Lower Manhattan is much as I remember it from last year’s visit. Unfortunately, check-in at my hotel is, too. As with last year, I’m at the M Social Hotel (the former Millenium Hilton – and that’s not a typo; it was intentionally spelled with one “n”) across from the World Trade Center. This is a neat hotel and you can’t beat the rates, but getting checked in can be an adventure. The guest lobby is on the third floor. As I get in the elevator, a guy probably in his mid-40s who’s also on the way up says, “How long you been waiting?” I told him I’d just arrived. Turns out he’s been waiting a couple hours to get checked in.

The good news is that this year, the lobby’s not under construction. The bad news is that, like last year, there’s a long line. There’s exactly two clerks working check-in, and there are all kinds of problems: IT issues, rooms not ready, you name it. A lot of people are sitting at tables or on couches waiting for issues to be resolved. At times some of them are vocal about it. There’s a young couple that’s flown in from Turkey, and they’re very unhappy; the female half of the couple marches up to the counter, loudly protesting, almost in tears. Another frustrated guest issues a few four-letter words to one of the clerks about the lack of personnel up front. The guy I was on the elevator with is in front of me, and at times he turns and gives me a sardonic look. I’m tired, of course, and I need something to eat and something to drink, and after about 20 minutes the standing there with my bag’s strap digging into my shoulder gets to me. I start to wonder a little bit if I’m going to be sitting around like some of these other poor souls, waiting and waiting and waiting. Last night’s reading comes back to me. How would Marcus Aurelius handle it? I can’t control the circumstances, but I can control how I feel about it and I can control my response to it, and no matter what happens, this moment will pass. Float with it. 

As it happens, after a half-hour’s wait, I’m up at the counter checking in, and it all goes well. Not only did the “why not?” upgrade offer I took a chance on pay off (to what the clerk promises is a great room), but the clerk throws in a drink voucher to thank me for my patience, and she calls me “dear” three or four times throughout the transaction. (I get the impression she’s very thankful I’m not yelling at her. I feel for her and the other staffers who are having to deal with a mess that likely stems from management issues.)

With happy relief I go to the elevator. The room number starts with 30. The last button on this elevator’s panel is 30. “Top of the house, Ma!” I chortle as the elevator zooms up, Willy Wonka-style. Then up on 30 and to the end of the hall, and I open the door…and have my breath taken away by a corner suite. The sitting room looks north, with views toward City Hall and the Woolworth Building. The bathroom is between the sitting room and the bedroom around the corner. On one side, the view north is toward Midtown. The view west is toward the World Trade Center. I’m overwhelmed. I’m just some kid just up from the country, grew up in a tiny rural town, and here I am with an amazing corner room on a high floor of a fancy hotel in lower Manhattan. It’s too good, too much. I’m too happy.

None of that, however, is going to make up for more urgent needs. I walk a couple blocks up to Walgreens for some provisions, then head back. Before going back to the hotel for the night, there was one more thing. Last year, I visited the World Trade Center memorial and found some names that were significant to me, in particular the flight crews of American 11 and United 175. I’d been haunted, however, that I’d forgotten to find Father Mychal Judge at the memorial. This time, I didn’t leave until I did.

Back in the room for the night, I got cleaned up, scarfed down some food, caught up on things (including the outcome of the Preakness, whose victor made me think of Robert Vaughn), and took lots of photos from up on high. But I also knew I had an early report time next morning, so I didn’t stay up too late. Somehow I eked out about four hours of rest.

Then the day dawned. I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful it would look: the orange glow over the horizon out one window; through another, warm light reflecting off One World Trade Center’s curtain of glass. This huge city, and yet this moment of quiet beauty and wonder. What a blessing to see this, to have this moment.

I didn’t want it to end. But a day was waiting on me. One last check of everything, one more elevator ride. Out in the lobby is the hotel’s flag from September 11, 2001, now preserved behind glass. (Last year I wrote about this hotel’s association with that awful day and how it’s haunted me.)

Then out the door, up to the subway station and Houston Street, then over to Varick and 7 Hudson Square. Into the lobby and the security desk. Why is it every time I check in at ABC, I get nervous and own-goal myself? All set, I wait for my friend Dennis to meet me in the lobby.

It doesn’t take long, and Dennis brings me up to the multi-purpose room where the editing and other magic happens. There’s my friend Gary, who’s happy to see me again. The next four hours or so are a blur, as Dennis does updates and fixes for Good Morning America while Gary manages things, and I observe all of this while devouring one of the delicious cranberry muffins that’s been brought in for our enjoyment. (The guys don’t know this, but what keeps me coming back are these muffins.) They practice their trade the way skilled, experienced hands do them: what seems intricate to the layperson is quickly dispatched with quiet precision, then it’s on to the next task.

Fortunately, there’s not a whole lot to fix today (and when I have a chance to help clarify where a fix was needed, I get this little thrill! Yes! I got to help out in big-time teevee!), and that leaves plenty of time to talk shop. At points visitors drop by, including the weekend executive producer. At another point, we visit the control room to take care of an errand. This, really, has become why I like to visit: the people, all of whom are very kind and welcoming to an interested outsider who works on the fringes of this business. Last year, and in 2024 at the old ABC campus on 66th, so much of why I was there was to see the place and go everywhere we could. Now, it’s different. As much as I like looking around, I’ve seen it. I’m here because Dennis and Gary are my friends and I don’t get to see them enough. And, as I tell Gary, I keep coming back because I learn stuff (including, this time, such valuable life skills as who to channel when leading a labor negotiation). I can then take that back and use it for what I do with the students. It’s an ongoing education, and it’s always worth the effort to get here. 

The morning passes quickly and we have a lunch date to keep, so Dennis and I head out and catch the subway up to Lincoln Center, then cross over to 66th. Two years ago, this was where my first visit to ABC took place. There was a tall office tower in the middle of ABC’s campus. Now, almost everything is gone. There’s about eight stories left of the office tower, and even that’s not long for the world. The site is surrounded by plywood sheets with diamond-shaped Plexiglas windows, but there’s not much to see; just rubble. I see a strangely intact brick and wish I could levitate it over the fence as a souvenir. Dennis takes several photos over the fence and from the opposite side of the street, while I amble down the sidewalk and try to peer between the gaps. In what had been the office tower’s lobby, I see shattered windows and what’s left of an escalator. It’s sad to think that two years ago this place was alive, functional, busy. Now it’s a wreck, and soon what’s left will be hauled away. The old, landmarked portion that once housed Durland’s Riding Academy remains, and I hope it’ll find new purpose, but everything else is gone. Soon the only reminder that anything television happened here will be the street sign reading “Peter Jennings Way.” 

As I wander along, I see an older couple, obviously tourists, looking through the fence and trying to piece together the scene. I don’t ask where they’re from, but their accent sounds kind of German. They see me and ask what was going on here. I tell them that this is where the ABC Television Network used to be. We strike up a brief conversation and they ask me where I’m from. I’m up from South Carolina, I tell them. They start telling me about the places down my way they’ve been, most of them in the Lowcountry. I’m in full Southern charm mode by this point, nodding and smiling and laughing a little. The man goes on in a little bit of detail, gets hung up on remembering where this one place was, and then the wife says in this weary way, “Do you think she really wants to hear all this?” The interplay between them is a hoot. We wish each other well and part ways, I catch up with Dennis, and then it’s off to our lunch date at P.J. Clarke’s. As we’re walking along we’re alongside a family group with a couple pre-teen kids who are trying to top one another with gross-out bodily function humor of the sort pre-teens will do. The mother suggests something that’s kind of a tongue-twister. It’s all I can do to not suggest the “cottonpickin’ finger-lickin’ chicken plucker” routine. Instead, I kind of laugh to myself at a scene that’ll never play out.

There’s a table waiting at P.J. Clarke’s, and already there is our friend Gady. With him is his lifelong friend Joel, whom I met last year when I was up to visit Gady. I knew we were going to meet up with Gady, but I didn’t expect Joel, so that’s very much a treat. They’ve got a lot of stories to tell, since Gady worked at CBS for more than five decades and Joel worked at NBC for a long, long time. A little bit later, Gary joins us. The next hour and a half are a fun blur of stories and history and remembrances of folks from back when, and laughter and the enjoyment of sharing good company over a good meal. I try to take the scene in as best I can, knowing how rare a treat this is, that back home this kind of thing doesn’t happen. Memento mori. 

Regrettably, the time comes. There’s a train leaving Penn Station at a quarter after 3, and my name’s on a ticket for it. There’s handshakes and hugs, a request from Joel to come back soon, and I head off to begin the long journey home. As I wait at the subway station, it’s oddly still. Fifteen minutes ago, there was fun and there were friends. Now I’m alone, and it’s too quiet. My heart is full of love for the guys I was just with, and I ache for having left them; yet I also know there are folks (and critters) back home who need me. It’s an exquisite agony, the simultaneous joy and ache of having people you care about in so many far-apart places, knowing you’re blessed to have them but knowing that blessing comes with an ache, and for a moment I’m verklempt. But soon the train is here, and I’m quickly at Penn Station. There’s a picket line of striking Long Island Railroad workers outside the entrance. Then past the Garden and into Moynihan Train Hall, where I stop in the Walgreens and get a couple supplies for the trip, and then wait for the boarding call.

Soon enough, down we go to the track. This time, it’s a regular train back to Baltimore instead of an Acela, but I’m in no hurry; the nice thing about the trip from here on out is that I have no deadlines to meet. The three hours pass without anything of note, and it’s back to the BWI station. I get Supercar out of hock, program the moving map, and follow the directions south. I’m very deliberately making the transit past the District of Columbia on a Sunday evening, hoping the traffic will be a little less, and the transit east of town works well. Where things do back up is in northern Virginia, and there’s a lot of stop-go-stop for at least 45 minutes. Once we’re past Quantico, things open up and I make Thornburg in good time. 

All was going well…or so I thought. The directions in the moving map were supposed to take me to a Holiday Inn Express. Instead, they take me to a little shopping center in the corner of a Food Lion parking lot. I’m rather perplexed by this, and for a moment wonder if the hotel actually exists. I pull over into a parking space to sort things through and find out that, yep, I’ve been pranked by a whopper of a map issue. (Cue Lewis Grizzard saying “We been ho-axed!”) I figure out where the hotel is, set course, and inside about five minutes I’m there. It isn’t the most inspiring location; there’s at least two semi trucks parked in the small lot, and there’s a lot of clientele between this hotel and the adjacent hotel, but it’ll do. I finally find a place to park, get my bags and stuff, and check in. It takes a couple minutes to get a clerk, and when I do get my room, it’s on the first floor…right next to the breakfast lounge. I can hear the television from the lobby through the wall. At least it’s a short hike, though, and for my purposes this room will be fine. I get cleaned up, eat something, catch up on computer chores, and turn in.

The next morning I’m up bright and early, ready for the rest of the journey home at my own pace. I refuel the car and set out, taking the bypass around Richmond, and then into North Carolina. There’s a brief stop in Fayetteville to visit a hobby shop I hadn’t visited in about a decade, and then on toward South Carolina, resisting the urge to travel east to Kinston and commune, at least in spirit, with Vivian Howard. I content myself with a wave as I fly past on 95.

At the state line, there’s the now-obligatory stop at South of the Border (and by this point in the drive, obligatory because I need a restroom stop), and I amble around one of the shops for a little bit, soaking in the ambience of a bygone roadside era I knew way back when, and buying a couple suitably tacky souvenirs. After that, it’s back on 95, then to 20, and then the first signs of Columbia start to materialize. Then north on 77, a stop for fuel, and then my giant circle closes as I take an exit toward Winnsboro and the last miles home, and the folks and the critters who are glad to have me back. 

Although there’s been some changes in recent years, you still don’t see as many gimmicks as you would in other golf broadcasts. It’s still kind of a throwback. In the opening montages, you don’t see these tough-guy hero shots of golfers backed by edgy music; you’re much more likely to see gauzy beauty shots of the tree-lined road to the clubhouse, of Amen Corner, of the stone bridge at 13 over the tributary of Rae’s Creek. Even the commercials are lower-voltage corporate image spots instead of attitude-driven, in-your-face hard sells. All in all, the final round is a soothing broadcast to have on in the background, and it’s also the last surviving example of a kind of broadcast I grew up with. It’s what sports broadcasting used to be, before we traded in our Vin Scullys and Jack Whitakers for sportscasters whose main selling points were attitude and volume. Yes, it could seem stodgy and stuffy, more than a whiff of “don’t upset Grandpa,” but there was a dignity to how they handled their duties, a dignity that’s missing in so much in modern media, let alone modern life.

This year, the tournament takes place against what’s been going on at CBS in general. As it’s been impossible to ignore, what’s left of CBS has been swallowed up by yet another conglomerate that’s making deep cuts. CBS Radio News will soon be no more. The Broadcast Center, I’ve heard from reliable sources, seems more and more like a ghost town. Television City and Black Rock were sold off a while back. As sad as it is to see play out, CBS has been little more than a brand in a portfolio for a long time. The network that Mr. Paley and Dr. Stanton brought to greatness really started to ebb in the mid-1980s, a victim of changing times and changing philosophies in the business and financial realms, and downhill has rolled the snowball since. It’s a longer story than I care to write here, and the story has been told many times over by now, anyway. 

Yet there are times, like this weekend, when I think about what’s now a lost world. Really, not just for CBS, but for the broadcast industry in general, and the audience as well. The changes in television, the booming music and flashy graphics, the explosion of options, shorter attention spans, the constant need to monetize everything…it’s rare when a broadcast is allowed to be the pleasant company you enjoy on a lazy weekend afternoon.

All of this came back to mind, not only because of today’s broadcast, but because I recently watched again this clip I first stumbled across about 15 years ago. It uncorked a lot of memories (and if you read the comments on the original YouTube page, you’ll see I’m not alone):

That’s the end of the 1983 Talladega 500, which CBS aired on July 31, 1983. So many things come back from my memories: Don Robertson’s voice announcing the billboards, the lengthy credit roll over still-store images, the peerless voice of Ken Squier, and the way CBS would end these kinds of big broadcasts with wistful music. (In this case, it was “Rising Star,” the love theme from the movie The Electric Horseman. CBS used cuts from that soundtrack for several years on its NASCAR broadcasts, including the main theme under the starting grid. CBS Sports liked using soundtrack cuts, such as Chuck Mangione’s “Children of Sanchez” for some big events, or Lalo Schifrin’s theme to St. Ives for golf tournaments. But, I digress.)

Now even that seems like a thousand years ago, even though it’s only been four decades. And so many of the people in that credit roll from Talladega are no longer with us. So many folks in that recruiting video are also gone now. But, really, all of it’s a lost world. The voice of Don Robertson speaking for Pontiac and Sears? Pontiac’s gone now, and the once-mighty Sears is all but dead, victim of modern corporate techniques. Don Robertson died a few years ago. So did Ken Squier. 

But there’s something else. That long closing credit roll gives what’s due to a lot of hard-working people who made possible that telecast you’d just watched. They were the people that made all that hard work and coordination happen, and made it look so effortless. Many of them had been at the network for decades, built lives and careers around CBS, and represented so much institutional and technical knowledge that would be impossible to replace. You can get an idea of what that world was like if you watch this video, which CBS produced in the 1980s while seeking the next generation of technicians and other broadcast specialists. (And happy coincidence: you can tell that much of the location footage was taken while CBS was setting up to cover a race at Talladega.)

For some people, that tape is an interesting artifact. For me, though, it has an emotional punch. Not just in what I remember from that era, and not just nostalgia for a time I missed. It’s because it makes me think of people I know. One of my friends is a CBS retiree; he worked there for more than 50 years. His wife also used to work at CBS. Last year I went up and spent the day with him. He told me stories, shared artifacts, showed me clips that he worked on and told me the stories behind them. Those stories told of teamwork, of craftsmanship, of a pride he still felt in the work he did. It was a privilege to hear those stories firsthand. And it made me a little sad that I missed it all. To this day I can hear the voices of CBS announcers that I remember, see little visual cues or characteristic qualities in a promo, and it takes me back, makes me smile…and makes me ache, even more so since some of the people who helped make that history are my friends. It makes me ache for an era that’s long gone, but it also makes me ache because the people who made all that happen are fewer with the years…and with them go so much history, so many memories, so many stories. And it makes me realize I need to get back and spend more time with my friend and his wife while I can, not just because I love the stories, but because they’re sweet people of whom I am very fond.

Progress is inevitable, I know. The strange new media landscape makes so much more possible. (Heck, I’m the beneficiary of that, since it means I’m now executive producer of a program we produce at work. And I assemble that program on a ridiculously small and ridiculously powerful laptop computer, running an editing package that cost me nothing to download, and yet can do in a second the kinds of effects my CBS retiree friend would spend untold hours doing in sessions at Broadway Video back in the day.) The networks that dominated television 50 years ago are now competing for eyeballs and clicks with hundreds of other outlets. It says everything when NBC’s centenary is coming up and it’s barely registering, let alone that its anniversary promo would make you think most of the network’s history took place after 1984 (blink and you’ll miss Dave Garroway). And I’ve found out the hard way that modern corporations really aren’t interested in legacy or tradition unless it can somehow be monetized. 

And yet, this one Sunday a year when, by decree of the venue, a sports broadcast is allowed to breathe…it makes me think of what we once had, what we once took for granted, and what’s vanished.

My parents implored Santa to do something about it, and the following Christmas I got a portable cassette recorder.

Over the years to come, I would make many tapes on that machine and the several that would follow when they inevitably broke. But the very first tape I made with that first tape recorder it is an interesting artifact. On Side A, there’s a few moments from Christmas morning: me goofing around and Dad’s voice commanding me to bring something to him; me giving a couple of inventories of my haul from Santa. Then there’s an extended cut from the next day, when Dad thought it would be hilarious if we secretly recorded Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ house, and so we conspired to hide the tape recorder on a nearby shelf. In the moment, it was funny, for we played it back about an hour later to our astonished family (at one point my grandmother, hearing herself say something kind of harsh, did a spit-take worthy of Danny Thomas). Now, with half the people at that table now dead, it’s a precious artifact. It’s the only recording I have of my great-grandfather’s voice.

Side B, though, has a time capsule of a different sort. After I got home from Sunday school, I turned on the hand-me-down cabinet-model stereo in my room (which didn’t have a cassette deck, alas), placed the tape recorder next to the speakers, and recorded the last 45 minutes or so of that week’s “American Country Countdown.” That’s interesting in a lot of ways. In the previous installment I talked about country music being what I grew up with, so the eleven songs that led the week’s chart are a good idea of what the typical week in my fourth-grade life would have sounded like.

For the uninitiated, “American Country Countdown” was the country music version of “American Top 40.” Like AT40, it most often aired on weekends. It was hosted by the super-cool Bob Kingsley, who had one of the best radio voices I’ve ever heard (seriously, listen to some of this for a little bit and I dare you to not keep listening), and who was so good at telling you the little stories that gave you a glimpse into the artists and their hit songs. As the best DJs could, back when radio was an art form, Bob had this way of making you feel like you were a couple friends spending a few hours together on a weekend morning. (I came to appreciate this even more about a decade later, for one of my responsibilities working Sunday mornings at the radio station was playing “American Country Countdown.” By then it arrived at the station as a package of four CDs. Each segment within an hour was a separate track, and I’d pause the CD player after each track to do our local breaks. At the start of 1993, our program director figured out how to integrate the “Countdown” discs into our automation, and that was the beginning of the end of my young radio career. But, I digress.)

I wish I could say my recording was perfect, but it’s far from it. (I keep hoping the complete show will surface someday, either through one of the video/audio sites or that I’ll happen across the LPs on an auction site; regardless, if anyone reading this has the whole program, please let me know, for I’m interested.) It’s straight off the speaker, and that means you get background noise. My folks were wanting me to get finished so we could go over to my grandparents’ house for lunch (where Dad and I pulled our prank). You can hear me opening and closing the door to my room, and my voice calling out to my folks, trying to buy time. (I was a completist, even then.) At one point you can hear me trying to sing along to the David Frizzell song. On the other hand, I had the foresight (or laziness?) to keep the commercials and IDs intact, and those speak not only of a bygone era in radio production but also of local businesses that are gone with the wind.

But, what are we waiting for, right? Let’s get into the songs that led Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart for the week of December 18, 1982. (The full rundown is visible here, if you like. There’s some stuff on there that’s pure gold, and some stuff that didn’t age well, but that’s the nature of time capsules, no?)

Up five notches (as Kingsley would say) to number 11 is Johnny Lee and Friends, with an enhanced version of “Cherokee Fiddle.” For some reason, I loved this song a lot as a kid, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the chance to capture it on tape was the reason I wanted to record this program. One of Johnny’s friends on this version is reportedly Charlie Daniels. Say what you will about Charlie (and I have about his later years), but the man was a musical genius, and without peer on the fiddle.

At number 10, up three notches this week, is Rosanne Cash with “I Wonder.” It’s…well, only vaguely country music (to borrow a line from William Poundstone, curved lines and considerable imagination must be used). It’s closer to “Linda Ronstadt with Nelson Riddle” than “Loretta Lynn with Conway Twitty.” On the other hand, it’s Rosanne freakin’ Cash, who is awesome and is welcome to do whatever she wants.

Number nine is one of the first George Strait songs I remember, that’s now a deep cut. “Marina Del Rey,” up two notches this week, has George pining over a beach weekend he’s just spent with a mysterious lady. It’s lovely, evocative, haunting. George Strait knows how to select good songs and interpret them just right; in this one, you feel both ecstasy and ache. I can’t think of a bad George Strait song, but without question this is one of his best.

Bob leads into this week’s number eight song (up one from last week) by mentioning that David Frizzell (brother of Lefty) plays a bit part in the new Clint Eastwood movie Honkytonk Man. (As did several other real-life country artists, including beloved Marty Robbins in a scene made even more poignant by the fact that Marty died one week before the movie’s release.) It wasn’t David Frizzell’s first go-around with Eastwood, for he had contributed to the soundtrack for Any Which Way You Can. Clint helped make Frizzell’s first solo album a reality, and it’s from that album that we get “Lost My Baby Blues.” Frizzell’s voice was perfect for songs about getting drunk after getting dumped. (The same album also gave us the immortal “I’m Gonna Hire A Wino To Decorate Our Home,” without question the greatest song title in history. Young me missed the point of the song, loved the over-the-top mental imagery, and bought the single.)

Continuing that theme is Merle Haggard, whose “Going Where The Lonely Go” advances five positions this week. It’s a typical solid song from Merle Haggard in the early ’80s. He was reliable, one of the human gods on the country music Olympus of my childhood. Like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and George Jones, Merle Haggard had just always been there, reliable as my dad’s Chevy truck.

Reba McEntire, some time before she became a Southern-fried queen of all media, is up four notches with “Can’t Even Get The Blues.” Even in this early track you get a glimpse of the exasperated Southern-fried sass that would become her trademark.

Hank Williams Jr. gets topical with this week’s fifth-place song, “The American Dream.” Bocephus takes on professional athletes signing million-dollar contracts (one wonders if Nolan Ryan’s ears were burning), well-dressed televangelists mooching for donations (“they want you to send your money to the Lord, but they give you their address”), and Democrats complaining about Reagan’s budget cuts, all while the rest of us are making hard choices about what we can afford. Hank was a few years away from fully embracing the outsized Bocephus character of “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight,” but for those who knew his albums’ deeper cuts, nothing to come stylistically or politically was really that much of a surprise. The post-chorus bridge incorporates the first line of “Hail to the Chief,” which is reprised at the end with Hank saying “Hail to the chief.” (The version we get here ends with that, but another version has Hank pausing for a moment before laughing and saying “Hail, yes. Heh-heh-heh!”)

My brother, then in his mid-teens, was becoming a full-blown Hank Jr. fan about this time; the macho Southern outdoorsman aesthetic of Hank’s music really resonated with him, and a few months later Mom took him to see Bocephus when he performed at the (now-demolished) Greenwood Civic Center. He also had all of Hank’s albums, and when he would do the driving he’d play Hank’s cassettes, and I thus got exposed to a lot of his late ’70s and early to mid-’80s work. Some of it is cartoonish, some of it has not aged well at all, some of it is outright gross (seriously, “Fat Friends” should never have existed), some of it goes places you wish it hadn’t, but if you know where to look there’s some really nice, sensitive and sometimes outright gorgeous stuff in there.

Kenny Rogers was white-hot in the early ’80s and it seemed like everything he touched turned into a best-seller. In his lead-in, Bob mentions that Rogers attributes much of his success to having an ear for good songs that he knows will become hits. That continues this week, as “A Love Song,” written by Lee Greenwood, is up four. Mom didn’t like Kenny Rogers and thought he acted like a conceited showboat, but even as a kid I could appreciate that he was a reliable hitmaker with mass appeal, and even if I wasn’t necessarily a fan I couldn’t deny that some of his stuff was just plain good. (“Love Will Turn You Around,” which he had taken to #1 earlier in the year and was used as the theme to Six Pack, may be slickly-produced, but…my word, that groove. It’s a particular favorite.)

Number three this week is John Anderson, up three on the charts with “Wild and Blue.” Lots of fiddle, lots of steel guitar, lots of John’s twangy, yodeling voice encompassing the ache and frustration at the song’s heart. It’s a great version of a great song, but within about three months it’s going to be lost in the super-colossal shadow of a breakout hit from the same album.

Aw, son. Jerry Reed’s up two this week as “The Bird,” one of his reliable comedic turns, moves into second place. Reed leaned so much into his goofy comic persona with his songs and on-screen appearances, but, my word, the man was an outright genius with a guitar.

Bob leads in to this week’s number one song by telling us that for his hit songs, Earl Thomas Conley – who, from Bob’s description, sounds like kind of an introvert – gets inspiration from things that he’s learned in his life. Each song is, in a way, Conley saying “Well, if you liked that, here’s another side of me.” It’s something that Conley expects will be happening the rest of his life. With that, up one notch to take this week’s title is “Somewhere Between Right and Wrong.” And wherever that may be, this song makes it sound like a rockin’ good time.

And after the fade-out and Bob’s closing remarks, my efforts to stall for time with my parents gave out and the recording abruptly ends.

Many more tapes were to come in the months and years ahead. I have many of them, and sometimes I’ll listen to them. The sound isn’t the greatest, but the memories are vivid. I’d never dare let anyone else listen to them, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything. It doesn’t seem like it really was that long ago, and it’s strange how these sounds can bridge the decades I’ve lived, and yet some of the things I captured – like these eleven songs – make me glad I got to experience the times I’ve lived.

A few years ago I transferred all the tapes I could to DVD. From time to time, I’ll pull a disc from the archives, go through it, get some screen captures and make some snarky observations. And for this first installment, why not go back to the very first tape to go through the machine? Over the years it got re-used a lot, so there’s no through-line to what we’ll find, but it’s an interesting crazy quilt to look through. So, here we go.

There’s a somewhat muddy report from Nightline, reported by Ken Kashiwahara, about assault weapons. I got this screengrab for the vintage WLOS-TV ident, obviously.

Then a report from the CBS Evening News about Clint Eastwood’s run for mayor of Carmel-By-The-Sea.

And then some of the Dec. 15, 1984 Saturday Night Live, hosted by Eddie Murphy. He gives his thoughts about the dolls and action figures available at Christmas…

…and there’s also a favorite sketch, in which Bishop Desmond Tutu and Doug Flutie are guests on the same talk show. Tutu accidentally breaks Flutie’s Heisman Trophy and tries to repair it, and it…doesn’t go well. It’s a hoot.

A vintage ID for WYFF-TV! The “arrow” 4 and the Proud N, all vintage goodness, along with a promo for the syndicated version of Happy Days.

Sundays used to mean the fishing programs. You could watch the larger-than-life Roland Martin on another channel, or wait around until 12:30 for Championship Fishing With Virgil Ward on Channel 7. (“From the lakes of northern Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico….”) But my brother the outdoorsman was a big fan of Bill Dance, whose low-key demeanor hid a goofy sense of humor.

I loved this commercial. It made the Daiwa MagForce reel seem like the coolest thing ever. My brother ended up buying one, likely because of seeing this ad so often.

Why is Bill Dance showing us all this airline-supplied footage of a Delta 727?

Why, it’s because his special celebrity guest this week is the Lovable Lush himself, Foster Brooks! And they’re going fishing together. Bill picks him up at the Memphis airport. It sure looked different in 1985 compared to how it looked when I was there in 1998, when it was a huge hub for Northwest Airlines. (And since its de-hubbing after the Delta merger, it’s been modified yet again.)

But not all is fun and games at WYFF-TV. One Sunday night in 1985, a fire broke out in the station building. While they were able to stay on the air, their ability to originate local programming took a hit. The next day, the noon news originated from the front yard.

A glimpse of the damage inside gives you an idea of what they were up against.

Fortunately, some other stations in the market pitched in to help keep them going.

General Manager Doug Smith joins Kenn Sparks at a somewhat worn anchor desk to give an update on how the station is doing. It’s awkward when you are your own top story.

Lunch is delivered while the program’s on the air, much to Kenn’s bemusement. At one point he jokes that they considered calling the noon newscast Brunch With Kenn. Kenn Sparks was a cool cat as it was, and is at the top of my list of best local newscasters ever, but it’s impossible to overstate the aplomb with which he handles this most unorthodox newscast. He’s always in command, but can still find ways to roll with the weirdness of the moment. It’s a master class and it’s beautiful to watch.

They’re back inside for the 6 p.m. news (which was handy, as I recall there were storms in the area that evening; at points you can detect weather-related interference on the recording). Carl Clark and Carol Anderson are in an obvious temporary studio. The audio’s not the best. There are lags in rolling the stories. But they’re still going. It’s what you have to do.

This grab from a story about the night before is of interest, not only because it shows the temporary setup they were operating from, but because of one very vivid memory I have. That Sunday night, we had my grandparents over to watch a movie with us. I seem to recall it was Hang ‘Em High. The television set didn’t have a remote control, and in those days, the youngest child was the remote control. I followed my father’s commands to rewind the movie and find something on television. When I punched the button for Channel 4, the picture was…weird. It was the familiar “arrow 4” and call letters, but at a weird angle and with strange lighting, and the sound of equipment running in the background. It was the scene captured by that TK-760 you see above, aimed at the logo on the van at top right. It startled me. We didn’t find out until later what had happened.

Charlie Gertz! He was one of a kind. He’d been a weather forecaster in the Navy, got into television, was a longtime weatherman for WTOP-TV (and was good buddies with Willard Scott at crosstown rival WRC-TV), and eventually came to Greenville. He had this marvelous deep, froggy voice and a somewhat monotone delivery that local radio hosts loved to parody (seriously, say the word “Saskatchewan” around someone who grew up watching Charlie Gertz). There was an ongoing promotion where you could win an umbrella that had “Charlie Said It Would” printed on it. His forecasts included an aviation forecast, which I thought was awesome. He also owned a local tavern, and one of the running jokes around the region was whether Charlie had a couple before he came to the station. It didn’t matter. He was awesome. I miss him.

The local newscast ends with a report on the landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery earlier that day, on a mission that carried seven crewmembers, including a French scientist and a Saudi prince. (I had no way of knowing that many, many years later I’d get to watch in person as Discovery took to the sky, let alone that I’d someday be up close with that great spaceplane at a big museum in Virginia.) 1985 was a banner year for the Shuttle program, and big things were in the works for the following year. Which leads to the next story, with a lot of well-dressed people on a stage in Washington:

Why are they there?

Looking at that now…oof.

Next is the last few minutes of the M*A*S*H episode “Life Time,” which always captivated me because of the clock in the lower corner. I didn’t fully understand the concept when I was a kid; now, through mature eyes, it’s a brilliant and gripping episode. For whatever reason, our ability to pick up WLOS-TV that night was ratty. It could have been my parents had the antenna turned that night for some reason.

There’s a bonus: Bob Hooper (longtime morning host on WESC radio) in a promo for Bowling For Dollars, which occupied the 7:30 slot until Channel 13 picked up the Wheel Of Fortune/Jeopardy! duo:

From November 1986 – because, remember, this tape got used a lot and I tended to save some segments and record over others – an Hour Magazine interview with Buzz Aldrin. I watch this and I’m struck by several things: Buzz was 56 when he made this appearance, and the Apollo 11 mission had only been 17 years prior to this moment. And now, Buzz turns 95 in a few weeks, while I’m only a handful of years younger now than he was here. eek.

Then there’s the special commemorating the 35th anniversary of Today, which NBC aired on a Saturday night in January 1987. Now Today is about to turn 73. Somebody I met once or twice gave this special a fairly thorough going-over some time ago, so I’ll let that post speak for itself.

And then there’s a few moments from an episode of the brilliant miniseries Fresno, which Carol Burnett and her wonderful group of friends did as a spoof of prime-time soaps. Somewhere there’s a tape on which my mother recorded the whole miniseries. I need to find it.

At the end is a segment of the brief “We The People” series CBS did to commemorate the upcoming bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. This segment features House speaker Tip O’Neill, an icon of the era’s politics, a dealmaker of the sort they don’t make any more.

There’s the tail end of another Bill Dance episode, with this blast from the past: an ad for Jim Walter Homes!

“And we save money by using a character generator typeface we got secondhand from CBS!” (If you know, you know.)

A very, very brief glimpse of an ad for Pale Rider, which was Clint Eastwood’s return to the Western genre. (Here’s the whole thing. I thought it was a cool ad, and I loved the music.)

An ad for Sherwood Chevrolet featuring the once-ubiquitous Dave Campo, whose out-loud style stormed onto our region’s screens in early 1984. (This will give you an idea of what he was like.) You loved him or hated him. I was fascinated with him.

One of the treats of summer vacation was getting to stay up late and watch Johnny Carson. It was a special treat when I could watch on the big color television in the den. One night I captured Johnny simultaneously spoofing Rambo and Fred Rogers, in “Mister Rambo’s Neighborhood.”

Sign of the times: John Palmer with a bulletin about the ongoing saga of TWA Flight 847.

Sometime that summer I’d caught a repeat of a “Best of Saturday Night Live” that had the “Buckwheat Shot/Buckwheat Dead” cycle on it. I was speechless with how brilliant it was and started taping SNL episodes in hopes it would get repeated. It didn’t recur that year, but my quest did yield a different moment of brilliance: the Christopher Reeve-hosted episode that featured Jackie Rogers Jr.’s $100,000 Jackpot Wad, which is just shy of perfection itself, and a reminder how good the “ringer” season of SNL could be.

The “Saturday Night News” segment also featured another favorite bit: Rich Hall’s hilarious spoof of Paul Harvey. Sometimes he was a better Paul Harvey than the real Paul Harvey.

Next is the August 5, 1985 rebroadcast of Living Proof: The Hank Williams Jr. Story. My brother was a huge Bocephus fan at the time and wanted me to record it for him. At one point earlier in the day we got into some kind of tiff and I threatened to delete the timer setting for it if he didn’t knock it off. We must have settled it, because there’s the recording:

It’s not a bad movie if you keep in mind its origins, which is that it’s a made-for-television movie produced by Procter & Gamble, and it’s going to bear the hallmarks of a made-for-television movie. Including the casting, which gives us John-Boy Walton as Hank Jr.

And, to be fair, he acquits himself well in the non-concert scenes. But in other scenes, he does his own singing. That in itself wouldn’t be that big a deal, except that in other performance scenes they use actual Hank Jr. tracks, and they don’t sound anywhere near alike. The movie closes with Hank Jr., his demons behind him, recovered from the mountain-climbing accident that nearly killed him, making a triumphant return to stage. Richard Thomas is in full Hank Jr. get-up: the clothes, the beard, the sunglasses and cowboy hat…and he looks like a kid going out for Halloween as Hank Jr. But I can’t harp on it, because given its limitations it’s okay, and it’s earnest, even if it also leaves a lot out, but it gives you an overview.

But this bit of casting really makes it, if you ask me:

Not to mention Clu Gulager! (And a small part played by a pre-stardom Naomi Judd.)

And since this is a Procter and Gamble production, it means all the ads are going to be for in-house products. Including the ads where the Ronald Reagan-looking guy presides over the replacement of an upscale restaurant’s regular coffee with Folgers Crystals!

In the closing credits, I saw this and thought it was a hoot. I read the book not long after seeing this movie, and…yeah, “suggested by” is an apt characterization. (And all kidding aside, it is a very good read that stays with you.)

Only part of this at the end before the next recording cut it off, alas, but here’s future Folgers spokesdriver Tim Richmond for Old Milwaukee. Little did the people at home realize just what a wild man Tim Richmond was in real life. He was a heck of a good racer, a first-class character, and we lost him much too soon.

The tape runs out with part of the repeat of the Nov. 10, 1984 Saturday Night Live, with George Carlin (Saturday Night‘s very first host!) making his return to Studio 8H. Alas, the tape runs out right in the middle of the great 60 Minutes spoof.

And there you are. Tune in again, someday soon, when I again run out of post ideas and dive into the miles-deep recesses of my video collection.

Here’s the November 24, 1958 Life magazine. I really should have done this one last week, I know, but better late than never. This is a favorite: on the cover is the awesome Kim Novak with a cat, billboarding a story about Bell, Book and Candle. I love Kim Novak, I’m a cat mom, and Bell, Book and Candle is among my favorite movies (and sometimes the older of our cats, who tends to stay close to me like a familiar, gets called Pyewacket – but, as any cat parent knows, any cat accumulates about 50 names in addition to their official name). What’s not to love?

Well, okay…as we’ll see, there’s not much to the story about Bell, Book and Candle. But we can still have some fun with this issue. Let’s commence:

It’s 1958, so we’re going to see recurring themes. Remember, in this era America was under a constant cloud of cigarette smoke and floating on a sea of booze. Here you see the oft-forgotten Kool penguin mascot – in the first panel, the poor little one is in peril. If you can actually feel pity for a cigarette mascot, I do here.

Meanwhile, King Sano cigarettes – with the fancy new filter, because filters were the big new thing – has as its mascot former diplomat John S. Young. “Time and again, in today’s tense situations, I see important people under pressure lighting up this new ‘soft smoke’ cigarette,” the ad quotes Young as saying. Hey, we’re dealing with the H-Bomb and guided missiles, the new space race, the Middle East, Berlin, the Congo, Quemoy and Matsu, and this smoldering situation in Vietnam…but hey, if it means boom times for the coffin-nail business, it’s all for the good, right?

It’s after hours at the agency and the boys at Sterling Cooper are letting their crew cuts down! And not only did they get Hughes Rudd to stop by and tickle the ivories, but their piano has a gigantic hand emerging from it. I’m especially amused by the line “Clear Heads Agree Calvert Is Better,” when nobody’s head is going to be clear after a while.

(And any booze under the “Calvert” brand reminds me of what racer Buddy Shuman reportedly told a woman who wondered how he got the courage to drive a car so fast on track: “I take ‘er through the straights and Lord Calvert takes ‘er through the turns.”)

Get plenty of Planters Cocktail Peanuts for the holidays. That can remained more or less the same into the 1980s. I remember this because we always had a can in the snack cupboard. My dad ate them a lot, and they were the definition of store-bought peanuts when I was a kid. The first time I tried dry-roasted peanuts, on a visit to my grandfather’s summer home, I thought they were exotic.

The ability of flooring to hold up to high heels was an important selling point in the ’50s and ’60s. There’s one in particular I remember where it implied a woman was jumping up and down on the flooring, on the points of her heels. Which you can completely see happening. (And you wouldn’t at all see someone like that being taken away for their own safety.)

Reader’s Digest Condensed Books were such a staple for so long. My grandfather’s summer home was lined with them. He never read them, I don’t think, but he’d just pay for them when Reader’s Digest would send them for approval. Now, of course, you can’t give them away.

The dream/fantasy scenes in the Maidenform ads never fail to crack me up (and bring to mind the MAD Magazine version that mashed up a Maidenform ad with Nude Descending A Staircase). And, of course, once you’re back from your space-age makeover, get back to work in the kitchen with all your spiffy General Electric appliances. The man of the house is gonna need something to settle all that Calvert Reserve from the office party.

“I dreamed I got out of a Chrysler automobile in my Maidenform bra! The only hooter holster with The Forward Look!”

And a neat, space-age decanter for Old Forester, just in time for the holiday season. It reminds me of a Palmolive bottle for some reason. And once it’s drained (which, if your husband’s a Sterling Cooper employee, won’t take long) it would likely make a dandy vase for the happiest flowers in town. hic

Okay, there’s a ton of automobile ads in this issue. Which is appropriate, since the cars of that era are best measured in gross tonnage anyway. Let’s handle most (if not all) of them now:

Holy crap, were the Lincolns up to 1960 these massive ingots of automobile. I’ve been aboard aircraft carriers before and these give me the same impression of overwhelming size. And yet I am captivated by them. Of course, the real challenge if you own one of these monsters now is finding parts for it. (Contrast this with what the Lincoln Continental became for the first half of the 1960s: one of the most beautiful automobiles ever.)

If the USS Lincoln is beyond your means (or perhaps too spendy), there’s always Mercury. It’s interesting when you compare how cars looked in 1950, still trying to get accustomed to a postwar world, then to sort of a happy medium in the mid ’50s…only to become rolling Las Vegas by 1959.

By comparison, the 1959 Ford, which would seem like wild styling any other year, is positively sedate by comparison. Then again, you could always buy this heartbreaking work of automotive genius:

The “Olds sucking a lemon” look is toned down for 1959, but the E-Car is already suffering headwinds and has only a model year left after this one. Somebody in our hometown had a ’59 Edsel that, when he was done with it (or when it was done with him), he just parked it in his back yard. By the time I was of age, the weeds had started to grow up around it and the paint had oxidized and all that. One day when I was 9 or 10, I got to sit in it for a minute when nobody was home. I wanted so much to buy that car and fix it up. Obviously, it didn’t happen. (There were reportedly many offers made to him for it and he refused to sell. Eventually it was hauled away, and I have no idea where it ended up. I probably wouldn’t want to know, anyhow. But I’ve had a soft spot for the 1959 Edsel ever since.)

If all that’s going on at the House of Henry, then what’s the General up to?

Wide-Track Pontiac for 1959! The choice of my father’s father, who loved them big ol’ Pontiacs. Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman became well-known for their Pontiac ads, which artistically enhanced the “wide track” effect and made Pontiacs seem four lanes wide.

Meanwhile, over at Chevrolet:

The famous “bat wing” Chevy for 1959. Cadillac’s fins went upward to their highest for 1959, but Chevrolet extended them outward. There’s a story – and I’m not sure how true it is – that the 1959 Chevy’s radical departure from the boxy 1958 design was because the Chevy designers found out about Chrysler’s “Forward Look” and this was their response. The outcome was a car whose looks you either love or hate. My maternal grandmother’s response was the latter. When my grandfather brought home the family’s new 1959 Biscayne sedan, she said, in a quote that has lived through the generations: “Hewie, that’s a biscuit and you’re gonna eat every bite of it!”

Oh, and on the adjoining page is a story about people learning how to hunt, sometimes with tragicomic results. It includes this picture:

Yep, some farmer had to paint COW on the side of a cow. Note that it’s in Pompano, Florida. I used to live a couple miles from there. There weren’t any cows there, let alone room for them. There’s probably rows and rows of houses there now.

Theme song for the article:

But the real action at GM is taking place in the GMC Truck Division, with Operation High Gear in full swing:

I’m having fun imagining a race like this at the then-new Daytona International Speedway. Especially with the high banks and everything. Wheeee!

There’s a GMC truck for every need! Pickups! Delivery vans! But this is the one I really like:

It looks like somebody who’s resigned themselves to having to wear braces, but they’re kind of philosophical about it. “Oh, well, it could be a lot worse,” sighs the new D860. Automotive designs of the ’50s were so expressive.

Meanwhile, here’s another word from the folks at Dodge:

It (and an ad that repeats claims that Listerine would eventually have to retract) is adjacent to part of a story about Brigitte Bardot’s sister, who has a beauty all her own:

And that is adjacent to a story about fashionable flooring from Johns-Manville! Asbestos is the wave of the future!

Back to what the folks at Chrysler are up to, though. The infestation of beetles from West Germany has disturbed the automakers enough to prompt countermeasures:

What’s not mentioned is that Chrysler had wanted to enter the European market, and did so by buying part of Ford’s share in Simca (which Henry Ford II, when he wasn’t fictionally sitting awkwardly in a race car, was said to have regretted). That, and the name instantly makes me think of Latka’s girlfriend on Taxi. I can’t see it without imagining Andy Kaufman pronouncing it.

Studebaker (whose motto is starting to become a more insistent “what have we got to lose? We’ve gotta try something!”) is thinking along similar lines, and brings us the cute little Lark:

The Lark (which was a reworking of some existing designs) sold well the first couple years. Unfortunately, when Ford (with the Falcon) and GM (with the Chevrolet Corvair and Pontiac Tempest) got in on the act, sales dropped. Soon after, so did Studebaker.

But if you really want to go places:

The Boeing 707 is here! And American Airlines invites you to fly on the big, fast new Jet Flagship! (This page has some history on this exact airframe, and you can see another image from the same photo shoot that yielded the picture in this ad. You’ll see that some retouching was involved. You’ll also find out about its unhappy ending.)

Boeing’s in on the act:

Given her expression, I can’t help wondering if he’s said something highly inappropriate. I also can’t help wondering if that’s his wife, or, ah, “his wife.” It’s the late ’50s, so…the odds are decent, on both counts. (That’s not a typo at the bottom, either: there was a Boeing 720, a slightly downsized 707 variant meant for airlines that wanted to serve shorter routes. It was a stopgap before something like the beloved workhorse 727 was ready.)

But this week Life also brings us the other side of aviation:

The fiery aftermath of an accident at New York’s Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International). A Super Constellation on a training flight became uncontrollable when a propeller malfunctioned during takeoff. The plane smashed into the empty Trans-Canada Viscount seen here, only about 10 minutes before passengers would have boarded. Believe it or not, nobody was killed. (Read more about it here.)

What else is in the news? The famous Boston political boss James Michael Curley died, and Life covered his sending-off. It was a big deal in Boston.

King Hussein of Jordan, 23 at the time, eluded an attempt by Syria to take him out. Given that my memories of King Hussein are of an older statesman trying to broker peace, it’s always jarring to see him as a young man.

The Hope Diamond was sent to the Smithsonian Institution…by registered mail, insured for $1 million (which came to fees of $145.29 for postage, registered mail service and insurance). Harry Winston, it was said, felt sending it by the post office would avoid the ballyhoo of armed guards, couriers and so forth.

There’s supposed to be a curse associated with the Hope Diamond. When I was at the museum a quarter-century ago, there was a long line waiting to look at it. I knew of the curse and, even if I’m not really superstitious, didn’t feel like waiting in line to tempt fate.

Holy cow, now there is a news flash! I really must stop wearing my monocle while reading these things.

Brief story about a leopard cub taken in by a family in Uganda. It was all fun and games and cuteness and sweetness until the leopard’s instincts started to come in, and the little cub wasn’t so cute any longer, so…off it went to a zoo. (Reminder: don’t mess with nature.)

The leopard’s story is in between a Botany 500 ad (yes! It did exist outside the game show universe!) and a Schick electric shaver ad. Where Remington famously shaved the fuzz off a peach in its commercials, Schick instead uses analogies to cactus quills and toy balloons, promising it can handle any kind of skin.

The Polaroid Land Camera! A miracle it was for the day: pictures in only 60 seconds. Now it seems so quaint.

Next to it is a piece about Amedeo Modigliani, who work was encountering a renaissance. There’s several of his works, but many of them are nudes, and although I don’t have an issue with that, we do try to be a family blog.

T. S. Eliot, now 70, has a new wife and a new play, The Elder Statesman. (Maybe he’s also got the Hotpoint 6-Cycle Washer, too!) They threw an afterparty, and given that I think of Eliot as writing rather heavy work, it’s odd to see him so happy:

In between material about The Elder Statesman, you can read about the exciting underwear that may get you a Love Letter. Or you can order the World Book Encyclopedia in time for Christmas. I’ll always insist one of the wisest things my parents ever did was buy a World Book set when my brother and I were really young. I grew up with World Book, seemed to always have a volume pulled down off the shelf, and it made me want to go out and learn more and see the world. So much that I have, so much that I have done with my life, I owe to that. I am grateful.

And you can’t have T.S. Eliot without having a cat around, as we see here. Around him, you can shop for a Sheaffer pen set (which is interesting, given that I’m a Parker 51/61 fan) and delicious Cracker Barrel cheese from Kraft. (That’s much better if you say it in the mellifluous voice of Ed Herlihy.)

It’s Beefaroni night! “Fixed just as Italian children might be eating it near Rome.” Yeah, I’m certain. Because you know that 11-year-olds are daydreaming about being on the Via Veneto.

Or you can always make them Plantation Ham with martinis made with Seagram’s Golden Gin. Notice how the ham is a pretext to make martinis. Heck, the entire decade seems like a pretext to make martinis.

An Alpha-Bits ad, which brings to mind two favorite gags:

1. “Brian! There’s a message in my Alpha-Bits! ‘Oooooooooo!'”
   “Peter, those are Cheerios.”
2. “Raymond…I could have eaten a box of Alpha-Bits and CRAPPED a better interview!”

Next door is the start of an article about Eileen Farrell, who had a long and versatile career and just seems like she was a really neat person.

The article about Bell, Book and Candle is…well, after the cover, it’s a letdown, though we do get some neat pictures. The one at the top right, with Gillian and Pyewacket, is a keeper. (“Witch and helper” might describe a picture of me and Smokey, who is often my Pyewacket.)

Another reason I love Bell, Book and Candle: Ernie Kovacs.

“S.O.S. Pads! See us at the Kitchen Debate next year!”

The Army’s big mirror was a big solar furnace done as an experiment, made of 356 mirrored sheets. That’s prospectively at least 2,492 years of bad luck if they break. eek.

And it’s helpful the Vitalis guy is also an underwater salvage expert, because, as it happens:

Life looks into the realm of people trying to cash in on underwater salvage. One of them has an idea to raise the wreck of the liner Andrea Doria, which had gone down a couple years before: just seal the portholes and pump air into the hull. He’s even got a proof-of-concept model, which he demonstrates for Life‘s inquiring eye:

Not only do I love the look on his face, but look at the model playing the part of Andrea Doria: it’s the flat-bottomed Revell model of s/s United States. (Note: if an “ingenious plan” has been rejected by a big salvage firm, there’s likely to be a reason. Maybe he didn’t use Vitalis?)

Now that we’ve handled much of the news, let’s have a drink! I miss the way advertisements used to have original art in them, but something like this ad is just so darn evocative:

Meanwhile, Carling’s Black Label gives the strong impression that the people who produce television programs are getting gassed while they’re doing it:

Maybe you’d prefer an entire stadium full of orange juice?

Or if you can’t come out and say “Honey, I need you to buy me a sewing machine” (because, after all, it’s 1958 and your full-time job is to stay home and tend house), here’s ways you can hint for it, like you’re a 9-year-old who leaves a Red Ryder BB gun ad inside your parents’ magazines:

Let’s have more booze! Here, it’s as if Roger Sterling was channeling Old Scratch at the end of The Devil and Daniel Webster.

Ancient Age always cracks me up, for the only alcohol in our house growing up was a small bottle of it kept at the very back of a cabinet, on a high shelf. It had been a gift from my dad’s boss, who usually gave everyone at the sawmill a bottle of booze for Christmas. Dad, being a strict teetotaler, almost always gave his to someone else. This one, he had kept. It was there for the sole purpose of making the cough medicine our old family doctor taught my parents to make (part bourbon, part honey). Many was the night my brother or I, having contracted some kind of horrible respiratory illness as we tended to in our young days, would be sleepless and sore, our throats raw from terrible persistent coughs. One treatment from the bottle of booze medicine would soothe our throats and get us to sleep.

Something delicious:

The thing I love most is how they really dolled Elsie up. Given that I grew up in the country and had many occasions to be around actual cows, it’s a hoot.

This looks like a nightmare in the ad, but, oh, would I be all over it like that little kid in the corner:

Alas, at my age, I now know I’d be in the same predicament that our Buster Keaton-esque mail carrier would be in here. But if I could meet Speedy, that would be nifty. (It’s a shame we lost Speedy when he fell off that fishing pier so many years ago.)

And you know that Patti Page is a stickler for perfect spark plugs! (She wrenches her own Oldsmobile, ya know. While wearing the gown. That’s why the car’s in the studio.)

Okay, it’s not the Carousel, but what can be?

“Can you bring me my Chap Stick? My lips hurt REAL BAD!”

“Children, in a time before Ikea, we had these things called furniture manufacturers! And they built furniture that was meant to be passed from generation to generation! But, then….”

And, in the spirit of the approaching holidays, we close with an appeal for you to give booze…

…and cigarettes. Because, after all, it’s 1958.

Last year, I got to know Joe Pinner. If you know anything about South Carolina, you’ve likely heard of him. If you ever lived in Columbia, you’ve certainly seen him on television, and may have even bumped into him in person. He was the larger-than-life personality who worked for WIS-TV in any number of capacities: as Mr. Knozit, the children’s show host; as the weatherman on the Seven O’Clock Report (and such was the might of WIS-TV in its salad days, so highly-regarded it was, that it could use the network news as the lead-in to its own news program); as a co-host on Carolina Today; as the on-air spokesman in countless local commercials. Even if you didn’t live within viewing range of WIS-TV, you knew of him, and even out where we lived, where you could only get Channel 10 on the rare mornings when the signal would skip far enough, you knew the name and the face, and the voice. Oh, that voice.

Joe tried to retire in 2000, but was persuaded to do some part-time work for the station. He finally retired for good in 2018, spending his days cheering the fellow residents of his retirement village, visiting his friends, and caring for his wife, whom he dearly loved. Her final illness and her eventual passing saddened him deeply.

Last year, one of his sons sent out a request for people who might be interested in helping Joe write his memoir. He’d actually started work on it a few years before, but it was a project that fell by the wayside while he saw after other things. But Joe wasn’t getting any younger, and the time to act was at hand. I’d just published my book about Dave Garroway, and after years of work I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get into another project just yet. But something in my head kept urging me. Why not?

I’d very briefly met Joe at the breakfast meetings of the Slightly Legendary Old Broadcasters (the SLOBs) in Columbia, but I didn’t really say that much to him. I was, to be honest, in awe that this man I’d known from the television for so long was sitting next to me. (See the story Tom Hanks tells about the first time he was on The Tonight Show, as a young television actor, as he suddenly realizes I am shaking hands with Ed McMahon.) So the day I met Joe to discuss the project, I was a little nervous. Fortunately, it all went well and I ended up with the job.

Off and on that summer, I spent time with Joe and his son at Joe’s apartment in the retirement village. We recorded hours of interviews, his son offering prompts that sent Joe off on marvelous (and often funny) stories. We started going through a small mountain of memorabilia in his home office, and just seeing a particular picture could send Joe meandering down memory lane once again. As a historian, it was fascinating, but as a human being I could detect a wistfulness in his reminiscences. There’d be a note of melancholy, of heartbreak, as he remembered colleagues who were gone – or, hardest to bear, when a memory of his beloved Peggy would come to mind, and the ache in those moments was unmistakable.

After several sessions I was able to get most of the work done on Joe’s manuscript, and we had a draft more or less ready to go. We were close enough, at least, to start going through pictures. But, of course, life got in the way. I had to go back to teaching and seeing after everything at work. Joe also had to see after some health issues, and scheduling became an issue. In the meantime, I was able to get some interviews with people who had worked with him, and I also did a lot of digging through archival resources. Joe was amazed with the work I had done, that I had been able to find so many details and flesh out the stories he told, and after all my apprehension about the project, I was relieved.

Something else that relieved me was finding out that the Joe Pinner you saw on television was pretty much what you got in person. Many were the times in conversation when he would crack a joke or make some kind of funny observation, sometimes at his own expense. As we got to know each other, he would ask me questions: about my background, about my job, about the things I liked to do in my spare time. It was very much like being a kid in the audience on the Mr. Knozit program. Once he even asked me, in that familiar voice, “And what do you want to do when you grow up?” And without missing a beat, I eagerly replied, “I want to be on television like Mr. Knozit!” And it prompted that smile of his. (I think part of the fun we had together was that I knew his trade and understood timing, and could readily provide a comeback. It would have been fun to share a desk with him.)

Sometimes Joe would send a text message to check in on me or to say hello. I’d sometimes think: once upon a time, I was a kid watching this guy on television, thinking he was larger than life, and more than four decades later he is a dear friend who’s checking in on me, giving me encouragement, telling me he cares for me. And sometimes I would be the one offering him an encouraging word. Other times, I’d post something to Facebook and Joe would post a sweet (and often funny) comment.

This past April his son sent me a message: they were putting Joe in hospice care. I was saddened but not terribly surprised. I soon after arranged a visit, expecting to see my friend at death’s door. To my great relief, he was much as I remembered him, but with an oxygen tube below his nose, perhaps a little depleted but still in fine, booming form. We visited for a while, talked about the project, but by this point we were running out of stories anyway. I’d recently rebuilt the power steering pump on my truck and had posted about it on Facebook. During my visit, Joe asked, “Hold out your hands for me.” He was amazed. “These same hands that can write a book are the same hands that can fix a truck!” I’d been in awe of Joe Pinner, and yet Joe Pinner was in awe of me. At the end of my visit, I put my hand on his arm, looked straight in his eyes, begged him to take care. Maybe somehow I knew that was a last farewell, even if I didn’t realize it at the time, or maybe the memory of the last time I saw my mother was in my head, this subconscious realization of how fragile it all is, how no tomorrow is guaranteed any of us, that we should love those we cherish all we can while we can, that we don’t regret the things we do nearly as much as we regret the things we didn’t.

Months passed, and they had their hands full as it was, and I didn’t want to be a bother. They knew how to get hold of me when the time was right to resume work. In the meantime, I conducted another interview or two with Joe’s friends and former associates, finding once again that people light up when they get a chance to talk about their friend Joe. (Some of the stories I’ve heard are for the ages, and when the book finally gets put together and hits the stands, I think you’ll be very happy – and amused.)

On September 20 I had flown to New York City. A friend who works at ABC had offered to let me sit in as he worked on the Sunday edition of Good Morning America. I would have to be at the huge ABC facility on West 66th early in order to clear security and do a couple other things before the program began. I was also trying to rest after a full day of traveling and then walking around Midtown, and I just couldn’t spool my mind down that well. I tossed and turned for a little while, and about 1 a.m. I had this urge to check my phone. Sure enough, there was a text message from Joe’s son: Joe had passed away that evening. It wasn’t that much of a surprise, but it saddened me. It hurt not just because we’d lost a titan of South Carolina television, but I’d lost someone I had come to love as a friend.

But, life went on. There was talk of a memorial service in November, but with the election, a busy work schedule, and so many other things competing for attention, it may as well have been a decade away. Time does what it does, though, and soon came time for the last farewell.

It didn’t look promising, though. The sky was gray that day, and there was light and insistent rain throughout. I was kind of concerned about it, not only because I’m not fond of driving in downtown Columbia even on a good day, but because my usual parking garage in Columbia is a few blocks away from where I needed to go, and I was bound to get wet. But I owed it to my friend to be there, and I pressed onward. As the miles ticked away, as I got nearer to Columbia on I-126, there were the scenes from that 1975 WIS-TV news intro I’ve watched countless times: the Columbia skyline, that weird interchange where 126 splits into Elmwood and Huger. And even that name – “Huger Street” brings back memories of the stories Joe told about how Nevin Broome, he of the carpet and rug store, demanded it be pronounced “huge-err” and not “yoo-gee.” I used to take this same route when I’d drive over to see Joe at his retirement village, but now I was taking another route to say goodbye.

A left onto Lady Street, past the rear of the Whit-Ash Gallery, another Columbia institution that’s now about to pass into history; across Assembly, and then up to the parking garage. The rain is light but steady. Down the five flights of stairs to street level, then up and over a few blocks, all the while thinking about how much this city has changed just in the time since I lived here in the late ’90s, let alone how much it changed in the decades Joe had called it home. Walking past a downtown restaurant, where sunny guitar music rings out from speakers, I’m struck with a mix of emotions. Lost in my thoughts, it seems to not take that much time before First Baptist Church – which I once saw described as “an entire city block of bricks” – is before me. Up the long flight of stairs and into the auditorium. I’m not accustomed to churches this big, certainly not a sanctuary with two upper tiers of seating. But here I am.

I went through the receiving line, renewing my acquaintance with Joe’s sons and their families. The big pink Mr. Knozit couch had been brought in, right in front of the pulpit, and in the middle was the urn holding the remains of my friend, whom only half a year before I had taken by the hand, looked in the eye, and urged to take care. After greeting the family, I looked for my pals from the SLOBs. We were listed as honorary pallbearers and had a special place in front. Soon enough, I found some familiar faces and was soon at home.

In time, the service began. The string ensemble that had been providing music during the visitation struck up a version of “Mr. Sandman.” I started chuckling. What a Joe Pinner moment! The family came in from a side door, as did the governor and his wife, who sat in the front row of our section.

The service itself was full, and heart-filling. A colonel from Fort Jackson spoke of how Joe had devoted so much time and effort to the same fort he once served at, and presented a flag to the family. Top officials from local arts organizations testified to Joe’s happy promotion of the arts. There was a video about him and his beloved Peggy, testimony to the life they’d built together; at last, they were together again. Three of his WIS-TV colleagues spoke: Dawndy Mercer Plank remembered Joe’s cheery, outsized presence in the newsroom, and sports director Rick Henry had funny stories of the charity baseball games they played in back in the day. Then Judi Gatson gave some particularly moving remarks, made even more poignant by how much she was trying to maintain her composure, and I don’t think there was a one of us in that sanctuary that didn’t wish they could take her hand and help her through, because her grief spoke for us all. There was testimony from a couple of members of the clergy, including a former WIS-TV colleague who ended up becoming Joe’s minister and was with him when the end came.

Toward the end of the service, there was a video presentation. Joe was fond of the song “My Way,” and of course the only version that counts is the one Ol’ Blue Eyes did, and that’s what we got. The visual was a collection of many, many photos throughout Joe’s life and career. So many emotions tumbled around in my heart as I watched, like puppies trying to climb over one another. There were little signs of things I knew, scenes that were familiar, scenes that didn’t seem like they were that long ago (has it really been that long since the “Our Pride Is Showing” campaign?). There was that familiar face I knew from television. But there, too, was my beloved friend – and yes, he has gone off into the big forever. It’s for real.

Broadcasting has changed so much, particularly in the last three decades, and “local station” is more often than not a relative term, since most stations are now owned by conglomerates. So often people get shuffled around from market to market, and the odds of becoming a decades-long presence at one station are not that favorable. And that’s most unfortunate. Joe Pinner was as much a symbol of Columbia as the State House dome or the Adluh Flour sign. But those days are gone. And now, too, so is Joe. He could have made a fortune in a larger market, or maybe even at a network. But he found his home in Columbia. Like the protagonist of Roger Miller’s “Kansas City Star,” he had found his happiness. Now, neither Miller’s hero nor my friend could pull the same happy trick. We’re the poorer for it.

The service ended, and I said goodbye to a couple of my pals and headed out. The rain had let up just a little bit. It was the start of rush hour, and getting out of town got interesting. But, in time, I was on the way home. That evening, sitting at home, I could see just the slightest hint of clear sky, a warm glow of amber from the setting sun. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe it was our Joe giving us one more smile from beyond.