have none of it. "I want you to rise up out of your chairs," he summoned his viewers from the set of "Wall Street Week' the next Friday evening, "not to shout, 'I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!' but," he added, to "write or e-mail your local PBS station saying you heard Louis Rukeyser is still going to have a program and that you'd like to see it."

Mr. Rukeyser was fired. But he quickly re-established the show at CNBC. He took pride in his new success and glee in the spectacle of Maryland Public Broadcasting suffering a forced retrenchment as his sponsors decamped from public television with him. (The Fortune version of "Wall Street Week" was canceled in 2005.)

Failing health forced Mr. Rukeyser off the air in 2003. He was presented with the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Emmy for Business and Financial Reporting in 2004.

Besides his brother Bud, of West Palm Beach, Fla., he is survived by his wife, Alexandra; three daughters, Beverley Bellisio of Middletown, Conn., Susan Rukeyser of Amarillo, Tex., and Stacy Rukeyser of West Hollywood, Calif.; two grandchildren; and two other brothers, William S., of Knoxville, Tenn., and Robert, of Greenwich.

One cost of celebrity for Mr. Rukeyser was the jibes he would have to bear while indulging his fondness for casino gambling. No sooner had he settled into a blackjack game, he once recalled, than someone would ask him if the odds at the table were really better than those on Wall Street.

James Grant was a panelist on "Wall Street Week" for 10 years, beginning in 1988.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/busin ... nted=print

[jbuck919]

I hope I am only honoring the memory of one whose program I enjoyed off and on for years and who died by modern standards an untimely death by recalling the funniest moment I remember from the classic sitcom Family Ties (though it will not sound funny in the retelling). The little brother misses his Michael J. Fox older brother character who for some reason is not there for Wall Street Week. The father consoles the kid, telling him that it's ok, he'll be along, and so forth, but the kid is unconsolable: "But we like to sing the theme song."

[Haydnseek]

We were talking just the other day about how much we missed his show which was a Friday evening ritual for us. His ability to put issues in perspective with humor and considerable insight was rather unique. The civility of his interviews and panel discussions was aways refreshing.

[Haydnseek]

I hope I am only honoring the memory of one whose program I enjoyed off and on for years and who died by modern standards an untimely death by recalling the funniest moment I remember from the classic sitcom Family Ties (though it will not sound funny in the retelling). The little brother misses his Michael J. Fox older brother character who for some reason is not there for Wall Street Week. The father consoles the kid, telling him that it's ok, he'll be along, and so forth, but the kid is unconsolable: "But we like to sing the theme song."

I'll bet he enjoyed that scene.

[lmpower]

I feel very sad about Rukeyser's death. I spent many pleasant hours with his program. It was a Friday night ritual with us for years. When the children were little Rukeyser's themesong was a big favorite with them. The only drawback was his congenital overoptimism, but then most of the time optimism has proved justified.

[Corlyss_D]

I hope I am only honoring the memory of one whose program I enjoyed off and on for years and who died by modern standards an untimely death by recalling the funniest moment I remember from the classic sitcom Family Ties (though it will not sound funny in the retelling). The little brother misses his Michael J. Fox older brother character who for some reason is not there for Wall Street Week. The father consoles the kid, telling him that it's ok, he'll be along, and so forth, but the kid is unconsolable: "But we like to sing the theme song."

I loved Family Ties - what I saw of it. It's heyday was when I was in law school. I loved the idea of a Reagan Republican springing from the loins of immature 60s flower-children.

[Haydnseek]

Louis Rukeyser: 1933-2006

Financial advice TV show pioneer
Ex-newspaperman explained Wall St. to Main St. on PBS

By David Zurawik
Sun television critic

May 3, 2006

Louis Rukeyser, who for 32 years presided over PBS' Wall Street Week, a landmark financial advice show developed in Owings Mills and distinguished by his keen insights, wry puns and idiosyncratic musings on the market, died yesterday at his home in Greenwich, Conn.

Mr. Rukeyser, who was 73, died of multiple myeloma, a rare cancer of the bone marrow, said his brother, Bud Rukeyser.

An imposing but likable on-air presence with deep voice, silver-white hair and mischievous smile, Louis Rukeyser left the airwaves in October 2003 when he started undergoing treatment for cancer.

The former Baltimore Sun London bureau chief and ABC News correspondent spent his last 18 months in television presenting his show on cable channel CNBC after a nasty public battle in 2002 with Maryland Public Television, which had produced his groundbreaking show for more than three decades.

At its peak in the 1980s, Wall Street Week was carried on more than 300 public television stations and boasted a weekly audience of 4.1 million viewers. The 30-minute program that aired Friday nights at 8 - four hours after the market closed for the week - was public television's longest-running weekly prime-time series, second only to CBS' venerable 60 Minutes in overall TV tenure. The series was canceled by MPT in June 2005 after three years of audience erosion that followed Mr. Rukeyser's departure.

"Before Louis Rukeyser, there was no such thing as a financial advice show on television," said Douglas Gomery, professor and media economist at the University of Maryland, College Park. "Along with Sesame Street, Wall Street Week was one of the first shows on PBS, a landmark series by anybody's definition. The reason for its success was Louis Rukeyser. He was the franchise - proof that the star system worked even for PBS."

Mr. Rukeyser's ability to translate economics into compelling television talk helped make investors out of millions of Americans: "In essence, what he did was bring Wall Street to Main Street - he made Wall Street understandable in terms of Main Street," said Frank Cappiello, a money manager who appeared as a panelist on Mr. Rukeyser's first PBS telecast in 1970 and his last in 2002, as well as his first and last on CNBC.

"You have to remember when the program started in 1970, we had just been through the Vietnam War and rising inflation, and so much changed financially during that 10-year span from 1970 to 1980. And every week, Lou would be there on TV explaining the changes - from commodities to money market funds - in very simple terms to millions of viewers, many of whom became investors as a result of what they learned from him and the experts he brought in."

A wide-ranging economic expertise only begins to describe the formula that made Mr. Rukeyser one of public television's first major stars - along with Alistair Cooke, host of Masterpiece Theatre, and Sesame Street's Big Bird.

The New York City native, who was dubbed "the dismal science's only sex symbol" by People magazine, was known within the ranks of PBS as "The Big Bird of Prime Time" because of the underwriting support, ratings and viewer pledges that he brought to the fledgling public broadcasting lineup in the 1970s.

In an interview shortly before his own death in August, Baltimore financial analyst Julius Westheimer, who was a recurring panelist on Wall Street Week for 29 years, said Mr. Rukeyser never forgot the audience: "Lou always said that the best educators throughout history were in part entertainers, and he stressed that to those of us who were regulars on the show. He also told us to talk about money, not economics. 'Economics puts people to sleep; money wakes them up,' he used to say."

Mr. Cappiello, who logged more hours than any other panelist in Mr. Rukeyser's Friday-night TV boardroom, attributed his longtime friend's on-screen ability to talk so engagingly about money to the relationship Mr. Rukeyser enjoyed as a boy with his father, Merryle Stanley Rukeyser.

The senior Rukeyser became financial editor of the New York Tribune at the age of 23 and wrote a business column for the International Tribune News Service for more than three decades.

"His father was one of the first real financial journalists in the country," Mr. Cappiello said. "And out of the constant contact with his father - with Lou as a young boy asking his father to explain things - he got the technique, which is very unusual, of explaining how finance works in very simple terms."

Louis Richard Rukeyser was born Jan. 30, 1933, in New York City, the second of four sons of Merryle and Berenice Simon Rukeyser. He was raised in the suburban community of New Rochelle, where he attended public schools and found his vocation at a remarkably early age.

"All I wanted to be when I grew up was a newspaperman," Mr. Rukeyser wrote in personal reference file for The Baltimore Evening Sun. The paper hired him for $55 a week in 1954, the year he graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. "I have been engaged in newspaper work since the age of 11, and getting paid for it since I was 16."

The New Rochelle Standard Star gave Mr. Rukeyser his start in the news business at age 11 by publishing a report he filed about his elementary school. By his sophomore year at New Rochelle High School, he was stringing as a sports reporter for several daily papers in the New York City area. His senior year at Princeton, Mr. Rukeyser was elected president of the Press Club.

He entered the Army for a two-year hitch in West Germany just three months after being hired by The Evening Sun and served as a correspondent for the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, before returning to Baltimore in 1957 and a job as chief political reporter.

After stints in London and India for The Sun, Mr. Rukeyser left the paper in 1965 to join ABC News - first as Paris correspondent and then chief of its London bureau. He returned to the United States in 1968 as chief economics correspondent for the network.

Two years later, when Anne Truax Darlington, a producer at MPT, was casting about for someone to serve as host of a show she was developing on economics and financial management, she thought of Mr. Rukeyser. She knew him from his work at The Sun and remembered seeing him on a BBC interview program in 1966 when she was in London as a Fulbright scholar: "Once I got Louis in my head, I couldn't get him out. Louis knew both economics and TV, and I knew we needed someone with an expertise in both if we were going to succeed," Ms. Darlington said.

Mr. Rukeyser and Ms. Darlington persuaded his bosses at ABC News to let him moonlight at Wall Street Week, but by 1973, "the tail was wagging the dog," as he put it, and he left the network.

Wall Street Week debuted on Nov. 20, 1970, and its impact was immediate, with New York Times TV critic Jack Gould asking in print three days later: "Who would have thought that the financial press would have some rivalry from Channel 67 atop a Maryland hill?"

Wall Street Week's format, which was as ritualized as that of Johnny's Carson's Tonight Show, always began with four or five minutes of remarks from Mr. Rukeyser directly addressed to viewers. It included the latest business news of the day along with the host's commentary and explanation of the market's behavior.

When Mr. Rukeyser, who always wrote his copy at MPT just before the start of the show, was asked whether he ever suffered writer's block, he replied: "I was chief rewrite man for the Baltimore Evening Sun when it had nine editions a day; you learn to get unblocked."

The show's second segment took Mr. Rukeyser across the set to a large conference table that featured the rotating cast of recurring panelists such as Mr. Cappiello and Mr. Westheimer answering questions about money, markets and investing. The host was not shy about challenging their answers.

Additional segments involved Mr. Rukeyser answering letters from viewers, and Mr. Rukeyser and his panelists interviewing influential economists, executives, entrepreneurs and government officials such as Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker, Malcolm Forbes, H. Ross Perot and John Kenneth Galbraith. There were also predictions as to how the market would behave in coming weeks from Mr. Rukeyser's "Elves," a group of technical experts he regularly sounded for their opinions.

Reassurance and comfort were key components of the Rukeyser formula for TV success. On the show that followed "Black Monday" (Oct. 19, 1987, a day when the market lost 508 points), Mr. Rukeyser opened his show by telling viewers, "It's just your money, not your life."

"He was a calming influence," Mr. Cappiello said. "I remember that show after Black Monday. Lou came on and told viewers, 'Remember this: The sun will rise tomorrow, your children love you, and America is still intact.' And that set the tone; it really settled people down."

Mr. Rukeyser extended the brand to a syndicated column, books, lectures, investment conferences and newsletters during the 35 years since Wall Street Week debuted. But no matter the medium, the secret of his success was essentially the same: Like legendary CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, Mr. Rukeyser was one of those rare early TV personalities whom viewers felt they could trust without reservation. For three decades, his loyal PBS audience was one of the most desirable in television.

"His target audience of people looking for investment advice was the perfect audience when it came to fundraising - people with money," said the University of Maryland's Gomery. "And they were loyal, showing up every Friday night to hear him and the insiders he brought to the TV table. For a long time, Rukeyser and public television were a very happy couple."

But as Mr. Rukeyser moved into his late 60s and his audience aged with him, PBS and MPT started to question the very formula that had earned them as much as $5 million a year for three decades. The first hints of a breakup occurred in May 2001, at a meeting in a downtown Baltimore hotel when MPT officials told Mr. Rukeyser that they wanted to reinvent his show in hopes of attracting younger viewers.

The strategy was part of an overall campaign by then-new PBS President Pat Mitchell to shake up signature series such as Masterpiece Theatre, Mystery and Wall Street Week. It was a disaster.

On March 22, 2002, Mr. Rukeyser - who had rejected a diminished role on the show and was to leave when his contract lapsed in June - opened his show by blasting MPT and PBS: "A funny thing happened to me on the way to the studio this week - I got ambushed," he said. MPT fired him two days later.

"They decided unilaterally not to proceed with me as the host of the show I created, wrote and maintained for 32 years," Mr. Rukeyser told The Sun at the time.

Within a month of leaving MPT, Mr. Rukeyser and his weekly program were on cable channel CNBC - and within another month, 160 public television stations were carrying the cable show in defiance of PBS. The CNBC show ran until December 2004, when Mr. Rukeyser asked that it be canceled because of his ill health. (He had not been on the show since October 2003.)

As might be expected, Mr. Rukeyser was one of the public television's wealthiest performers. While he earned more than a million dollars a year during the 1980s and '90s for his work on MPT, he made far more with his newsletters, lectures and investment seminars. The two newsletters he launched in the 1990s on stocks and mutual funds earned $20 million annually.

Mr. Rukeyser lived on 4 acres in Greenwich, Conn., with his wife, Alexandra Gill, a British journalist whom he met while working in London for The Sun. They have three grown daughters.

He enjoyed gambling, wine and fine dining, and traveled the world to sample the best restaurants and casinos.

"The best inflation hedge is living well," Mr. Rukeyser said in a Sun interview. "The government can't tax the psychic benefits, and your Rolls-Royce is bound to appreciate."


Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/obitua ... -headlines
From the Baltimore Sun

[Haydnseek]

May 3, 2006 | New York times
Louis Rukeyser, Television Host, Dies at 73
BY JAMES GRANT

......An eternal bull on the stock market, the more bullish, and less tolerant of dissenting bears he became, the higher the averages climbed. On the program of Nov. 5, 1999, Mr. Rukeyser announced the firing of the veteran panelist Gail Dudak for her 156 consecutive weeks of bearishly errant forecasting.....

This is inaccurate. Dudak was part of a group known as the "Elves" who were polled each week about the direction of the stock market. I think the question was "will the market be higher or lower three months from now?" Ms. Dudak would always vote down and Rukeyser would ask something like "so you think the market will be down three months from now?" She would reply something like "No, I think it will be up but it shouldn't be because stocks are overvalued." This got to be a joke for the audience as the months went by. She just refused to answer the very simple poll question with her true opinion over and over again. Otherwise she was a very good panelist, but I can imagine Rukeyser's growing frustration with her.

[Haydnseek]

Losing Lou
An eternal optimist passes from the scene.

Friday, May 5, 2006 12:01 a.m.

Of all the nice things said about pioneering financial journalist Louis Rukeyser after his death this week, the nicest is the observation that he was "an eternal optimist." When all is said and done, there are few better epitaphs for any man, pointing as it does to a life cheerfully lived--and by all accounts Rukeyser was a true bon vivant, in a suave, Yankee sort of way. What makes him special, though, is that he spread confidence to many millions of others, most famously in his role as host of public television's "Wall Street Week" starting in 1970.

To be sure, during Rukeyser's 32 years on that show, and later on CNBC's "Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street," the optimist label wasn't always meant as a compliment. Critics carped that he was "too bullish," and even fans recall that Rukeyser was fond of teasing or even dismissing experts on his show who he believed were too negative about the markets.

In the long term, however, Rukeyser was right, and not only about the stock market as a generator of wealth over time. More significantly, he had faith in the ability of ordinary folks to play the investing game alongside the pros, albeit with a set of wise rules. He was both a proponent and an exemplar of the rise of the middle-class shareholding society--the "opportunity society," long before it became a political slogan. Many Americans who followed his show were richer for it, whether they took the stock picks of his guests or merely honed their own instincts.

Rukeyser's greatest instinct may have been the one that originally sent him treading into the world of financial journalism on TV, where none had gone before. When Maryland Public Television launched "Wall Street Week," the country was in Vietnam War-induced turmoil, with a noisy counterculture that disdained capitalism and all its trappings. Yet every Friday night, there was democratic-capitalist Rukeyser with his hot-shot panelists and team of oracle elves, reminding everyone who was not smoking pot that a lot of people were making a lot of money on Wall Street, so why shouldn't his viewers sample the fruits of shareholding too?
Not by trying to jump fences, though. The best advice on the show, notably conveyed by Rukeyser and long-time guest Julius Westheimer, was the basic message to pay down debt, save for retirement and not get greedy on a story about some sizzling stock.

Whatever the advice, it came in memorably clear language. Brian Rogers, the chief investment officer of T. Rowe Price in Baltimore, was a frequent panelist on "Wall Street Week" after 1996. "What [Rukeyser] loved to do more than anything else was put market commentary into phrases and terms that people could understand," Mr. Rogers told us. "He'd always catch all of us on our use of buzzwords. . . . One time I was talking about mutual fund cash flows but I referred to them as 'winter flows' and Lou said, 'What? Are we talking about icebergs moving south?'"

What did move south, far and fast, were the ratings for "Wall Street Week" after Maryland Public Television replaced Rukeyser in 2002. Yet he thrived again on CNBC--with many panelists, sponsors and public-television stations in tow--still a standout in a realm now crowded with market-talk shows inspired by his popular appeal.

History has already validated Rukeyser's optimism about the American system, and thus about the ultimate course of the stock market. As Brian Rogers notes, "If you think back over the past 30 years, it was a good time to be bullish." On balance, it always is when you're investing in America, and we will miss having this particular cheerleader for the next 30 years as well.

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008333