did more than just help create and then dominate daytime talk. With his signature House Party closing segment "Kids Say the Darndest Things," you can almost say he invented children as an unadulterated source of TV entertainment. Certainly he made that claim, and one would be hard pressed to argue.

Like most of TV's great pioneers, Linkletter got his start in radio, in 1933. He was playing with an early recording device in preparation for one of his shows when his then 5-year-old son Jack came home from his first day of school. In an anecdote he repeated many times, including to CNN's Larry King in 2005, Linkletter says he turned on the device and asked Jack what he thought of school.

"He says, 'I ain't going back.' I said, 'You're not going back? Why?' 'Well,' he says, 'I can't read, I can't write, and they won't let me talk. Why go back?' "

Linkletter played the record on the radio, and a bit was born. "Kids" became part of his new CBS radio show, House Party, in 1944. And it remained in place when the Party joined CBS' daytime TV lineup in 1952, where it aired until 1969.

Look at the clips of those "Kids" segments and you can see how well Linkletter intuitively understood the new medium. He knew, he said, that the children might be more nervous on camera, so he had the set arranged to put them at ease: with them elevated on a stage above him and Linkletter sitting on an edge, so they could speak eye-to-eye.

He owed his success to more than the set, of course. Linkletter was both a good listener and a good leader of conversations — someone who knew when to move the subject along, and someone who was willing to let the other guy, or child, get the laugh.

Though House Party was his longest-running show, it was hardly the only one. Along with the almost equally popular game show People Are Funny, which ran on NBC television from 1954 to '61, there was an ABC nighttime version of House Party called Life With Linkletter (1950-52); The Art Linkletter Show (NBC, 1963) and Art Linkletter's Hollywood Talent Scouts (CBS, 1965-66), among others.

Yet for all his success, a family tragedy sent Linkletter's life and career in a different direction. In 1969, his 20-year-old daughter Diane leapt out of a window to her death, a suicide Linkletter blamed on LSD use. As his shows reached their end, he became a crusader against drug use, lecturing around the world.

He would continue to appear on TV: a series on "positive aging" for PBS; a brief 1988 revival of Kids Say the Darndest Things, where he played second fiddle to Bill Cosby. But the bulk of his TV career was over by the early '70s.

TV, however, was never Linkletter's entire life. He was also an astute businessman, investing in everything from Hula Hoops and an Australian sheep ranch to the beloved board game "The Game of Life." He was politically active through such organizations as USA Next, billed as a conservative answer to the AARP. And he was a successful author, publishing more than 20 books including the best-selling Kids Say the Darndest Things and Old Age is Not for Sissies. And he served as host both at Disneyland's opening ceremony in 1955 and at its 50th anniversary.

Not bad, really, for a man who was abandoned as an infant in the small Canadian town of Moosejaw. There he was adopted by a couple in their 50s: itinerant Baptist preacher John Linkletter and his wife Mary. The family was poor but happy, said Linkletter, who credited his parents for his conservative values and for teaching him to talk to anyone as they traveled. It was a skill that stood him in good stead.

Linkletter married his wife Lois in 1935. They had five children, three of whom Linkletter had to bury: Diane, son Robert, who died in 1980 at 35 in a car accident; and son Jack, who died in 2007 at 70 of lymphoma. He is survived by his wife and two adult children, Dawn and Sharon.