Sally Jessy Raphael

Sally Lowenthal (born February 25, 1935), better known as Sally Jessy Raphael, is an American retired television talk show host, who is best known for her program Sally (originally called The Sally Jessy Raphael Show).

Lowenthal was born on February 25, 1935, in Easton, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Easton Area High School in Easton. She lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where her father, Jesse Lowenthal, was in the rum exporting business and her mother, Zelda Lowenthal (aka Dede Lowry), ran an art gallery. She has a younger brother, Steven Lowenthal.

During her teenage years in Scarsdale, New York she worked at the local AM radio station, WFAS in White Plains. The station had a program in which Junior High School students had the opportunity to read the news on the air and Raphael was selected to participate. She attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. She graduated from Columbia University in Manhattan. Raphael studied acting under the tutelage of Sanford Meisner at noted Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in Manhattan.

She took her mother's maiden name of Raphael as her professional last name and used the theatrical surname of Jessy from her father's family to use as a distinguishing middle name.

After graduating from Columbia she became a news correspondent covering Central America for both major American news syndicates at that time, Associated Press and United Press International. Raphael has acknowledged that her hiring was in large part due to her Puerto Rican heritage, connections, and fluency in English and Spanish, which includes the ability to easily translate and switch between the two.

She obtained considerable media experience working in Puerto Rico, where she worked in both radio and television. One of her first jobs was hosting a TV cooking show. While working in radio, she met the man who became her second husband, Karl Soderlund, who was the general manager of a radio station there that hired her. After Soderlund lost his job, the two left Puerto Rico to work back on the continent in Miami (with its heavily bi-lingual Hispanic population). While Raphael was on the air as a radio announcer in Miami, she met and became friends with veteran journalist and talk show host Larry King.

Raphael worked for radio stations in both Puerto Rico and the United States, including working as a disc jockey, news reporter, and the host of a show where she interviewed celebrities. In the early 1980s, she was asked to do a call-in advice show on WMCA in Lower Manhattan. In 1989, she played herself on the television series, The Equalizer, in an episode called "Making of a Martyr" interviewing a gun control advocate.

Raphael's husband Karl Soderlund assumed the role of her manager, and was a partner in her two biggest successes. She hosted a radio call-in advice show distributed by NBC Talknet which ran from 1981 to 1987, but she is best known for hosting the television talk show The Sally Jessy Raphael Show (later shortened to Sally), which ran in first-run syndication from October 17, 1983, to May 24, 2002. "Talknet" was brand new when she came to the attention of producer Maurice Tunick. According to David Richards of The Washington Post, Tunick had auditioned a number of potential hosts, but hadn't yet found the right one. Tunick gave Raphael a one-hour trial run on NBC's affiliate, WRC in Washington, D.C. in August 1981. Before going on the air, she decided that rather than doing a political show, she would give advice and discuss subjects she knew a lot about, such as relationship problems. Soon, her advice show was being heard on over 200 radio stations, and she developed a loyal group of fans.