Roger Price; Quiz Show Host in Radio, Television

Roger Price, the low-key but zany host and moderator on some of early television’s daffiest quiz shows, has died in North Hollywood.

A spokesman for Price Stern Sloan, the publishing company he helped found in his post-TV years, said he died of respiratory failure in North Hollywood Hospital on Wednesday. He was 72.

An artist, comic and writer, Price had a droll with that was heard on radio and seen on television in the 1940s and ‘50s.

A gag writer for Bob Hope before turning to Broadway revues, he moved into TV with “School House” in 1949, an early variety show hosted by Kenny Delmar.

The simple line drawings he called “droodles,” first published in the early 1950s, became the basis for a quiz show in 1954. He was master of ceremonies and panelists included Marc Connelly, Carl Reiner and Denise Lor, who would try to guess what the strange sketches or “droodles” represented. Home viewers also submitted their own odd renderings, which were worth $100 if they stumped the panel.

Price also was moderator of “How To,” a 1951 radio and TV game show in which panelists were asked to solve such profound puzzles as “How do you stop a leaking faucet?” (“You turn it on,” Price might suggest.)

He was half of Lud and Luster on “The Jimmy Dean Show,” a 1954-55 panelist on “Name’s the Same,” in which contestants had the same name as famous personalities, and a regular on “What Happened” and “Who’s There.”

He was on a weather program for ABC, worked as a commentator for that network during the 1956 presidential campaign and in that same period joined writer-producer Leonard Stern to create the party game “Madlibs,” which sold millions of copies.

He and Stern joined with onetime Hollywood reporter Lawrence Sloan to form a publishing firm that began with joke books.

Today the firm is among the largest trade book publishers in the country.

For the firm, Price wrote “Elephant Jokes” and the “World’s Worst Joke Book” series. Price also brought to the company Dan Greenburg, whose “How to Be a Jewish Mother” became a national best seller.

His other books included “In One Head and Out the Other,” “The Upright Ape” and “The Roob Revolution,” which he dedicated to blundering yokels everywhere.

Bespectacled and balding with an untrimmed mustache wandering beneath his nose, Price considered himself among those rubes, he said in a 1970 interview.

Steve Allen, who used “Madlibs” to warm up audiences on his television shows, said Friday that his admiration for Price began in 1948 when he first saw him performing at a Los Angeles nightclub.

A drunken heckler was “totally lousing up Roger’s low-key but very funny act, “Allen said.

Price stepped from the stage, Allen recalled, and punched him.

Survivors include Price’s son, Roger T. Price III, a daughter, Sandi, and four grandchildren.