Sylvester L. Weaver Jr.

No one in the broadcast television industry -- in the U.S. or abroad -- will doubt for an instant that Sylvester (Pat) Weaver has been its foremost creative force. He was born in Los Angeles, California, to Elenor Isabel (Dixon) and Sylvester Laflin Weaver. From commercial television's nascent days at the end of the 1940s, Weaver virtually pioneered the very concepts of morning TV and late-night TV. Aside from those formats, he championed only excellence in television programming. It was by his wisdom that early TV escaped from the captivity of the rules of radio and would soon blossom into the medium that it has become.