Eugene Shalit was born on March 25, 1926, in New York. He was raised in New Jersey, where his father purchased a drug store. When the younger Shalit was in elementary school, he created the school\u2019s first newspaper, The Spotlight, and bought a fedora so he looked the part, according to his \u201cTODAY\u201d profile. He later wrote his high school newspaper\u2019s humor column.<\/p>\n
He graduated in 1949 from the University of Illinois, where he proved his journalistic bona fides as a sports editor, columnist and humor writer for The Daily Illini. <\/p>\n
He later became a reporter and writer for the Twin Cities\u2019 daily newspaper and filed dispatches on Big Ten sporting events as a freelancer for The Associated Press in Chicago.<\/p>\n
Shalit\u00a0reached\u00a0national fame as an on-air personality for the \u201cTODAY\u201d show, where he interspersed his entertainment coverage with offbeat in-the-field reports and improvisational hijinks on set.<\/p>\n
He said farewell to viewers in 2010. In a tribute, former co-host Meredith Vieira said: \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine not having him here. He is the \u2018TODAY\u2019 show.\u201d<\/p>\n
In more recent years, Shalit largely retreated from the public eye.<\/p>\n
Shalit was married to Nancy Lewis for 28 years, from 1950 until her death in 1978.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eugene Shalit was born on March 25, 1926, in New York. He was raised in New Jersey, where…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":["post-700671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}