Each year the familiar Christmas specials would run, and we knew it was the season when Charlie Brown and Rudolph would make their annual appearance, when Santa would ride through town in a Norelco shaver head and the Hershey’s Kisses would ring out “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” (To this day, those commercials – and the Corona ad with the whistled “O Christmas Tree” – are the only Christmas ads I genuinely love.)

Our church would host various things. We’d usually stage a Christmas pageant of some sort. For many years it was a retelling of the Christmas story, with most of the labor coming from our Methodist Youth Fellowship group. A couple of older kids playing Mary and Joseph, three adult men portraying the three kings (and singing “We Three Kings” as they processed down the aisle toward the manger), and the rest of us in MYF would get the usual bit non-speaking parts as angels or shepherds.

Each year our family gathered for a Christmas dinner, often at my grandparents’ tiny house. We’d have drawn names a few weeks before for a gift exchange, and after dinner we’d swap gifts. It could be a handful but it was good to see everyone, and seldom did it lack for entertainment, especially as the number of cousins increased and the younger ones got into mischief.

My parents would often go Christmas shopping. One of my mother’s love languages was giving, and she was always looking for one more neat thing to put under the tree for somebody. Often my brother and I would go with them, although we’d be in another department of the store (or another store in the mall) while they looked for gifts. When my brother got old enough and set out on his own, I’d often go along on these trips. All the stores would be festive and the local mall would be all decorated. It was exciting. There was anticipation. Sometimes on Christmas Eve I’d stay up late and watch NBC’s feed of the Christmas Mass from the Vatican, and even this small-town Methodist could feel the power and importance of that moment each year.

And when Christmas Day got here, it was the payoff. All of a sudden, so many wishes had come true, and there were so many goodies to compete for my attention. It was complete overload. My mother would spend much of the morning in the kitchen making all kinds of food: sausage pinwheels, ham biscuits, all sorts of stuff for the family and for visitors to graze on throughout the day. In the evening my grandparents would stop by for a visit, having spent the day visiting all the rest of the family, and they’d unwind with us for a couple hours before heading home for the night. When the last festivities were done, I’d collect my goodies and head to my room and enjoy them, trying not to get sad about this happy day coming to an end. Sometimes there would be a little sadness the next day or so, with all the excitement gone and now life was getting back to normal.

I have so many vivid memories of Christmas past. There was the year my brother was so ill with a cold/throat thing, coughing so hard that he stayed up sick all night; I was too keyed-up to get back to sleep, and so I stayed up all night and played with what Santa had left for me, which meant I spent most of the next day tired and grouchy. The next year, I got my very first computer (a Commodore VIC-20, which I still have), along with a whole bunch of old-time radio cassettes, and I remember so many happy days of coding programs into the computer (which would be wiped the moment I turned the machine off, since I had no storage device) while listening to radio programs from yesteryear. One year in the run-up to Christmas, we went on a shopping trip where the city’s shopping mall had a temporary shop set up selling old magazines, and I went positively crazy buying old copies of Life Magazine. I can’t think of a Christmas season from way back when that doesn’t have happiness associated with it.

But something happened. And, as with all things, it wasn’t abrupt. Some of it had to have come with growing up and growing older, with taking on the responsibilities of adulthood, the difference between being a passenger and actually having to do the driving, and Christmas becomes one more thing you have to manage in between all the others. (I can’t imagine what it would be like if we had kids.) And over the years, of course, you lose people. Some move away. Some pass away. This year will be the first Christmas without my mom, and I’ll only say the sense of reality will be heightened as a result.

It’s beyond just that. Every year, I’ve watched Christmas turn that much more into an industry, and with it the lines of demarcation have eroded. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas used to be this special zone, and Thanksgiving was a distinct holiday, enjoyed in its own right. Now Thanksgiving is more like a speedbump, and in my mind it’s the Rodney Dangerfield of holidays. It’s this pro forma prelude to the hyper-intense, mandatory-fun portion of the already months-long Christmas season that now seems to crank up even before Halloween.

The buildup is made even more unbearable by how aggressive it’s become. Radio stations that switch to an all-Christmas format six weeks before the day itself, for instance (and if I can barely make it through one rendition of “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” without screaming, hearing it several times a day is going to drive me straight to a mental institution). The people popping up on television with ugly sweaters and aggressive smiles and over-cheery holiday greetings. (Don’t even get me started on the ads for matching pajamas for the whole family.) The aggressive trend-chasing. It’s to the point where the sound of jingle bells in the background is like nails on a chalkboard.

My issue isn’t with Christmas itself. That, itself, I love. What I can’t take is what it’s been turned into. I know why it’s happened; some of it is cold profit, while some of it’s just been the kind of creep that happens in cultural phenomena. But the outcome of it has been this increasingly aggressive “it’s the Christmas season and we will remind you of it every few minutes! And we will aggressively show you HOW it should be done! And in case you don’t get the point, we will pipe in the sounds of jingle bells!” (I’m not even going to get into how Christmas has been twisted into yet another front in the increasingly all-encompassing culture wars, as our national dialogue – and, for that matter, seemingly everything about public life – continues to get contorted into an increasingly grotesque form of burlesque.) The more aggressive you are about something that you want me to enjoy, the more I retreat from it – and past a certain point, it approaches hostility.

(Side note: It’s much the same reason I avoided the “Must See TV” programs from NBC in the 1990s: the more aggressively you market it, the more it dominates the sphere, the more self-satisfied you present yourself as being, the less I am likely to want it. Friends was 30 years ago and I’ve never watched an episode, and have no plans to. I’m sure it’s a fine program, and I appreciate what it means to a lot of people. In my case, though, it was just so aggressively marketed and so culturally dominant back then that it turned me completely off. And maybe I’m still miffed because My So-Called Life was up against it and therefore never stood a chance.)

No, what I miss is the kind of Christmas that had some room to breathe. I miss Christmas as this quiet feeling of something wonderful to come, and you weren’t quite sure what it would be, but in your heart you had this warmth that assured you that whatever happened, it would be good. I miss the kind of Christmas season that found its own satisfaction in crisp December evenings, when the long shadows of mid-afternoon gave way to the darkness of early evening, when the company of a beloved friend or a family member by the fireplace was more than sufficient warmth for both body and spirit. Christmas meant the little lump in your throat when Linus recited the story of the first Christmas, or when Charlie Brown’s sad little tree was redeemed into something beautiful. And as I get older, Christmas brings back memories of people now gone from my life, from this world, and of what their presence meant, how I could never fully appreciate that until it was gone.

I miss the kind of mature Christmas that wasn’t about the material stuff. Oh, sure, you’d give some kind of little present to the people who meant something to you, but the gift was really kind of a MacGuffin. It was a token to remind people that the real gift was having them in your life, a gift you’re not going to find at any Black Friday sale or on the shelves at any big-box craft store. I miss the kind of Christmas that wasn’t about the Next Big Thing. I miss the kind of Christmas that gave you credit for being able to listen and let your own heart figure it out. (Then again, I am someone who is constantly looking for nuance and subtlety in a world where it seems everything comes drenched in Ranch dressing.) Christmas is a season of searching, of yearning. As my pal Emily once wrote, so many of the great Christmas hymns are written in minor keys and symbolize that yearning for something better.

That’s why, this time of year, the manufactured jollity and the relentless marketing and the fads and the memes only drive me away. I didn’t abandon Christmas; there’s a little porcelain tree on a table in our den (and it’s there because with two mischievous cats who get into everything, that’s all the risk we dare take). Or maybe it’s like Saturday Night Live or MAD Magazine: it was at its best when you were a kid, and all the seasons since are a disappointment. I can’t say.

All I know is, this time of year I’m looking for the simple things about the season, the things that matter most. Or maybe I’m just a distaff live-action Charlie Brown lamenting that it’s all become too commercial*, and throughout this rant I’ve been fooling myself into thinking the good old days were that good, when underneath there was as much profiteering and venality back then, and the only difference is that there’s a thousand more outlets for it now, and it’s more open, the more that public life transforms itself into a corrupt comedy. It’s probably all of that, and then some. Or maybe I’m a phony who wants it both ways.

(*Which is funny, considering that a television special that lamented how commercial Christmas has become ended up spawning no end of Christmas merchandise.)

But, still, I tune out as I can, and I search. The magic of the season is out there, somewhere, if I can drown out the din in a world that’s anything but subtle.

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.

On the way out of town, we stopped by the cemetery to visit my mother’s gravesite. We lost her back in January, when a sudden illness took advantage of frailties she either hadn’t known about or had kept well-hidden from the rest of us. (Since she was one of the most selfless people I have ever known, and never wanted to ever be a bother to anyone, I can’t help thinking it was the latter.) Not two weeks into the new year, she was suddenly gone. Everything changed for all of us. We have mostly coped well, but as you can imagine, every family get-together now has a hole blown in it the exact size and shape of her.

My mother now rests on a hill in the town cemetery, in a site that had been bought years ago by my folks as a family burial area. A couple years back, they had a gravestone made and had a granite perimeter installed and gravel poured in. I remember the day I saw that grave marker for the first time, with my parents’ names and dates of birth, and below it the area where, someday, another date would be carved in. It was sobering, for here was a hard, cold reminder that my parents’ days on this earth would someday run out, and they had prepared. This thing I hadn’t wanted to think about? It was no longer unavoidable. I had no idea it would be needed so soon, that within a couple years that second date would be carved in. But we’re not the ones writing the script.

Family burials aren’t new to me. My great-grandmother, who lived with my great-grandfather in a house next door to my grandparents, died when I was eight. It was my first close experience with death and maybe I was too young to really grab its meaning. Two years later my great-grandfather, who had spent two years in mourning, passed away. I remember going to the visitation for him, seeing him in his casket, this man who had been so gentle to me, told me stories, sang funny songs to me, had this marvelous hearty laugh when I’d say something he thought was funny, who always had a stick of gum in the front pocket of his bib overalls that he’d tear in half and give half to me…he was now lifeless in that box, wearing his best suit on the voyage into forever. Somehow I had accepted it and yet was still numb to it. I missed him, I knew I’d never hear that laugh of his again, and yet I somehow knew there was no escaping the reality. I knew he hadn’t been well, and there was one memory of visiting him in the hospital that had genuinely scared me. Somehow I got the concept of death as release. I thought I was supposed to cry, but I was oddly logical about it. I knew crying wouldn’t bring him back.

The next time was almost a decade and a half later. My parents had to rescue my paternal grandfather, who had fallen victim to Alzheimer’s Disease, and we took care of him at home until he could get accepted at a care facility. When he passed away there early in the new year, it was more a relief than anything. The man I had known was long gone. He was buried next to the site my parents had bought for the family, and after the funeral service we gathered as a family and embraced, and many in the circle wept. Again, I couldn’t. I was sad for them, and I knew it was a grim milestone in our lives, but his passing had been a release. The man I had known was long gone before he died. I had already mourned. I was sad for my father, who grieved a man he hadn’t known that well (to make a long story short, his parents separated when he was young, and my dad wasn’t reunited with his dad until he was almost 40 years old). But I hadn’t known my grandfather that well, hadn’t seen him that often, and what I did remember of him was gone. To me the shock came not at his passing, but when my parents brought him home after rescuing him, when this man from my childhood memories was suddenly this frail shell of a man who was no longer occupying this plane. It felt, to use a phrase I sometimes overuse, like walking straight into a plate glass window.

After that, the passings came more steadily. My father-in-law died a few years later, after a long final illness. My paternal grandmother (with whom I had never really gotten along) died a few years after that. A few years later, my mother-in-law passed away. And then my maternal grandparents passed away, though I had known their days were numbered, especially my poor grandmother after a sad, decades-long struggle with progressive dementia. And thus were my parents the last line standing. Now that line is half gone, and emotionally I am preparing for the inevitable.

But, really, the relatives are only half the story of why things feel so different now when I’m back home. It’s because so many of the people I remember from the town where I grew up are now up on that hill, too. Some of them are relatives, but others were part of the fabric that made up the town I knew as a youngster: the eccentrics, the gossips, the neighbors, the people who knew how to do a particular something and could do it really well, the men who helped build the house I grew up in, the folks who were there when you needed them, no matter what it was you needed. The friend, confined to her home with chronic illness, who used to call me to talk about baseball (and whom I loved even though she was a Yankees fan), and her mother, a very sweet woman who looked like Imogene Coca. One by one, they filled the empty spaces in that graveyard. Someday, sooner rather than later, those still among us will join them.

In my younger days I’d go on long walks around town on sunny summer evenings. It let me get out of the house and also gave me some exercise. Most evenings, the far point of my journey would be the cemetery. I’d wander through the paths, stopping sometimes to visit the tombstones of people I remembered or to read decades-old inscriptions on overgrown headstones. And, often, this song would be in my head, for it captured exactly how I felt:

Sometimes I’d hear that the neighbors had noticed me walking up to the cemetery so often. In the way of small-town gossips they wondered what was behind it, as if there was something weird or occult about me being there. I’m not sure they would have bought my explanation: I was up there so often because it was peaceful there, because I was fascinated by the little clues about the lives of those who were now at rest there. I was fascinated by the grave markers of the long-gone Woodmen of the World members, carved to resemble hewn timbers; the ornate marker, tall as I was and longer still, for a family of obvious means; the heart-shaped marker with a lamb atop, the resting place of an infant. Some of those graves were a century old, even then. It was soothing to be there, the stories telling themselves on a warm summer evening, the setting sun glowing gently, the crickets singing away. The people in those graves were long gone, in some cases more than a century, and yet I still felt their presence somehow.

Three decades later, so many of the people who are now there are people I knew somehow. One or two were more or less from my generation, cut down by cancer or chronic disease, and that makes it cut even deeper. If that’s how I feel, I can’t imagine what it’s like for my father. He visits my mother’s grave just about every day. A few months ago I rode to the cemetery with him on the secondhand golf cart he uses for short trips in town. After we’d spent time with Mom, he took me on a meandering tour through several gravesites. Every turn brought us to another grave of someone about whom he had a memory. I’d often hear a sad “he was a good fellow.” Dad is 82 now, has survived a couple of health scares in recent years, and is in good health. His mind is sharp and he can still get in a day’s work in the field on the tractor. And yet there are times when I understand why living a long life is a double-edged sword, why you never want to wish for immortality: you will live to see so many of the people you love be lost. The Green Mile will seem so long.

In my own mind, I find myself fighting waves of nostalgia, and the older I get and the more complicated I find the modern world, the more tempting a refuge it becomes. On occasion it’s made me wonder if someday I’ll move back to the tiny town where my story began. Almost as quickly, though, I remember that town no longer exists. Yes, it’s in the same place on the map. Many of the landmarks are still there. The house where I grew up is still there. But it’s not the same. Most of the people who made it the town I remember are now up on that hill. New people have moved in and, in their way, made the town theirs – and that’s good, for it keeps the town alive, and it’s also not right for me to expect that town to live up to my expectations. My nostalgia also elides the frustrations I so often felt, that I had to get out and experience a bigger world than I could ever find there, that the images in my mind from a childhood reading the encyclopedia had to become my own reality that I could experience firsthand, and I knew I couldn’t find that if I stayed there.

I’ve built a decent life, on my own terms. I’ve done not only so many things I wanted to do, but so many things I never imagined I could. I’ve been, as the song says, blessed and lucky. I’m also still hungry for things I haven’t yet been able to do, but it gives me something to keep going, and sometimes that’s as important as anything else. Be that as it may, it’s a life I’ve lived on my own terms. That little town will always be my hometown, and I’ll always be thankful it was. Not for the riches of Nineveh and Tyre would I trade growing up there, in a place that will forever live on in my heart. But in many ways, my idea of my hometown now belongs to history. Now, the rural acreage we happened into many years ago and the goofy little house we built there, the expanse of pines and the wildlife that frequently ambles through…over the last two decades, through financial and emotional commitment, that’s become home, the place that re-centers me, the place where (barring some kind of unforeseen calamity) I’m content to spend the rest of my days, on my own terms.

My little hometown will always call me back. I’ll always relate to Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice president in charge of media, wanting to escape to his days of childhood, giving in to that errant little wish, needing to be reminded that where he came from, there were merry-go-rounds and band concerts, and that maybe he hadn’t been looking in the right place.

The more I’ve been looking behind me, the more I’m reminded I have to look ahead.

Yesterday I had the urge to go back in time, and a URL in my browser’s history popped up and took me to the Sept. 23, 1957 issue. It has an amazing picture of Suzy Parker on the cover:

Suzy Parker was a top model of the day, her name immortalized in a Beatles tune. I first became aware of her because she modeled for Revlon and sometimes appeared in the live commercials on The $64,000 Question. Later she was married to Bradford Dillman, who I remember most for playing Dirty Harry’s officious superior in two movies.

I mean, look at her. Wow.

This week in September 1957 brought more than just a look into Suzy Parker’s world. There was a neat feature in which a photographer took modern-day photos with one of Mathew Brady’s cameras. I was especially interested that the famously grumpy John Foster Dulles was an agreeable sitter, for a comparison with Robert Seward’s portrait.

There’s a big feature about the American court system, featuring portraits of prominent jurists.

If you’re into duck hunting, there’s a photo feature on favored hunting sites:

Robert Frost went to England:

…and quiz show champion Charles Van Doren reflects on his experiences as a winner on Twenty One and whether the quiz show craze helps or hinders education. Two years later he would testify before Congress about how the whole thing had been rigged. It’s interesting to read this piece, knowing what was to come and knowing how his life was going to change after his confession.

As another sign of the quiz show craze, here’s this ad that fulminates against the federal electric utilities. (This post goes into the campaigns of America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies, and features some really strident ads that imply that government utilities are but the vanguard of creeping socialism that will take away your freedoms, your Bible, etc.)

In consumer goods, Columbia was promoting its big new stereophonic systems under the “Listening in Depth” campaign. I mean, look at that glorious monster spread over two pages. Columbia Records backed this campaign with a really awesome LP that featured samples from various stereophonic albums, but also had some bespoke tracks. (The special version of Duke Ellington’s “Track 360” started with the sound of a train traveling from the left channel to the right channel. If you’re wearing headphones, the train travels through your head. It’s fun!)

Not to be outdone, RCA is not only promoting its own sound systems…

…but is also promoting the washer-dryer systems it’s producing through its partnership with Whirlpool.

And let’s not forget Philco. Otherwise, they might make various threats. (As they did when they complained NBC’s Today program being broadcast from the RCA Exhibition Hall was unfair competition; as they did when Philips tried to do business in the United States, which prompted the birth of the “Norelco” brand name. Although many, many years later Philips bought what was left of Philco, and that’s why you see “Philips” more and seldom see “Norelco.” So there.)

Schlitz urges you to go bowling! Enjoy a Schlitzframe! Have some Schlitzfreshment! Be a Schlitzer! Get Schlitzfaced!

Colgate reminds you that the real reason you’re striking out on the romantic scene isn’t your personality, your clothes or any other cause except your HORRIBLE BREATH:

Mutual of New York can not only set you up with affordable insurance, but also with inspiration for song titles!

Conn – the same folks who brought you Mr. B Natural (and all the important debates pertaining thereunto) – promises that you’ll be playing music the very first day! (But Conn very carefully doesn’t promise how well you’ll play.)

Chrysler Corporation is promoting The Forward Look, although it conveniently elides any commentary on what will happen if your car ends up being possessed. Or any guarantees about its durability should it be stored in a below-ground time capsule for 50 years.

While these guys are eyeballing each other’s cars, Sputnik is only a couple weeks or so from being sent into orbit. (And to add to the quiz show craze, that same comparison is the opening scene to the movie Quiz Show. Which – as if that’s not enough – prominently featured another Chrysler product!)

If you need an outboard motor, throw renowned all-around lovable guy Carl Kiekhaefer some business:

All this, however, means I’m burying the lede. The big story is Little Rock, the integration of Central High School, and the role of Gov. Orval Faubus. Life sent a photographer down, has this lengthy up-close piece about Faubus, talks to his family.

Meanwhile, real people are suffering. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was beaten with fists and a chain; Dorothy Counts was threatened and gave up her attempt to attend a Charlotte school; a bomb exploded in the library of a Nashville school because a young Black student had been enrolled there.

Life‘s editorial page examines the events of the week. The second piece got my attention, and it’s why I’m writing about this today. And it’s not because of the legal aspects of it. It’s because the last two grafs touch on the role of the human heart.

It’s interesting to reflect on this same passage 67 years later. For the past few weeks, we have been sorting through the aftermath of the 2024 election. There are those who feel vindicated. There are those who feel distressed. As nauseated as I am by what modern political discourse has devolved into, I’m in neither camp. Instead, historian that I am both by inclination and training, to me it’s the cycle repeating itself. It’s nothing new. Yes, the methods and the media have changed, but the fundamentals haven’t.

Something else that hasn’t changed: the fact that it comes down to what’s in the heart and the conscience of each of us. No election, no referendum, no regime can alter the reality that each of us must answer to ourselves – can we live with the person we see in the mirror? – and we also have to answer to an authority higher than any governor or president or king or overlord, and someday we’ll have to answer for how we treated one another in this life. We have to answer to that voice in our heads that keeps us from being able to sleep if we’ve wronged somebody else. Some folks will be able to meet that test. Other times, though, I’ve felt like the traveler in this song, unable to believe the inhumanity humans willingly visit upon other humans:

We hear a lot about the horrible things that happen. News, as I teach my students, isn’t when the river remains within its banks. But what we don’t see anywhere as often are the little acts of kindness, charity and goodness that take place when nobody’s looking. Yes, the people who say horrible things and do cruel acts and scream the loudest are going to get the attention, and to some extent they’ll set whatever the perception is. But what we don’t see are the everyday acts of goodness: the extended hand, the kind word when it’s needed, the gentle moments of human connection that remind us we’re all occupants of this same life and this same little marble that’s drifting somewhere in the great vastness of space.

I don’t get to choose my students. I have to take who comes my way, no matter their race, creed, color, background, politics, identity…you name the variation and I’ve encountered it in my classroom in some way, shape or form. I’m obligated to set all that aside and treat every one of them the best I know how. That’s not only as a professional, but also as a human being. I have to be able to look back on my day and not regret what I said or what I did. That, and I have never discounted the possibility that God sent someone my way because there was something I needed to learn from them.

Anybody who thinks they know how the next four years, let alone the next decade, will go is fooling themselves. Nobody knows. Some of it will involve things that are in our hands, but so much of it won’t be in our hands. What is always within our hands, though, is how we treat one another. I’d hope that underneath all the loudness and tumult that hearts haven’t hardened, that there’s still a fifth column of decency that remains at work, even if we seldom hear about it.

Or, as a couple of more recent observers would remind us: be excellent to each other.

The ocean liner United States has been a long-standing fascination for me. It started innocently enough, during my senior year in high school. I had befriended the head librarian as soon as I started attending the school and became a library assistant during my senior year. (It tells you everything about me that I had closer relationships with some of my teachers and with the librarians than I had with most of my classmates.) During my senior year, she let me and a friend eat lunch in a work room in back of the library.

Along the back wall of this room were bound volumes of most of the original run of Life magazine, and several years of Time from the late 1940s and early 1950s. More often than not I’d spend part of my lunch hour with some of those volumes pulled down, and I’d happily leaf through these little time capsules, losing myself in another era: not only the stories of what was in the news then, but the photography and the ads. Spend enough time immersed in those ads and you find yourself longing for products that haven’t been offered in forever.

One day I was looking through the June 1952 issues of Time, and one cover stuck out: a ship’s captain, brow furrowed with responsibility, watchful gaze fixed on something in the distance; behind him was a porthole with frolicking vacationers visible, as bon voyage streamers fluttered by, a mildly surreal mash-up of the sort Time covers of the day specialized in. “Commodore Manning of the ‘United States,'” the caption read.

As I looked inside to see what the story was, I couldn’t feel the hook being set. I started reading about this amazing ship and all the modern features, including some the Navy didn’t want to disclose (and which, I’d learn in time, had to do with more than just claims of national security). Then throughout other issues, the advertisements, breathless with anticipation, from United States Lines about the ship’s entry into service. Then to the coverage of the ship in Life.

Inevitably I started wondering: what happened to this ship? It’s what I tend to do when I find out about marvels from the past; some itch makes me wonder what became of them. Nowadays, you could just pull out your smartphone and have the ship’s entire story at your fingertips. But in 1991, a “smartphone” would have meant Don Adams talking into his shoe.

Somehow I found out the ship was still around. There had been plans to convert the ship into a cruise liner, but nothing had happened. The ship was languishing away in Virginia and hadn’t been to sea since 1969. I got interested in writing about the ship and planned to go to Virginia to do some research at the Mariners’ Museum, and hoped to get some photos of the ship while I was there. But since I was the baby of the family, my parents said no. Eventually we worked something out (oh, was that a story) and it became a hastily-arranged family vacation that turned out to be pretty nice, probably the best vacation we took together. We took a harbor cruise and I saw the big ship with my own eyes. I’d been aboard big ships before, having been to many a ship museum, but there was something about seeing this ship up close, in person. The ship was still powerful, looked fast and majestic just sitting there, but so sad: faded, rusted, abused, neglected.

I got involved in the nascent efforts to save the ship from being scrapped, which really picked up when a federal court put the ship up for auction. There were all manner of strings being pulled, but to no avail, and in April 1992 we prepared for the worst to happen at auction. Instead, a Turkish-based group bought the Big U. Two months later the ship went to Turkey, and from there to Sevastopol for drydocking and to have the asbestos-laden interiors stripped out.

Well, the plans went nowhere, and the owners had begun selling parts of the ship for scrap (which is why, among other things, the lifeboats and davits were gone). Another eleventh-hour rescue and the ship ended up in Philadelphia in 1996. The following year, a friend and I went up over Memorial Day weekend to see the ship. When her dad retired from the Air Force in 1962, they got to travel back home from England aboard the ship. She still remembers watching Birdman of Alcatraz in the ship’s theater.

Years passed and various plans came and went, and the ship dodged various brushes with doom. At one point it seemed tantalizingly like the ship would get converted to go back to sea again, but that didn’t work out. At another point, plans for the ship’s refurbishment and preservation seemed so close. But that, alas, was not to be. And then, the owner of the pier where the Big U was moored got tired of this big ship being there, and more legal wrangling ensued. Alas, we know how it ended; with sale to a Florida county that will scuttle the ship as the world’s largest artificial reef.

Back in July, we didn’t know how this was going to turn out, although since January, when the word about the pier situation really started getting dire, I had been bracing for the final act happening sometime this year, and I had a feeling the ship was running out of lives. The e-mails from the ship’s preservation organization were sounding more concerned than usual.

There had been occasional opportunities for guided tours aboard the ship, but they often involved more money than I had available, or they required some kind of “in,” such as being a former passenger. But in mid-year, the Conservancy opened things up: for a minimum donation, you could go aboard. I thought the odds of me getting a slot were long, but I figured I’d regret if I didn’t try, and so I sent an inquiry. To my surprise, I got the first date I requested. All I had to do was make the donation, which happened moments later. Then came all the logistics: oh, crap, I gotta plan a route, book hotel rooms, get a timeline together, etc., etc. Which, all of that came together, but since I do tend to fret, it got interesting.

The morning of July 19, I loaded up the car and set out. On any trip this size, I’ll usually spend about the first 20 minutes wondering why am I doing this crazy thing? and then, at a certain point, something will shift and I’ll ease into travel mode. Certainly by the time I was on I-77, I was ready to go. My trip followed much the same route my friend and I had taken in 1997: I-77 to I-81, and then on to the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Philadelphia. It was hours and hours and hours of travel, with TCM’s splendid podcasts about Pam Grier and John Ford keeping me company much of the way. Since I had started out early, though, I was able to make it across the Pennsylvania line and spend the night in Chambersburg. The next morning, I was up early, got on the Turnpike and it was on to Philadelphia. Mission-driven person I am, I was there at 9:15 for the 10 a.m. report time, and killed a little time at a Lowe’s near the rendezvous point. Across the busy four-lane street from us, there was the Big Ship. It had been so long. I was glad to see my old friend again, even if my heart broke a little more.

There was a group of about 20 that morning, from various places; some of us were experienced with old ships, while some were just curious about this big old ship they kept seeing from the Walt Whitman Bridge. One was an artist who had become fascinated with the ship and was making a repeat visit to take pictures for her projects. Eventually all were accounted for, and we made a convoy over to the pier, and parked where we could. I was finally up close with the ship, and I could scarcely believe it. There’s my car, all of a sudden, parked alongside s/s United States.

We got out of our vehicles and stood pierside, then walked around for photo opportunities. I was overawed. This is so big, I kept thinking. But that cut two ways: yes, the ship was a marvel, but only up close could I really appreciate how much damage the years had inflicted: the mangled railings, the busted portholes, the streaks and pocks of rust. In a heartbeat, my awe turned to sadness: This is so big. The vastness of the job was suddenly so apparent, like a giant hole had consumed me and all I had to dig out with was a toy shovel and pail. I had the feeling you’d need probably a billion dollars to truly do this project right. It was a billion dollars I didn’t have.

Every so often, the inevitable becomes heartbreakingly clear and you have to brace for it. It’s a feeling I knew in early 2019 when the veterinarian at the emergency clinic told me that our senior cat’s heart was giving out and that I was about to lose my bestest buddy of 15 years, and I suddenly had to make one of the most heartbreaking decisions I’ve ever made. It’s a feeling I knew not two weeks into this year when I got the phone call that my mother, who had been in the hospital but seemed okay when I visited two days before, was in the ICU and was crashing quickly. It’s the feeling that you’re about to have to let go of something you have loved so dearly for so long, that last-minute happy endings don’t exist outside Hollywood, and even the first glimmers that maybe it’s all for the best, that the unforeseen costs of answered prayers could end up worse than just doing the right thing and, as a friend of mine often says, letting go and letting God. It’s the coldness of reality grabbing you by the collar.

Now, granted, this is different because a 990-foot ship will never love you back. But, still, when you’ve invested 33 years into caring so deeply about something…yeah, this hurt.

In time our tour guide led us down the pier to a metal gangway. After all these years, it was about to happen. Up and over, and I’m aboard. “We meet at last,” I tell the ship, giving a gentle pat as I step aboard, into a crew area called Times Square. A couple of men who help take care of the ship greet us. There’s some paperwork we have to sign (of course), and we’re all given flashlights since there’s a lot of areas without lights ahead, and after a briefing we set off.

(Side note: Some of what I’m about to cover was also covered by Steven Ujifusa, author of A Man And His Ship, in this post a few days ago. Check it out, as Steven got coverage of a few areas I mention here but didn’t get pictures of.)

First we have to climb a spiral stair up, and then we emerge into…vast emptiness. Where passenger cabins once were, now there are outlines of where walls used to be. Light streams in from the cabin ports. The stubs from where the toilet and bath plumbing used to be stick up from the decks. The ship’s decor and many other artifacts were auctioned off in 1984 and are now scattered among hundreds of museums and private collections, and good luck ever getting all that stuff back; much of what was left, notably the marinite asbestos panels that made up walls and other interior divisions, was gutted in 1994 during the yard period in Sevastopol. For the most part, we’re touring an empty hull, communing with ghosts. Here and there, there are signs of what once was – the different patterns on the decks that corresponded with which class you were in (first, cabin or tourist). It’s like finding little traces of a lost civilization. It made your heart hurt. At one point, in a now-denuded lounge, I embraced one of the countless structural stanchions that shoot up through the public spaces like trees. Very quietly, I whispered: “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” If it’s true that ships have souls, I hope that ship heard me.

There’s something else I haven’t mentioned. If you’ve been aboard enough ships, you know they have a distinct smell. Just about every ship I’ve been aboard has had some variant of that smell, even active Navy ships that are well-maintained. It’s a mix of grease, fuel oil, sweat, stale air and who knows what else. It’s hard to describe, but the closest thing I’ve found is the smell of old color-printed magazines that have sat in storage for a long time; a pungent, slightly mildew-y, slightly ashy smell that gets your attention. Now imagine that on a ship that hasn’t been climate-controlled in decades, neglected and open to the elements. Even through a KF94 mask I could pick up that smell. It soaked into my hair and my clothes, and even days later I could detect the smell in that mask. It became poignant.

Some of the public areas were evocative. At one point we went into a little room that looked out over what had been the first class dining room, where everybody who was anybody would have dined back in the day, wearing their absolute best, the truly important folks getting invited to sit at the table with the Commodore (or with the captain when the Commodore wasn’t at sea). The tables were long gone; only the sockets remained from where the table legs were secured to the deck. The little compartment we were in, one deck up, was a loft where the musicians had once played. And now we looked out over an empty dining room; the best we could do was reconstruct the scene in our minds.

Elsewhere on the tour, we visited what had been the first class lounge. You could still make out where the musician’s platform had been, and the circular dance floor, though worse for wear, was still evident. I was likely to never get another chance, so when no one was looking, I did a quick Natalie Merchant twirl on the dance floor and rejoined the group.

Eventually we emerged on deck. Once upon a time we’d have been walking on green-colored weather decks covered in Neotex. But over the years the Neotex gave up, crumbled away. Some of it rests as little gray-green flecks of gravel collected in nooks and crannies, while some larger pieces hold on. The temptation was strong to pick up a little piece of it and slip it into my pocket as a souvenir. But…my conscience told me it wouldn’t have been right. The only thing I felt was right to take was photographs, and so I did.

We explored other areas: where the lifeboats and davits once were, now it’s just a long and open run of clear deck, with beaten-up railings along the edges. The pilothouse, where the ship was guided on record-breaking voyages and through stormy seas, is now empty. Atop the pilothouse, you could look up close at the giant forward funnel, whose last sheets of weather-beaten paint from the final yard period 56 years ago are hanging on for dear life. Brave souls could try to climb up the foremast, but my dread of heights kept me a live coward instead of an vertigo-plagued hero.

We explored aft, too: overlooking one of the giant propellers now resting on deck; a good view of the aft railing that was bent in Sevastopol; the shoots of green that have grown in nooks and crannies; the rust that has eaten away at unprotected metal. Then the vacant promenade deck, once all full of life, but now empty and ghostly, empty light fixtures now hanging down.

Back inside and back down to Times Square we went. The tour had already gone longer than expected, but there was more to see. As we waited for the next leg of the tour, there was a cooler with iced-down bottles of water and Gatorade, and we were welcome to help ourselves. I hadn’t had anything in hours, and walking around this unventilated ship on a humid summer day had worn me low. It took me no time at all to drain a bottle of Gatorade.

Then we were off to visit one of the engine rooms; once a forbidden area, now we were merrily climbing through it, exploring things, finding wonders hidden in the dark mustiness. Along the way, I’d look up and see paint hanging down in giant sheets from the overhead, or see where cables and wiring had been chopped out. I got to thinking about the hundreds of miles of wiring and cabling that would have to be replaced, the countless passages and corridors and nooks and crannies that would have to be scraped and repainted…well, there went my heart hitting the deck once more.

The last stop on the tour was the swimming pool. When the ship was new, this kind of became famous, with the stylized flags spelling out “Come on in – the water’s fine” on the bulkhead at the rear of the pool. Well, the pool basin was still there, but the flags and a whole lot else were long gone. Some in the group climbed down into the basin, while I was content to soak in the ambience from above. I’ve never learned how to swim, anyway, and with my luck I’d have found a way to go under in a dry pool.

And with that, the tour was over. We threaded our way back up to Times Square and our tour guide gave each of us a folder with some information and a sticker, our souvenir of the visit. I waited behind to let others go ashore first, and to thank the gentlemen who had helped us while we were aboard. But then I had a moment of panic: I couldn’t find my glasses. I looked everywhere in Times Square, unable to remember where they might be. At last I thought to check the top of my head; sure enough, I was still wearing them. Yeah, it was a brain failure, but in its way, it gave me a private moment with the ship. On the way out, I gave a bulkhead a gentle, loving pat, told the Big U to keep her courage, and reluctantly joined everyone else on the pier.

There was time for a few more pictures, and we lingered and talked for a little while, and then the convoy headed out. The two men who had hitched a ride over with me met back up with me, and I delivered them to their vehicle, wished them well on their ride back to Virginia. And then I gave our ship one last, loving look as I drove away. I looked up at Uncle Walt’s bridge, with “Song of Himself” gamboling through my head, then pointed my car the other direction, toward I-95 and the hotel room that awaited me in North Carolina.

That night, as I prepared for bed, the smell of that ship was still with me: in my clothes, in my hair. As, too, were the tangled emotions: wishing I could pick the Big U up, take that ship home with me; trying to cope with the likelihood that the ship could well be torn apart in a ditch in Brownsville, or that the ship that Mr. Gibbs designed to never sink would meet that very fate. But even with all that, I could know that, even if the worst did happen, at least I had this day.

Given what I know now, I’m glad I had it.

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.

In this section you’ll read about all kinds of things. You’re probably not going to find many hot-button items here, because that’s not my style. I have my point of view, yes, but there’s plenty other places where you can read dime-store commentary on current controversies. No, here you are more likely to read about my travels, my research interests, some of the more interesting curiosities and trinkets I’ve accumulated over the years, odd memories from way back when, places I’ve been that no longer exist. There may be other projects, too, but they’ll be dependent on my available time and interest.

If that kind of thing is your bag, then welcome aboard, and I hope you find something here worthwhile.