A man who did everything

Hugh Downs, who died last July at the age of 99, was something of a Renaissance man. We remember him best for his frequent television appearances. I am old enough to remember when he was Jack Paar's sidekick on Tonight in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Later he hosted the Today Show, appeared on various game shows and a variety of other programs. But he was also an author, a composer, a pilot, a scuba diver, a sailor, a magazine columnist and a special consultant to the United Nations, among many other kinds of activities.

His 1995 book Perspectives gives some idea of the breadth of his interests. The book is a collection of short essays first presented on the ABC radio show Perspective. Not until the acknowledgements at the end of the book does he acknowledge that many of these essays were co-written by his son, H.R. Downs.

Some of these essays are now dated. Others just aren't very interesting, more a recitation of related facts than the expression of an original idea. Yet most of them make amazing, entertaining and informative reading.

He tells of visiting the South Pole and of, in his words, "literally going around the world in twenty-four steps." In another essay he has us imagine the entire solar system as being the size of your thumbnail. In that case, the Milky Way would be the size of the state of Alaska. He writes that clothing is "a kind of advertising," and he says that trousers were invented in Scotland because those kilts can get a bit drafty in the winter. At first men just put a wool sleeve called a trowse on each leg. When eventually sewed together, they became trousers.

He writes about motorcycles (who knew Hugh Downs rode Harleys?), gambling, horses, phobias, left-handedness, dogs, coins, tipping, the free press and other subjects both serious and whimsical. Sometimes he gets personal, as when he tells about appearing on television before he had ever had the chance to watch television.

It was an endlessly fascinating world from Hugh Downs's perspective. A quarter century later his Perspectives remains worthwhile reading.