Sunday was deceptively calm. Old movies (including one with a hilarious supporting role played by my spiritual godmother Eve Arden), watching the football playoffs and the goofiness thereof. But it was all with two thoughts looming in the background: it all changes tomorrow, and it all changes next week.

The more immediate change happened Monday at noon, and that’s been the gigantic thing that has dominated the entire landscape before and since. Others have written volumes about it, and we’re not even through the first week. For my part, since I try to keep this place reasonably family-friendly and there’s no way I can discuss it without using language that’s not at all family-friendly, it’s best if I preserve silence. I didn’t have long to think about it, anyway, because an hour after it all began, I was in our front yard helping to free a delivery van whose driver got it stuck in our wet grass. (It’s a long story involving some poor assumptions on his part.)

The other change I had to cope with this week was more personal: the end of a lengthy winter break. A few years ago, the college went to an academic calendar that built a very brief January term into the schedule, which then bumped the start of the Spring semester by about two and a half weeks. For those of us who don’t teach in the January term, it effectively means half of December and almost all of January are out of the office and self-directed.

Those who don’t understand what we do in our trade (and it’s a lot of folks, including most people in my family) get the idea that we coddled professors use all this free time to lounge around eating bon-bons while regular folks work for a living. What many don’t know is that my work doesn’t stop. It’s just not in the office. We have to rewrite our syllabus documents, write and revise lesson plans, develop assignments, take care of requests from students (which continue regardless of what the calendar says), develop and submit course schedules for upcoming semesters, monitor e-mail…a ton of things. In my case, I’ve also had to continue producing episodes of the television program – which, even though most of it is assembling features and connecting segments we recorded in advance, still involves about a half-day to stitch everything together, round up the latest game information for the scoreboard segment, QC it, render the final version and deliver it, etc. And in between all that is when I see after the things that are hard to fit in my schedule during the school term: taking the car in for service, taking the cat in for her annual exam, meetings with colleagues at other institutions to share/steal ideas, etc.

And, sometimes, we have to attend things on campus. There were a couple during the break, but few are as sobering as the one I attended Thursday, which had to do with preparation in the event of something that’s happened with increasing frequency over the last many years (and, indeed, happened again this week). It was a presentation of about two and a half hours, and it forced me to think about things I really don’t want to think about – including, again, how vulnerable a campus is, and how easily some nutcase could shatter the peace and goodwill that we take as a given.

Now, none of this is that new. In 1988 it happened at an elementary school near my hometown. I was in high school at the time, only a few miles from that school, and I remember hearing about it when school dismissed that afternoon. Three years later, the semester after I graduated, an isolated incident happened at my high school (more disturbing is that my mother, who worked at the school, was just over in the next hallway when it happened). And over the years, these kinds of incidents have happened in all kinds of places; not just schools but just about anywhere groups of people can gather.

You would have hoped at some point enough would have been enough, but it keeps happening. At one point the presentation showed, on a map, the number and magnitude of these incidents over the last 24 years. The word “disturbing” isn’t enough to describe it. The incidents themselves are disturbing enough, but the lack of meaningful action by those who could do something about it is even more so, and on the notes I took, I wrote some rather pungent commentary about this sorry state of affairs.

Part of the presentation included a network interview with a teacher who was at the school that got attacked not long before Christmas 2012, and she talked (through tears) about what she did to protect her students. We were told about another teacher who got on top of her students to protect them, and then paid for their futures with her life.

I remember that day very vividly – or, more accurately, the following days. We were going to a Christmas party the next afternoon, but it was so difficult to feel any kind of joy after knowing what had happened. Even though it was hundreds of miles away, the horror of it all was overwhelming. On the way home, as we listened to a radio news story about it, I had the first genuine crisis of faith I can recall in my life. It frightened me. What kind of world could this happen in, that this could happen to these little kids and the adults who took care of them? And it was my hope that something would get done about it. But we know what happened: a whole lot of nothing. My faith in God survived, but my faith in a few other things has yet to recover, and my scorn for a few people in particular only deepened.

And that’s what accompanied me as I sat through this seminar on Thursday. Not only do I have to know my subject area, not only do I have to know about classroom management and assessment methods and all this other stuff, but I have to constantly keep one ear open. I have to know where the nearest exits are (or can be made). I have to keep a special app on my phone, just in case. I have to know how to use the things in my classroom to defend or fight. And I also know that, in the worst case, I have to make sure my students are safe before I can see after my own safety. I’m the last one out of the danger zone. And I also know in my heart that if I have to, I’m going to be the one on top of the pile, protecting them.

It’s a hell of a thing, but it’s what we have become, or what we have allowed to happen. I’m in this business to give these young people knowledge and experience. And yet I know there’s a very real possibility I could pay for that with my own life. I know if it came to it, I would, and without a moment’s hesitation. But it shouldn’t be that way. (And any time somebody suggests that the solution is for teachers to carry…well, please don’t go there with me. And I write this as someone with a small arsenal of my own.)

Over the years I’ve become more reclusive. Some of it is because some things I used to enjoy are no longer out there to be had. But, to be honest, some of it is because I’m turned off by the amount of rudeness and lack of consideration so many people display any more. It’s everywhere from the drive over (try going anywhere without somebody zooming up and tailgating you) to people plowing you over in store aisles, people using their phones in movie theaters…there’s so much that’s counter to how I was taught to behave. But on top of that, when you go anywhere, you also have in the back of your mind…what if somebody comes in to cause mayhem?

And with all that, being out here in the woods has an appeal that’s almost narcotic. We’re away from so much of that, and to an extent we can control how much of the outside world reaches us. We interact more with animals than with people, and they’re often much better company. It’s easy to get into a groove with all that and wish I could just work from home. But I also know how much I enjoy my work, and how much working with the kids does for me, even on days when they drive me crazy. I spent a year teaching over Zoom during the pandemic and, although it was the prudent thing to do given the circumstances, it was missing something. I didn’t think the students were getting everything they needed from me. And, for my part, it hurt my style. The way I work in a classroom is just this side of improv, and unless I have a live audience I can play off, it just doesn’t work.

It comes down to a calculation. Do I let the possibility that something horrible could happen cheat me out of the joy of doing my job? Do I let it cheat the students out of what I could give them?

Do I let the horror win? Or do I accept the risk, learn what I can about how to protect them if the worst happens, have a plan in the back of my mind, keep one ear open, and move forward?

I know what’ll happen Monday. I’ll go in and do my job, and make the most of it. But part of me will regret that I have to think about those other aspects.

This time of year is my least favorite. It’s the start of a new year; the days are still too short, the shadows are at weird angles, the weather is cold and sometimes fierce. My mood tends to sag, not only because of the environmental factors but also because it’s a new year, full of uncertainties. And within the span of this week, that was driven home anew.

I can’t let that keep me behind a moat, though. I’m cheating myself if I don’t keep my courage, and move toward better days. They are coming, even if I can’t yet know when.

As I write this, I’m in a hotel room in Athens, Georgia, a stone’s throw from the University of Georgia’s main campus. Tomorrow morning, I’m meeting with an archivist who works with the huge media library over here, hoping to get guidance on some projects that some associates and I have in the works.

The fact I’m over here on business makes this visit an exception. Most of the time, I’m over here for my own purposes. Many times it’s been to visit my friend Bobby, who now lives just a short drive from downtown. Other times, though, I’m over here to chase some ghosts. And every time I come over here, there are that many more ghosts to chase.

Once upon a time I wanted to live here. For some reason, I decided during the first half of my junior year that I wanted to go on to graduate school. I’m not sure I knew why. I think a friend and I had talked about it, and I wanted in, especially since it would give me a chance to get out of the nest. I still remember the night I told my mother, as we browsed in the housewares section of a massive hardware store during a particularly enjoyable shopping trip a couple weekends before Christmas. I started planning from there.

There were several universities on my mind. The most obvious was the University of South Carolina. I mean, it was right there in the middle of my home state. However, my mentor and unofficial adviser at Lander told me that going to my home state’s university for graduate work could confine my prospects. He said I should expand my horizons, and suggested Vanderbilt and Wright State, among others. Intrigued, I sent away for information and added those to the roster.

But somehow my heart got set on the University of Georgia. Location had a lot to do with it. I knew of Athens, and my dad often listened to a country station from there (WNGC, which provided us with our weekly dose of “Leonard’s Losers” – get me outta here, Percy!), but had never been there. It was far enough away for me to have independence (important, given that I was spending my college years still living at home, with most every move benevolently but still carefully watched by my parents, if not the whole tiny town) and yet not too far away. And, to be honest, the town’s reputation as a haven for independent types, artists and oddballs appealed to me. Now, granted, the Athens of the mid-’90s was nothing like the Athens of those not-so-long-ago days that spawned R.E.M. and any number of others, but it still appealed to me.

So, plans got made. I started getting things lined up, taking the Graduate Record Exam and having my scores sent to the appropriate places, getting applications in before deadline. And in the summer of 1995, not long after I graduated, my mother and I drove over to Athens for the day, just to look around town. It was a long drive through rolling hills and beautiful countrysides before we got to this odd city that seemed to be on top of a hill. We parked and wandered around, going into quirky little shops, stopping in an art gallery where several photographers (including Michael Stipe) had their works on display, having lunch at a neat sandwich shop across from the university campus. We went over to campus and I spent an hour or so in the massive stacks of the library, making photocopies (remember those?) of sections of books that I never knew existed, on topics that fascinated me. I couldn’t put my finger on why Athens held me in thrall, at least not in a way I could express that others would understand, and at one point my emotions boiled over into a flash of impatience toward my mother that, though I will always regret it, is typical for someone who’s in their early 20s and feeling frustrated. I was caught, I suppose, between being in a place that represented possibility and being in the company of someone who represented the world I was trying to escape.

The year after I finished college turned out to be what we’d now call a “gap year.” It wasn’t planned that way, but that’s what happened. I didn’t have any job prospects or anything lined up. (It turned out to be a good thing, for I spent much of that time off fighting a case of depression that, now that I look back, I’m amazed I made it through with my mind intact.) But one day the phone rang. It was a professor in the history department at UGA. They were looking at applications. Was I interested in starting in January? Oh, was I ever. But I knew so much would have to happen in a big hurry. The finances would have to get squared. I’d have to find a place to live. I’d have to move a couple of mountains. I had to conclude that although I would love to, I wasn’t in a position where I was honestly prepared to do it, and I declined with regret. So, on I went, with Georgia as my primary focus and South Carolina as my safety school, with visions in my head of moving off to Athens the next August to start my new life.

Well, not so fast. In the mail one Saturday arrives a letter from Athens: thanks, but no thanks on admission for Fall. I was heartbroken. I’d just been offered a slot a few months before, and now I’m chopped liver. What gives? My mother took me to lunch, and in our booth at the Huddle House the next town over, I stewed and considered next steps. The next week, I wrote back (by postal mail – remember, this was the mid-1990s, and e-mail had yet to make it to our tiny town) and expressed my displeasure over this perceived inconsistency. Why was I okay for January but suddenly no good? In full early-20s righteous indignance, certain that I was getting the shaft (and blissfully unaware of how admission processes actually work in high-demand programs), I demanded an investigation. Which, obviously, did not turn out in my favor, as a very polite letter a few weeks later explained.

South Carolina did want me, though, and I made my peace with that. In August I moved to Columbia and started graduate work at the big university. And it’s funny how life works: you don’t get what you want, but you end up finding what you really needed. That first semester, I met people I’d never have met otherwise. I built some friendships that last to this day. I had faculty members whose example showed me how to do the job I have now (and at least one faculty member whose example showed me what to never let myself become). This was doubly so when, after a year in the graduate history program, I decided to pursue a master’s degree in journalism instead. As I quickly found out, it wasn’t as easy as changing majors as an undergraduate, and I’m still boggled by how naive I was to think it could be. Be that as it may, the folks in the J-school were kind enough to help, and the basement of the Carolina Coliseum, with its windowless offices and classrooms, became my new home. I’ve often felt those were some of the best days of my life, and some part of me will always yearn for those times. Those were days when I was with classmates with whom I seemed to click, when I had professors who really saw something in me that I had yet to see myself, and when things just felt happy. And to think: had I gotten in at UGA, I’d have never had that. (Heck, I might not have survived it.)

None of that stopped me from driving over to Athens every now and then, though. Maybe I couldn’t get in as a student, but it was a nifty day trip and I could visit favorite haunts: not only could I spend hours in the library, but I could browse at Wuxtry Records and Jackson Street Books, enjoy a sandwich at Yudy’s, visit any number of the interesting little shops along the streets, and generally indulge the latent bohemian inside me for a little while. It was all of the pleasure of living the daydream without the reality of actually living there, and it was fun. You get to know the landmarks, and you love it while you have it, and you hope it can stay that way forever – for the heart is sentimental, sometimes foolishly so.

At the turn of the century, life took me to another part of the country. I was back a year later, to take up the job I now have, but it took four more years for me to get back to the little town with the big university. AEJMC was having its regional conference in Athens, I needed to attend conferences to build up my tenure and promotion portfolio, and so it all came together. In early March of 2005 I drove into town for the first time in nearly six years. Athens had been fixed in my mind as it was the last time I saw it. But as I drove along Broad Street, things…well, they didn’t look right. Yudy’s was gone; on its exterior was now the logo of a nationwide coffee chain. So too were gone a number of the quirky little taverns and shops I remembered. Slowly, the eccentricity was giving way to the chains. At least the Holiday Inn, which was hosting the conference, was still on that weird split-level lot. I pulled in, got my room, and then hiked up the hill to a pizza joint on Broad Street. After that, I walked over to Jackson Street Books, where I happily prowled the shelves and brought back a couple of treasures, and I spent the evening reading away, happy as could be.

If being away for five years was a shock, it was far more so when I came back nine years later. Bobby had invited me over for a visit to his home, back when he lived a few miles over, and then to dinner in Athens with a friend of his, a former network correspondent who now taught at the university. So much more had changed, so much more had become streamlined and franchised. There were signs, still, of the old Athens – Wuxtry Records remained, proud and unbowed, exactly as I remembered – but the town I had known was slipping away, ever more.

Every time I’ve been back, something else has been missing. Jackson Street Books closed in the middle of the last decade, as the realities of the weird new world of commerce proved too much for an independent bookstore to overcome. The Holiday Inn that I stayed at two decades ago is now an empty lot, soon to host yet another of the gigantic construction projects taking place around town. (I’m writing this from the Holiday Inn Express a couple blocks west, which replaced it.) Tall hotels and apartment complexes now flank the uphill approach to Broad Street. The Varsity, which used to be just outside town, is closed. The university itself, as all large universities seem to these days, has expanded its footprint and huge new buildings have appeared in places I remember as sleepy blocks of town. (Although Wuxtry Records remains – bless them – and it’s become a ritual for me to buy another t-shirt when I’m in the store. I can never have enough Wuxtry t-shirts.)

I know it’s progress. I know that you can’t want a place to remain the same forever. I also know that a place rightfully belongs not to the sentiments of those who cast their hopes elsewhere, but to the people who live there now. It belongs to them, and not to the “remember when” types.

It all comes back to that line about “I’m going over there to chase some ghosts.” I think I mean it not just because I miss Yudy’s or Jackson Street Books or any of the other places that amazed and amused back then. I think I also do it because, inside, I miss the times that those places represent. I miss the optimism of the kid who loved visiting those places, and a time in my life when it seemed all things were possible. Or maybe I over-romanticize those times because, when you know how the story turns out, memory becomes a luxury. Time and sentiment can sand the rough edges off the past’s realities and uncertainties. Plus, when your present reality has its own uncertainties and scary moments, it provides a distraction. (Memory is both blessing and curse, isn’t it?)

But I have to remember, always, that what didn’t go my way three decades ago made possible all the wonders my life has now. Change one thing – no matter how insignificant you think it was – and it doesn’t play out the same. It’s possible that if UGA had let me in three decades ago, I’d be a best-selling historian or some media darling, dividing my time between my homes in various parts of the world. Or it’s just as likely that it could have gone the other way and I’d be working in a box factory somewhere. And yet I wouldn’t want to trade that coin flip for what I have now: a life that, for all its weird angles and worries and things yet to be fulfilled, still provides a lot of contentment and contains an awful lot of love. It feels the way an honestly good life should, and it all happened because things didn’t go my way.

The rest? It’s a nice place to visit, and in my reveries I often do.

But I’m not sure I would live there.

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.

From time to time, I’ll dive into the archives, take a look at what was happening back then, and provide some commentary and recollections as appropriate. And for this first installment, let’s go back to 1979. As it happens, the 19th of November is a day I remember very vividly. Let’s go to my hometown paper from that afternoon.

Here’s the above-the-fold for the Greenwood Index-Journal from that afternoon 45 years ago. Yeah, there’s word about three of the American hostages freed from Tehran getting to Denmark; there’s a brouhaha about government officials going on trips; the SALT II treaty’s in jeopardy. But what I remember is that story in the center of the page. That morning, a C-54 cargo plane had crashed into a forest a few miles from my hometown. The two pilots were killed and the aircraft was destroyed.

As it happened, the airplane (which itself had a long and interesting history, far longer than is worth telling here) was full of dope. It had flown through the night from South America, staying low to escape detection, and was trying to land in a farmer’s field in the countryside. From what I’ve been able to piece together, they ran into fog and couldn’t land, and of course there was no way they could put down at a proper airport without risking their cover being blown. There are reports the airplane caught fire. Whatever happened, the airplane lost altitude and descended into a thickly-wooded area just off a county road. Its landing gear snagged a powerline by the road just before the crash, a few minutes after 6 a.m.

That afternoon, after my brother and I got home from grade school, Dad loaded us all into the truck and we drove over to the scene. Dad was assistant chief of the local volunteer fire department and a former magistrate, and knew just about everybody among the local authorities, so we were able to get right up to the scene. I’ll never forget the sight of that huge airplane sitting in the middle of a scorched stand of pines, everything forward of the wing box crumpled up and gone; the bulldozer moving things around, the various and sundry pieces of the airplane strewn around the ground (a stray bit of instrumentation; a shard of aluminum that one of my parents picked up, flexing it in amazement that this big airplane was made of such thin metal). The cargo had been rounded up and impounded, and the bodies had been taken away. All that was left was what was left of the poor airplane. (Much of the wreckage remained for years, tied up in legal and insurance haggling, until it was finally released. Most of the airplane was cut up and hauled away by a local scrap dealer who vowed never to cut up another airplane. The stuff that was left behind stayed a few more years. The trees finally grew back and now you can’t tell anything ever happened there.)

The other vivid memory was the smell. Plane crashes have a smell to them. It was the first time I’d encountered that smell: ground saturated with spilled aviation fuel, scorched foliage. I haven’t smelled it in a long time but it’s vivid in my memory. I smelled it again a few years later when a little Piper went down in the woods outside Bradley. It’s a smell that means death. I hope I never have to smell it again.

Let’s see what else was going on that day. Thanksgiving was coming up:

There’s too much about that layout to make me think it was an accident.

Oh, those nutty environmentalists! And so soon after Three Mile Island! (And why does everybody in this cartoon remind me of the Duke Brothers from Trading Places?)

If you were a kid attending a Greenwood-area school in the ’70s and ’80s, chances are your class got a visit from J.D. Ravencraft. He would bring this custom-built, padlocked wooden case with seized drugs and paraphernalia displayed inside and give talks about why drugs were bad. When he visited my kindergarten class, he gave us all a ride in the police van after his presentation. For some reason I’d get a little scared when he would show up. I don’t know why; he was always nice to us, but very serious about his work, and at my young age I couldn’t catch the subtleties.

The first visit to our many bygone merchants of yesteryear. Meyers/Arnold was one of those upscale retailers that seemed too ritzy for our working-class family, and looking at the ads I think I can kind of understand it. All that purposeful lowercase text says “your family can’t afford to shop here. go to k-mart and sky city and roses instead, you riff-raff. or to jcpenney if you’re feeling fancy.” Not to mention that artwork. The man in his robe looking away sternly, with his ideally sculpted hair; then there’s the gal next door in her underwear and that giant ’70s hair. Hmmm.

The big thing back then was department stores having portrait studios – or having mobile portrait studios show up for a few days. When we’d see a big RV in front of a store, my brother and I dreaded it because we knew we’d get dragged in for portraits. I hated it. Oh, sure, now they’re keepsakes in their weird color-faded glory, but six-year-old me hated having to wear my Sunday clothes and sit in this obviously phony setup while some man I’d never seen in my life coaxed me to smile when I didn’t feel like smiling. Grrr.

Instead, let’s let the soothing thought of Tom T. Hall bring us back to happiness. Tom T. was one of those presences I grew up with. I’ve always loved him. I miss him.

Greenwood had two movie theaters then: two screens at the Apollo on the 72 By-Pass, and the Auto Drive-In. The three-screen cinema at Crosscreek Mall had yet to open. It’s gone now, as is the Apollo. The Auto held on for a while, went under, but miraculously came back. It’s a treasure. I have so many memories of going there.

My folks went to see 10 at the movies about this time. I was six and had no idea what any of it meant, though I had seen the commercials for it. I only knew I rode Bus 10 to school and couldn’t figure it out.

The Greenwood Humane Society regularly submitted these pieces to the Index. They seldom failed to depress. If Sarah McLachlan music had existed at the time, you’d be hearing it.

The Index would often run pictures like this, letting the staff photographers show off little scenes they found. It’s a little bit of poetry amongst all the news. Some of these are particularly beautiful, as this one was.

McCormick was only a few miles from my hometown; it was where my dad worked, where our family doctor was, where the pharmacy and the dime store and the Red & White grocery store was. And once a year they’d hold Gold Rush Days, a festival premised around the gold mine near town. They’d have a thing set up where you could pan for gold, and somewhere back home I have a little vial with some tiny gold flakes in it from my attempt long ago.

Two big businesses from Uptown Greenwood: Winn’s Shoes and, across the vastness of Main Street, Toy Box. I only remember going into Toy Box once or twice, and I don’t recall going to Winn’s Shoes, although I was there the morning in 1994 when the sign from the now-closed store was craned down and donated to the Greenwood Museum. Toy Box was doomed after the Circus World toy store opened at the mall. Winn’s held on for a while but the inevitable happened, especially with the chain stores coming in.

Sky City’s your place to go for K-Tel! We somehow crammed 24 songs onto a single side of an LP! Buy now! Odd recollection: the restroom entrances at the Greenwood Sky City were down a shallow ramp. The Bi-Lo was next door. Many years later the Sky City building was demolished and a new Bi-Lo was built on the site. Go figure.

More shopping. Greenwood Supply was this huge brick building with building supplies, sporting goods, you name it. Near the back, next to a room that had range hoods and other appliances on display, was where the doorbells were on display. And they were functional. When you’re a kid, that’s catnip. John B. Lee was the big store for musical instruments and did big business to students who took music classes. (Although I think my brother’s guitar came from a discount showroom in Augusta.)

Cedric’s Fish and Chips was a popular chain around here for a while. I didn’t know the legend of Cedric back then, so I didn’t get the reference. I was amused by the name. We never ate there, though. If we were going out to eat, back then it was going to be at the Bonanza steakhouse (which later became the Bill Fuller Family Steakhouse).

Let’s now take a tour of long-gone supermarkets. They’re having big sales, what with Thanksgiving coming up. Here’s from the Big Star, in the K-Mart shopping center:

Community Cash, over on Montague:

The Winn-Dixie, which for some reason my parents thought was upscale (although it was where my grandparents shopped):

The Hoggly Woggly:

And the Bi-Lo, where we went. They used to have big plastic cows atop the facade, and kids used to try to steal them as a prank. I remember Mr. Harold letting me ride on the lower level of his bag cart when he’d take our bags out to the car; the Wometco vending machines along the back wall of the refrigerated food section, and I loved the soda machine that dropped the little cup down, filled it with ice, and shot your drink into it, and you’d retrieve it from the little sliding door. The kids these days will never know such pleasures. (And to add to the weirdness, Wometco owned the ABC station in Asheville, which we used to watch.)

The headline at the top is timely, since our younger cat has become very much a zaftig princess.

On to sports. The 1979 season ends with the King extending his reign (a story told in the great book He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back):

And this young up-and-comer served notice, too. I’d keep an eye on him for next year.

A little more shopping, and this is certainly a pretext for a sale. (I keep wondering about a seafood joint offering a Buddy Rich special.)

Heeeeere’s clothing!

The comics section. These three fascinated me as a child. The Born Loser resonated with the Rodney Dangerfield albums Dad played just loud enough for me and my brother to hear. Winthrop was…Winthrop. And Eek and Meek was just bizarre, which I think is why I kept coming back.

Then there was always They’ll Do It Every Time, which for some reason the Index often ran in the classified section:

Another moment of weirdly appropriate layout: a headline about a Mafia trial…below a picture of a group touring the Greenwood Packing Plant, where pigs came in one end as complete animals and exited the premises in Carolina Pride packaging.

An ad for the Midland-Ross facility in Greenwood. Just about every year there would be a little aviation show at the county airport and Midland-Ross would bring in its flying laboratory, a tricked-out Beech 18.

There’s dozens of these little houses in the mill villages around Greenwood, near the old textile plants (or, in some cases, where the plants were before they were knocked down). Look! It’s on the Old Duke Rate! Buy it now!

And what’s with these little gas-sipping cars from overseas? Ain’t got no room for nothin’ in them things. And no horsepower!

Not when I can get me a 1975 Caprice wagon for $2395! Yeah! It’s the car that thinks it’s a house!

The back page of the back section. I remember when these full-page cigarette ads were often on the back pages of newspaper sections. Probably brought in a good bit of ad revenue. That’s counterbalanced by how many people from my life are dead because of these damned coffin nails.

And that’s all for today. We return you now to your regularly-scheduled present.

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.