Mike Wallace signs off

It looks as if Mike Wallace has finally decided to hang up his microphone at age 90. A pretty good source -- son Chris -- has told U.S. News & World Report that his father has decided that triple-bypass surgery coupled with injuries from a fall serious enough to hospitalize him are enough. Mike officially retired from 60 Minutes in 2006 but continued popping up occasionally on the show until his recent health troubles.

If Wallace is really retired -- I can't quite believe it -- then it's the end of what was almost certainly the longest career in the history of television news. A former game-show host and actor (surely you remember ABC's Stand By For Crime, the big hit of 1949, a cop show in which viewers got to phone in their guesses about who committed the murder), Wallace launched his TV journalism career in 1951. All Around The Town was a live interview show on CBS on Saturday nights where Wallace and his wife Buff Cobb bopped around New York chatting with people anyplace from Coney Island to the New York City Ballet. He got tougher on Night-Beat, a half-hour interview show on the old Dumont Network's New York affiliate. And the time he started doing Mike Wallace Interviews on ABC in 1957 (subjects included gangster Mickey Cohen, segregation Arkansas Gov. Orville Faubus, and UFO wingnut Donal Kehoe), the network was billing him as "the Terrible Torquemada of the TV Inquisition," which sounds pretty much like the guy you know from 60 Minutes.

I remember as a little kid listening to him narrate a syndicated half-hour documentary series called Biography (the great-grandpa of the A&E show that eventually spun off into its own cable network) back in 1961. Who could have imagined he wouldn't sign off for another 47 years?