Milt Grant; Dance Host, TV Station Entrepreneur

Milt Grant, the host of a wildly popular television dance show in Washington in the 1950s and early '60s, who later found colossal success and failure as an owner of independent TV stations, died April 28 at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 83 and reportedly had cancer.

For someone in the communications business, Mr. Grant was a secretive person who revealed little of his personal life during his few interviews. A woman who answered the telephone at his privately held company in Florida, the Grant Group, would not confirm the nature of Mr. Grant's business, his age or even his death. The company has no Web site.

After getting his start in radio, Mr. Grant made his first splash with his daily dance show, which exposed a generation of Washington teenagers to the emerging force of rock-and-roll.

"Milt Grant was one of the most important pioneers of early rock-and-roll in Washington," said Mark Opsasnick, a cultural historian and the author of "Capitol Rock." "When he started his music show in 1956, there was nothing else like it on the [local] airwaves."

After the program was canceled in 1961, Mr. Grant entered the second phase of his career, founding one of Washington's first independent commercial stations, WDCA-TV (Channel 20), in 1966. He never appeared in front of the camera again.

Mr. Grant first came to Washington, according to a 1988 article in Regardie's magazine, as a Columbia University student recruited to the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II-era forerunner of the CIA. Throughout his life, he regaled business associates with tales of wartime spying exploits in North Africa and Italy. He returned to Columbia after the war, then went into radio as a news director in New York after graduation.

After a stint in Scranton, Pa., Mr. Grant -- who had a deep, classic broadcaster's voice -- returned to Washington in the early 1950s as an announcer with WTOP radio, then became a popular disc jockey with several other radio stations.

Sensing the growing importance of television, he joined WTTG-TV (Channel 5) in 1956 and persuaded the station's management to let him launch a music and dance show, but only if he paid for the airtime himself. For six months, Mr. Grant was on one day a week with the "Milt Grant Record Hop," selling the ads himself.

The show took off -- "just like lighting a match," he once said -- and soon was on seven days a week. Originally broadcast at 5 p.m., the renamed "Milt Grant Show" later moved to 4:30 and was expanded to an hour.

His formula was to gather high school students in a ballroom at the old Raleigh Hotel at 11th and E streets NW and let them dance to the newest tunes. (One oft-featured dancer was Carl Bernstein, who later gained renown as a Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal.)

Each show began with Mr. Grant calling, "Hi, kids!"

"Hi, Milt," they answered.