Milt Grant, 83, Legendary Sock Hop Host

Milt Grant, who died April 28 at 83, parlayed a stint as disc jockey for Washington’s equivalent of “American Bandstand” into a roller-coaster ride as the head of a dozen independent television stations around the nation.After he made a killing in the mid-1980s building up and then selling a series of UHF stations in Texas, he became overextended with a series of new stations and declared bankruptcy in 1986. His Grant Broadcasting Company owed creditors more than $300 million, a record at the time for a broadcaster, according to some.Yet within three years he had reorganized, and by the time of his death Grant Communications Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., owned eight stations in the South and Midwest, five of them Fox network affiliates.Most of all, Grant was a freebooting programmer who specialized in keeping his finger on the pulse of his audience, from his days spinning top 40 records on Washington’s top radio stations. When he later became station manager of Washington’s WDCA-TV, he scheduled in-studio monkey races as part of the station’s offerings for children, as well as “Scooby-Doo” and the innovative “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” A newcomer to Texas broadcasting in the early 1980s, he managed to secure the broadcast rights to Houston Astros and Rockets games, building KTXH-TV into the top-rated independent station in the city.But the syndication genie Grant helped unleash by, for instance, paying a reported $30,000 an episode of “Gimme a Break” (peanuts today, but a big figure in 1985) came back to burn him after he sold his Texas stations. When he opened new stations in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Miami, they quickly sank under mounting costs for syndicated offerings.Grant grew up in Plainfield, N.J. He said he had served in the O.S.S. during World War II, and after returning from the war studied at Columbia University and New York University. While at school, he was news manager for WNYCTV. He later worked as an announcer and DJ for radio and television stations in Scranton, Pa., and then Washington. As was more common in that era, he often doubled as an ad salesman. In 1956, he started “The Record Hop” — later retitled “The Milt Grant Show” — on WTTG-TV, where it aired each weekday at 5 p.m. and became the station’s top-rated show.“It made me fall in love with television and all its powers,” Grant told the Washington Post in 1990.Among the guests were Chuck Berry, Fabian, and Bobby Darin, and the show became a rallying point among the city’s youth, many of whom danced on the show. Reporter Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame once received a pair of box-toed loafers for winning a dance contest on the show. The house band was the Wraymen, fronted by Link Wray. For one show, at Grant’s urging, Wray improvised his signature guitar tune, “Rumble.” Grant took half the writing credit when it was released on vinyl. “Milt Grant, he smelt a dollar,” Wray told the NPR radio show “Fresh Air” in 2005.In 1961, “The Milt Grant Show” ended soon after WTTG was bought by Metromedia, which replaced it with episodes of “Robin Hood.” Grant went back to radio, then in 1966 put together a syndicate to launch WDCA-TV, Channel 20, an early UHF station. WDCA was a marginal operation — not all sets could receive UHF — and Grant experimented widely with programming. In addition to monkey races, he developed the concept of “counterprogramming”: broadcasting children’s shows when the other stations aired afternoon movies and sitcoms again their evening news. The station struggled, and was sold in 1969. Grant stayed on as station manager.By 1979, the station’s finances had turned around sufficiently that it was sold for a tidy profit to Taft Broadcasting, and Grant moved on to greater success in Texas.Milton GrantBorn May 13, 1923, in New York City; died April 28 at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; survived by his wife, Tommy Jo Grant; his children, Thomas, Shirley, Andrea, and Valerie, four grandchildren, and a sister, Selena Gruber.

Milt Grant, 83, Legendary Sock Hop Host

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