LOS ANGELES (AP) — Art Linkletter, who hosted the popular TV shows

People Are Funny and House Party in the 1950s and 1960s, has died. He

was 97.

His son-in-law Art Hershey says Linkletter died Wednesday at his home

in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles.

Art Linkletter’s House Party, one of television’s longest-running

variety shows, debuted on radio in 1944 and was seen on CBS-TV from 1952

to 1969.

“On House Party I would talk to you and bring out the fact that you

had been letting your boss beat you at golf over a period of months as

part of your campaign to get a raise,” Linkletter wrote.

“All the while, without your knowledge, your boss would be sitting a

few feet away listening, and at the appropriate moment, I would bring

you together,” he said. “Now, that’s funny, because the laugh arises out

of a real situation.”

Though the show had many features, the best known was the daily

interviews with schoolchildren.

Linkletter collected sayings from the children into Kids Say The

Darndest Things, and it sold in the millions. The book 70 Years of Best

Sellers 1895-1965 ranked Kids Say the Darndest Things as the 15th top

seller among nonfiction books in that period.

The primetime People Are Funny, which began on radio in 1942 and ran

on TV from 1954 to 1961, emphasised slapstick humor and audience

participation — things like throwing a pie in the face of a contestant

who couldn’t tell his Social Security number in five seconds, or asking

him to go out and cash a check written on the side of a watermelon.

The down-to-earth charm of Linkletter’s broadcast persona seemed to

be mirrored by his private life with his wife of more than a

half-century, Lois. They had five children, whom he wrote about in his

books and called the “Links.”

But in 1969, his 20-year-old daughter, Diane, jumped to her death

from her sixth-floor Hollywood apartment. He blamed her death on LSD

use, but toxicology tests found no LSD in her body after she died.

Still, the tragedy prompted him to become a crusader against drugs. A

son, Robert, died in a car accident in 1980. Another son, Jack

Linkletter, was 70 when he died of lymphoma in 2007.

Art Linkletter got his first taste of broadcasting with a part-time

job while attending San Diego State College in the early 1930s. He

graduated in 1934.

“I was studying to be an English professor,” Linkletter once said.

“But as they say, life is what happens to you while you’re making other

plans.”

He held a series of radio and promotion jobs in California and Texas,

experimenting with audience participation and remote broadcasts, before

forming his own production company in the 1940s and striking it big

with People Are Funny and House Party.

Linkletter was born Arthur Gordon Kelly on July 17, 1912, in Moose

Jaw, Saskatchewan. His unwed mother put him up for adoption when he was a

baby; when he was about 7, he and his adoptive parents moved to the

United States, eventually settling in San Diego.

He recalled his preacher-father forced him to take odd jobs to help

the family. So Linkletter left and became a hobo, hopping trains across

the West, working where he could. He recalled later that he felt the

religious faith instilled by his father had been a great gift.

After leaving daily broadcasting in 1969, Linkletter continued to

write, lecture and appear in television commercials.

Among his other books, were Old Age is Not for Sissies, How To Be a

Supersalesman, Confessions of a Happy Man, Hobo on the Way to Heaven and

his autobiography, I Didn’t Do It Alone.