Art Linkletter, at 97; affable host of 'People Are Funny'

The death was confirmed by Art Hershey, a son-in-law.

From his early days as an announcer on local radio and a roving broadcaster at state fairs, Mr. Linkletter showed a talent for ingratiating himself with his subjects and getting them to open up, often with hilarious results.

He was particularly adept at putting small children at ease, which he did regularly on a segment of “House Party,’’ a reliably amusing question-and-answer session that provided the material for his best-selling book “Kids Say the Darndest Things!’’

Television critics and intellectuals found the Linkletter persona bland and his popularity unfathomable.

Millions of Americans disagreed. They responded to his wholesome, friendly manner and upbeat appeal. Women, who made up three-quarters of the audience for “House Party,’’ which was broadcast in the afternoon, loved his easy, enthusiastic way with children.

“I know enough about a lot of things to be interesting, but I’m not interested enough in any one thing to be boring,’’ Mr. Linkletter told The New York Post in 1965. “I’m like everybody’s next-door neighbor, only a little bit smarter.’’

He was also genuinely curious to know what was going on in the heads of the people he interviewed. “You have to listen,’’ he said. “A lot of guys can talk.’’

Gordon Arthur Kelly was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Before he was a month old he was abandoned by his parents and adopted by Fulton John and Mary Metzler Linkletter, a middle-age couple whose two children had died. It was not until he was 12, while rummaging through his father’s desk, that he discovered he was adopted.

In his autobiography, “Confessions of a Happy Man,’’ Mr. Linkletter recalled his adoptive father, a one-legged cobbler and itinerant evangelist, as “a strange, uncompromising man whose main interest in life was the Bible.’’ The family prayed and performed on street corners, with Art playing the triangle.

By the time Art was 5 the family had moved to an unpaved adobe section of San Diego. As a child he took on any job he could find. At one point he sorted through lemons left abandoned in piles outside a packing plant, cleaned them, and sold them for 6 cents a dozen.

Mr. Linkletter decided to see the world after he graduated from high school at 16. With $10 in his pocket, he rode freight trains and hitchhiked around the country, working as a meatpacker, a harvester, and a busboy in a roadhouse.

A fast typist, he found work in a Wall Street bank just in time to watch the stock market crash in 1929. He also shipped out to Hawaii and Rio de Janeiro as a merchant seaman.

After returning to California, he entered San Diego State Teachers College with plans to become an English teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1934, but in his last year he was hired to do spot announcements by a local radio station, KGB, a job that led to radio work at the California Pacific International Exposition in San Diego and at similar fairs in Dallas and San Francisco.

In 1936 he married Lois Foerster, a college student in San Diego. The couple had five children: Jack, who followed his father into television and died of lymphoma in 2007; Dawn, of Sedona, Ariz.; Robert, who died in a car accident in 1980; Sharon, of Calabasas, Calif.; and Diane, who committed suicide in 1969, which spurred her father into becoming a crusader against drug use.

With John Guedel, Mr. Linkletter made an audition tape for an audience-participation show, with contests and gags, that would rely on his ability to ad-lib and coax humorous material from virtually anyone. Guedel came up with the name “People Are Funny,’’ and NBC put it on the air in 1942. Enormously popular, it ran on radio until 1960. The television version, which made its debut in 1954, ran until 1961.

Working without a script, Mr. Linkletter sent audience volunteers on silly assignments outside the studio with instructions to report back on their experiences.

On one show Mr. Linkletter spotted a woman’s enormous purse and began rummaging through it, announcing each item in turn: a can opener, a can of snuff, a losing racetrack ticket and a photograph of Herbert Hoover. The handbag bit became a staple of the show.

“House Party,’’ which ran five days a week on radio from 1945 to 1967 and on television from 1952 to 1969, was a looser version of “People Are Funny,’’ with beauty tips and cooking demonstrations filling time between Mr. Linkletter’s audience-chatter sessions.

The highlight of the show was a segment in which five children between the ages of 5 and 10 were interviewed by Mr. Linkletter. After one boy revealed that his father was a policeman who arrested lots of burglars, Mr. Linkletter asked if his mother ever worried about the risks. “Naw, she thinks it’s great,’’ he answered. “He brings home rings and bracelets and jewelry almost every week.’’

Mr. Linkletter assembled replies like that in “Kids Say the Darndest Things!,’’ illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,’’ and its sequel, “Kids Still Say the Darndest Things!’’