Dick Clark, 1929–2012

Years before he was nicknamed “America’s oldest teenager,” Dick Clark found his boyish looks an obstacle to success. He was fired as a beer pitchman, for instance, because the brewery owner thought he looked too young to drink. But when Philadelphia television station WFIL needed a youthful presenter for its teen dance program Bandstand in the late 1950s, it turned to Clark. “I was 26 years old, looked the part, knew the music,” said Clark, then working at an affiliated radio station. “They said, ‘Do you want it?’ And I said, ‘Oh man, do I want it!’”

Born in Bronxville, N.Y., Clark got his first taste of show business in the mail room of a radio station his father managed, said NPR.org. He worked briefly as a television news announcer in Utica, N.Y., before landing his Philadelphia radio job. A year after becoming the host of Bandstand, he persuaded ABC to syndicate the show nationally, and in 1957, American Bandstand was born.

The program ran for 32 years and introduced American audiences to generations of pop stars—from Ritchie Valens and the Monkees to Madonna and Luther Vandross, said The New York Times. The show “did as much as anyone or anything to advance the influence of teenagers and rock ’n’ roll on American culture.” In the early 1960s, 20 million viewers tuned in every weekday afternoon to watch clean-cut teens dancing to the latest hits and hear the “plugged-in pseudoteen” Clark deliver his catchphrase: “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”

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With his “savvy business eye” and ear for a good tune, said the Los Angeles Times, Clark drifted into “wider music pursuits” as American Bandstand flourished. In 1960 congressional hearings into bribery in the music business, Clark admitted that he had accepted gifts from record companies and had to divest himself of record-pressing and distribution businesses to keep his Bandstand job. He moved into television production, creating the American Music Awards and TV shows such as TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes, The $10,000 Pyramid, and New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, an annual spectacular that began in 1972. Clark missed the 2004 show after a stroke, said The Washington Post. But every year since then, he “continued his signature countdown of the final seconds before the clock struck midnight.”