ED SULLIVAN

Ed Sullivan was a television host from the 1940s to the 1970s. He is best remembered for hosting the long running musical variety television (TV) series "The Ed Sullivan Show" from 1949 to 1971 (everybody who was anybody appeared on his show, including the greatest stars of the time, but he also had an odd fondness for Chinese acrobats, a talking mouse puppet named Topo Gigio, and the world's greatest ventriloquist Senor Wences appeared many times), but for many years before that, he wrote an influential newspaper gossip column called "The Talk of the Town". He memorably played himself in "Bye Bye Birdie". Sullivan passed away in 1974 at the age of 73.