Background
Grauer was born on June 2, 1908, in Staten Island, New York, the son of Adolph Grauer, a surveyor and civil engineer, and Ida Kunstler Goldberg.
announcer commentator broadcaster
Grauer was born on June 2, 1908, in Staten Island, New York, the son of Adolph Grauer, a surveyor and civil engineer, and Ida Kunstler Goldberg.
In 1925, Grauer's parents, having decided that he needed a more formal education than he was getting as a child actor, enrolled him in Townsend Harris High School in New York City. He went on to the City College of New York, graduating in 1930 with a bachelor's degree in English. He had been drama critic for the college's newspaper and editor-in-chief of its literary magazine.
At age seven, shortly after the family moved to Manhattan, Grauer was plucked from a children's social dancing class by a motion-picture scout to begin a career at the Fort Lee (New Jersey) movie studios, acting with such stars as Madge Evans, Theda Bara, and Pauline Frederick; in 1920 he starred in The Town That Forgot God. By then his career on Broadway had begun. He originated the role of Georgie Bassett in Penrod (1918), a play in which Helen Hayes was the ingenue, and eventually went on to the leading role of Tyltyl in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Bluebird (1923) and a part in the Theatre Guild production of Processional (1925). During World War I, dressed in an army officer's uniform, ten-year-old Grauer toured with a troupe entertaining at various army camps. He sold over $1 million in Liberty Bonds. An ardent bibliophile, Grauer opened a small bookshop and mail-order book business after graduation, but was unsuccessful. For a short time he played juvenile roles on radio, and then, in October 1930, was hired by the National Broadcasting Company as a radio announcer. Grauer's knack for extemporization enabled him to report many major news events over the next three decades, beginning in 1932 with the Los Angeles Olympic games and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case. That same year he became the announcer for the long-running show of the gossip columnist Walter Winchell. In 1933, Grauer reported on the maiden flight of the dirigible Akron. That year his career and his life were nearly cut short. While he was describing a parade on Fifth Avenue in New York City, from a blimp hovering above, a trapdoor opened at his feet; he barely escaped plummeting to his death. The first of his reportorial "scoops" occurred in 1934 when Grauer interviewed the first survivor ashore from the luxury liner Morro Castle, which burned off the New Jersey coast near Asbury Park. Later scoops included NBC-TV's first special event, the opening of the New York World's Fair in 1939, and the first on-the-scene news broadcast of Count Folke Bernadotte's assassination in Israel in 1948. For many years, beginning in 1937, Ben Grauer (as he was known on radio and television) broadcast every presidential inauguration and, from 1944, covered every national Democratic and Republican convention, first on radio and then, in 1948, on television, sharing the microphone and camera with John Cameron Swayze. He remained on the air for sixteen consecutive hours, reporting the results of the 1948 Trumman-Dewey-Wallace presidential contest. During World War II, Grauer expanded on his World War I fund-raising activities, generating $15 million in defense and war savings bonds. In 1945, at war's end, he covered the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, following this with the Paris Conference of Allied Foreign Ministers in 1946. Other broadcasts from overseas included the 1947 solar eclipse in Brazil, the Berlin airlift and the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953, and the 1958 opening of the Brussels World's Fair. He broadcast from United Nations headquarters in New York on the Suez Canal crisis and Hungarian revolt in 1956, the Lebanese rebellion in 1958, and the 1960 meeting of the United Nations Security Council. Grauer reveled in the spontaneity demanded by reporting special events, recognizing and accepting the fact that commentators cannot help being subjective, despite efforts to the contrary. This situation changed somewhat with the advent of television because, as he pointed out in an interview, the picture, not the announcer's choice of words, controlled the presentation. Among his other programs on radio and early television were "Pot of Gold, " "Mr. District Attorney, " "Big Story, " "Citizen's Searchlight, " "Living, " "Atlantic Spotlight" (NBC with the BBC), "Daily Business Trends, " "Newslight, " and "It's a Problem. " His love of books generated an interest in printing as an art strong enough for Grauer to become a recognized master of the hand printing press; for instance, he designed and printed his own Christmas cards. His abiding interest in the archaeology of Central America - an ambition, never fulfilled, was to excavate the site of a Mayan city he had seen while flying over the Guatemalan jungle - made him an ardent voice for the completion of the Pan-American Highway. His article "The Break in the Golden Brooch" (1951) describes the problem and offers his solution. He was also the author of March on Pharaoh (1932) and "How Bernal Diaz's "True History' Was Reborn, " in William Targ, ed. , Bouillabaisse for Bibliophiles (1955) and was editor of NBC News Picture Book of the Year (1967-1969). By the 1960's, Grauer had become Telstar's Spanish commentator and the producer-narrator of "Señor Ben and His Pan-American Highway of Melody, " in addition to his English-language broadcasts. He retired from NBC in 1973 but continued broadcasting a weekly short-wave program, "New York, New York, with Ben Grauer, " over the Voice of America. Grauer died, two days before his sixty-ninth birthday, in New York City.
President of the National Music League; Vice-president and trustee of the Overseas Press Club; secretary of the Academy of TV Arts and Sciences
On September 25, 1954, Grauer married interior designer Melanie Kahane; they had no children.