Jerry Springer, 79, the famed host of the popular 1990s talk show “The Jerry Springer Show” and Cincinnati politician, died on April 27, just months after learning he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“He hasn’t been sick for a long time,” Rabbi Sandford Kopnick of The Valley Temple in Cincinnati, told PEOPLE. “He died of cancer, and he didn’t have cancer for very long.”
The Cincinnati mayor-turned-host had one of the longest-running daytime talk shows, with 27 seasons from 1991 to 2018, and at one point its ratings surpassed “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” The Los Angeles Times reported.
CNN reported “The Jerry Springer Show” had more than. 4,000 episode, all of which Springer himself called “silly.”
“I think [the show is] silly, crazy and has no redeeming social value other than an hour of escapism,” he said in 2010. “There is never anything on our show that hasn’t been on the front pages of newspapers in America. The only difference is that the people on my show aren’t famous.”
According to CNN, the host took a liking to being the “grandfather of trash TV,” saying in 2010, “It’s probably accurate. I don’t know what the award for that is, but I think it is true that we were probably one of the first shows to present some of the outrageousness we have.”
Before he was a talk show host, he was an astute Midwestern politician.
“He was very, very smart. He was a remarkable family man, and he was somebody who understood what it means to pay it forward.”
Kopnick said. “He always knew his good fortune. He never took it for granted. When he certainly could have moved on to another congregation after I arrived in this one, not only did he stay, but he did what he could to make it thrive.”
In 1965, Springer graduated from Tulane University and then attended Northwestern University, where he earned a law degree before serving in the United States Army Reserve.
In 1968, he was an aide to 1968 presidential candidate and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who would later be assassinated like his former president and late brother, John F. Kennedy.
Springer would work at a Cincinnati law firm before he announced his bid for Congress in 1970. He was unsuccessful, but was elected to the Cincinnati City Council in 1971.
In 1974, Springer was just a city councilman, but in 1975 he resigned after a political scandal, and that same year he would win his seat back, marking one of the greatest political comebacks in modern politics to this day.
Springer was busted by the FBI for paying for prostitutes with two personal checks between December 1973 and January 1974. He was a newly married man, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
He resign to take care of his personal issues as a private citizen. He ran again for office the following year.
He managed to secure his seat in 1975 with an honest TV ad that addressed the issue head-on.
In 1977, he became the city’s 56th mayor, only serving one term.
“If government, any government, is to have any positive effect on our lives, which after all, is its purpose – to make life more tolerable – then that government must bear some relationship to how we live,” he said in his mayoral inauguration speech.
In 1982, Springer failed in his bid for the Democratic nomination for Ohio governor and took a news anchor position at NBC Cincinnati where he would eventually get the opportunity to host a syndicated talk show, and the rest was history.
“Jerry’s ability to connect with people was at the heart of his success in everything he tried whether that was politics, broadcasting or just joking with people on the street who wanted a photo or a word,” said Jene Galvin, a lifelong friend and spokesman for the family, told USA Today. “He’s irreplaceable and his loss hurts immensely, but memories of his intellect, heart and humor will live on.”
