It was while doing a story on the "Jeopardy!" game show craze that a certain TV newsman made a crack about his famous lack of fame.
A few months later, the journalist, whose theme song could be "Hey, DON'T Look Me Over," happened to be tuned to the show when, under the rubric "BB," this question flashed on the screen: "He calls himself `20/20's unknown correspondent.""I don't even think I was the $100 question," Bob Brown says now, smiling. "Maybe $80.
"Nobody got it."
After 13 years and 250 stories for ABC's popular "20/20" magazine, the man those "Jeopardy" contestants couldn't name still enjoys something other than celebrity.
Maybe that's because he's a reporter who won't let the camera get in his average-guy face. Maybe because when he picks up the microphone, he puts away the pronoun "I."
"Let the story tell itself," says Brown, who has won five Emmys sticking to that hang-back approach. "Let the viewers find out for themselves."
Thanks to Brown, viewers through the years have found out about "Jeopardy!" and George Burns, bass fishing and symphony conductors, voice mail and a rape offender treatment program, pet shrinks and an autistic savant artist.
Tonight at 9 p.m. (Ch. 4) on "20/20," Brown brings them Steve Martin.
Visiting Martin on the Dallas set of his new film "Leap of Faith" and in his Beverly Hills home, Brown was unfazed that this supremely gifted comedian was, offstage, anything but a laugh riot.
"I had been told that he was not a good interview, because he's shy and reserved and tends to be a little dull sometimes," says Brown. "My reaction was, `Great! I tend to be a little dull. I'm shy and reserved. This guy is my kind of interview.' "
During the segment, Martin comes across as a reflective man who, long after he stopped wearing an arrow through his head, still is mistaken for a wild and crazy guy - even when he's shopping.
"I can say `How much is this item?' and they laugh," he tells Brown in the interview. "And then I have to kind of express that I'm serious."
The moral of Brown's thoughtful report, as it is with many he does: To see something new, just take another look, and I don't mean at me.
A TV newsman since the early 1960s, Brown in the mid-'70s found himself cast in a starring role. But his run as weeknight anchor in Dallas was short-lived after a consultant was brought in to evaluate the station's talent. It turned out that, in a galvanic skin response test, tapes of Brown somehow didn't make viewers throb or sweat.
Nor, most likely, would they today. Welcoming a guest to his Manhattan home one recent afternoon, he is still a fellow from Tulsa, Okla., in sweater and jeans who seems a little surprised to find himself in the 46th-floor suite he and his wife Nancy have just rented.
But as a member of ABC News since 1977, Brown long has held his own in the powerful company of "20/20" co-hosts Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs and a strong team of fellow correspondents.
He does it with restraint, and respect for the power at hand.
"With television, it's all an optical illusion," he says. "The pictures don't really move. So as soon as you present a piece of journalism on television, you're immediately fooling the audience in a basic kind of way.
"You have to know as much about that illusion and how you make it work in the service of journalism as you do about journalism itself."
When each Friday rolls around, Brown is watching "20/20," and if one of his pieces is on, he may be the one who is sweating.
"I don't like to watch myself," he says, unsurprisingly. "I go stone-cold and I start to think, `Why did I put this in?' or `Why did I say that?' But I watch anyway. It's a great learning experience."
His viewers learn, too. No sweat.