John Cameron Swayze (April 4, 1906 – August 15, 1995) was an American news commentator and game show panelist during the 1940s and 1950s who later became best known as a product spokesman. Early life Born in Wichita, Kansas, Swayze was the son of a wholesale drug salesman. He attended school in Atchison, Kansas, and at Culver Military Academy before enrolling at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There he was a fraternity brother of the subsequent film and television actor Frank Wilcox He left the university before graduating, opting instead for work in radio. Swayze first sought to work as an actor, but his activity on Broadway ended when acting roles became scarce following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Career Early Years Swayze returned to the Midwest and worked for the Kansas City Journal-Post as a reporter and as radio editor. From the newsroom, he narrated bulletins for broadcast by Kansas City radio station KMBZ via a microphone the station had placed at the newspaper. On September 27, 1933, he also began the radio program Stranger Than Fiction. In addition, Swayze worked in sports, writing about and broadcasting football games, and took part in early experimental television broadcasts. Swayze began working full-time doing news updates for KMBZ in 1940. He broadcast news items prepared by United Press Kansas City bureau overnight editor Walter Cronkite. Network In 1946, Swayze went to Hollywood, where NBC hired him as director of news and special events for its Western Division. NBC transferred Swayze to New York City, where he proposed a radio quiz program he called Who Said That Quote. Some sources claim that the show was first proposed and edited by Fred W. Friendly, later of CBS News, who co-produced it with his first wife, Dorothy Greene. In the series, celebrities tried to determine the speaker of quotations taken from recent news reports. NBC premiered the radio program, re-titled Who Said That?, in October 1948. It subsequently also ran on television, from December 1948 until July 1955. Swayze was a permanent panel member of the show and was referred to as the anchorman in what may be the first usage of this term on television. NBC appointed Swayze the host of its national political convention coverage in 1948, the first commercial coverage ever by television. (NBC Television did broadcast the 1940 Republican National Convention from Philadelphia on a noncommercial, semi-experimental basis,