NEW YORK -- Television game showproducer and star Jack Barry died Wednesday while jogging in Central Park, hospital officials said. He was 66.
Barry, who created the popular daytime game show 'The Joker's Wild' and hosted it for the past 12 years, was pronounced dead at Lenox Hill Hospital about 1:20 p.m. The exact cause of death was not immediately released, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Barry and his wife had just returned from a European vacation to visit their daughter, Barbara, in Spain, said Gene Shefrin, a spokesman for Barry's production studio.
Barry was jogging in Manhattan's Central Park near 64th Street and Fifth Avenue when he collapsed, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Barry started a broadcasting career in the early 1940s at WTTM in Trenton, N.J., then moved to WOR in New York and became partners with Dan Enright.
As well as creating the 'The Joker's Wild,' Barry and Enright Productions created the longest-running daytime quiz show in network television history: 'Concentration.'
In the late 1960s, Barry was the host and co-producer of the '21' show, the highest rated game show at the time of the so-called quiz show scandals.
Barry's '21,' along with other game shows such as the '$64,000 Question,' was pulled off the air because producers were accused of feeding answers to contestants.
'Because he was at the top, he took the biggest fall and he was out of television for four or five years,' Shefrin said. 'It was a common practice at that time for game show producers to feed questions or answers, or both, to their contestants. It was not illegal at that time, but it is now.'
Legal charges were not lodged against Barry, Shefrin said.
'Because he was in the eye of the storm, it took him until 1972 until he could get back into television, with KTLA (in Los Angeles). That started his comeback, and he climbed back to the top,' Shefrin said.
Barry and Enright also created and produced 'Tic Tac Dough,' the daily NBC series 'Hot Potato' and produced for cable television 'Nipsey Russell's Juvenile Jury.'
Barry created the original radio version of Juvenile Jury in 1946. It aired on NBC-TV in 1947 as NBC's first commercially sponsored show on its East Coast network. The program went national during the 1950s.
Barry and Enright also produced the quiz shows 'Life begins at 80,' 'Winky Dink and You' and 'Dough Re Mi.'
Barry was the owner and operator of Jack Barry Cable TV System in Los Angeles and was a partner in several other municipal cable systems nationwide. He produced several movies including the recently successful 'Private Lessons.'
Barry, who moved to Los Angeles in 1962, is survived by his wife, Patte Preble Barry, and their four children.
Funeral services were not immediately set.
