Robert Lewis Shayon (August 15, 1912 – June 28, 2008) was a writer and producer for WOR and for the CBS Radio in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. He was also a teacher at the Annenberg School for Communication and the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

Biography

He was born in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

on August 15, 1912. His mother died in 1918 when he was 6, and his father, who was an insurance salesman, later married a woman who had her own children. By the late 1920s, he was homeless and sleeping on park benches. He took odd jobs in theaters and occasionally he read poetry on the radio. There he met the Australian opera singer Leah Frances Russell (1891–1983), who became his mentor and benefactor. She introduced him to her daughter, Sheila Russell, whom he later married. They were married for 47 years, until her death in 1983. Shayon died on June 28, 2008, in Frankfort, Kentucky.

Radio programs

*Operation Crossroads (1946) *The Eagle's Brood (1947)

Books authored

*Interaction: television public affairs programming at the community level (1960) *Open to criticism (1971) *The Crowd-catchers; Introducing Television (1973) *Odyssey in Prime Time (2001)

References

Other sources

Oral history interview
with Shayon in the Columbia Center for Oral History Research collection {{DEFAULTSORT:Shayon, Robert Lewis 1912 births 2008 deaths Hollywood blacklist Deaths from pneumonia in Kentucky Homeless people Writers from Brooklyn American radio producers Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania faculty