Allen Ludden

Allen Ellsworth Ludden was an American television personality, emcee and game show host, perhaps best known for having hosted various incarnations of the game show Password between 1961 and 1980.

Allen Ludden, born Allen Packard Ellsworth, was the first child of Elmer Ellsworth, a Nebraska native living in Mineral Point, Wisconsin and working as an ice dealer and his wife Leila M. Allen, a Wisconsin native and housewife. Elmer Ellsworth died the next winter at age 26, a victim of the worldwide Spanish flu epidemic, on January 6, 1919. When Allen was about five years old, Leila Ellsworth married Homer Ludden, Jr., an electrical engineer and the son of H.D. Ludden, the town physician, a Chicago native who had practiced in Mineral Point since 1906. Allen was given his adoptive fathers name and became Allen Ellsworth Ludden. The family lived briefly in the Wisconsin towns of Janesville, Elkhorn, Antigo and Waupaca before moving to Texas when Allen was still a small child.

Source: Wikipedia