Richard Dawson Dead At 79

Richard Dawson, the man famous for kissing near twenty thousand females on The Family Feud has passed away at age 79. Dawson died Saturday night from complications related to esophageal cancer at Ronald Reagan Memorial hospital. 

Dawson won a daytime Emmy Award in 1978 as best game show host. Tom Shales of The Washington Post called him “the fastest, brightest and most beguilingly caustic interlocutor since the late great Groucho bantered and parried on ‘You Be Your Life.’” The show was so popular it was released as both daytime and syndicated evening versions.

He was known for kissing each woman contestant, and at the time the show bowed out in 1985, executive producer Howard Felsher estimated that Dawson had kissed “somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000.”

[via Washington Post]