I will be a guest on WTMJ-TV’s “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes” Sunday at 10 a.m.
Regular readers know that I am a media history buff. (Which makes sense for someone who majored in journalism and political science and minored in history.)
One of the more useful functions of YouTube is as a collection point for old media that can be converted from film, 33- or 45-rpm record (remember those?), reel-to-reel or cassette tape, kinescope or videotape, or, for all we know, Victrolas and wire recordings to electronic form. (Until some obscure copyright-holder who thinks they deserve money demands that YouTube takes down the offending old media, that is.)
While I was looking for something else (and I don’t even recall what I sought), I came upon this treasure trove of old Madison media that dates back before I was born.
First is a series of ads that apparently ran in Madison theaters in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Contained within this video is (1) my mother’s former employer, (2) our favorite pizza place, and (3) the theater where my brother and I watched our first movie.
(The answers are (1) the Bank of Madison, (2) Paisan’s Restaurant, and (3) the Cinema Theater, two blocks east of my father’s bank, where we watched “Lady and the Tramp.”)
The popular radio station among those of us in the grade-school set was the top 40 station, WISM (1480 AM):
Both of these blow my mind. I met Clyde Coffee (he would occasionally drop by the restaurant I first worked, and I watched him broadcast on a Saturday morning at what the station called “Club Syene,” their Syene Road studios south of Madison) and Bill Short (who was also a sports official and as recently as last year was still doing radio traffic reports in Mad City), and once interviewed Jonathan Little, who went from WISM to WZEE (104.1 FM) to turn an automated station into WISM’s replacement and the number one station in the Madison market, Z104. And the last piece has a recording of Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, from the first time he was mayor.
(More Madison radio can be found here. For that matter, the menu on the left has more radio from elsewhere in Wisconsin.)
WKOW-TV (channel 27) was Madison’s first TV station, switching on its transmitter as a CBS affiliate in 1953. (When WISC-TV went on the air in 1956, CBS switched to WISC, and WKOW went to ABC, since WMTV had already started as an NBC affiliate, although WMTV also carried ABC and DuMont.) WKOW commemorated its 50th anniversary with this video. I recall none of this, but I would point out that I met (1) Blake Kellogg when he became a UW professor and (2) interviewed Marsh Shapiro after WKOW fired him in 1986. Shapiro already owned the Nitty Gritty restaurant/bar by then, and I have eaten his Gritty Burgers and drunk his beer. I also remember John Schermerhorn and “Dairyland Jubilee,” a show that ended when he died of a heart attack at 44. Tom Hooper went on to be the consumer reporter for WITI-TV in Milwaukee.
In the days before multiple late-night shows and infomercials, nearly every TV market had at least one station that did Friday- or Saturday-night horror movies, usually with a host. In Madison, it was …
… The Inferno, brought to you by American TV & Appliance, on WMTV (channel 15). It was originally called “Ferdie’s Inferno,” after Ferdinand Mattioli, the first owner of American TV. After Mattioli died of cancer, his younger brother, Leonard, took over the company, and the show became known as “Lenny’s Inferno.” The host was Mr. Mephisto, and the box talked back to the host. The younger Mattioli was a legend in Madison TV, with the most, shall we say, energetic commercials on the tube.
This is a photo of the old WISC-TV studios on the West Beltline. The “Radio AM-FM” refers to what later became WISM and what now is WMGN (98.1 FM, “Magic 98”). WISC was the host of the first appointment TV I recall, “Circus 3,” Madison’s answer to Chicago’s “Bozo’s Circus,” featuring ventriloquist Howie Olson and Cowboy Eddie, apparently a relative of Howdy Doody, along with, as you see from the back wall, the classics:
WISC also had the market’s first noon news, the “Farm Hour,” the theme music to which was Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown.” (The same music as the old “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” TV ads. If I ever own a radio station that does farm news, that will be the farm news sounder.)
WISC was actually Madison’s third commercial TV station, but because it had the only VHF channel (2 to 13 in the pre-digital days), it became the Madison TV market’s number one station almost as soon as the transmitter was turned on. And yet it had perhaps the most interesting history. (Other than, that is, WKOW’s owner selling the station to a company that went bankrupt, which gave the owner the chance to buy back his stations. The fact I was an intern at WKOW at the time had nothing to do with WKOW’s owner’s bankruptcy … I think.)
According to a Madison Magazine article on WISC’s first 50 years, in 1970, WISC received a challenge to renewing its Federal Communications Commission license. (According to a former WISC employee who spoke to my high school journalism class, there was some question as to how WISC got channel 3, and there were some accusations of WISC’s covering news events with cameras that lacked film in them.)
WISC’s response was to create Madison’s first and last hour-long news, “Eyewitness News,” at a time when perhaps Madison didn’t really have enough news to fill an hour at 6 p.m. That lasted until the mid-1970s, when WISC returned the 6 p.m. news to half an hour and started the market’s first 5 p.m. news under the banner of “Action News.”
WISC’s 50th anniversary website has a lot of video and photos, including a reunion with Cowboy Eddie, but sadly it does not have photos of the first Action News set. Picture in your mind a checkerboard of blue wooden squares and yellowish glass, with the visuals for the stories projected onto the glass. The anchors sat not at a desk, but on low-backed chairs holding their scripts in their laps.
Tedd O’Connell, who later went on to become the first news director of WGBA-TV in Green Bay, anchored for 15 years. The weather guy was John Digman, a short redhead who used the antenna from a 1949 Cadillac as his pointer. After a couple of years, WISC decided Action News needed a desk after all, so they made one, in the shape of a giant number 3. (Perhaps emulating WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, the state’s first commercial TV station, whose news anchors read the news from behind a giant 4 around the same time.) Later in the 1970s, WISC ditched the checkerboard for a more conventional-looking set, other than its yellow, orange and green colors.
(WISC’s 50th anniversary website also doesn’t have this blast from my personal past. The night before my girlfriend, who was a year ahead of me at Madison La Follette, was to graduate, we were at her house, when WISC’s just-before-9 p.m. news update came up, with, I believe, O’Connell teasing a Madison high school senior skip day bust. She and I spent the next hour speculating on which high school got busted; we dismissed La Follette immediately. So 10 p.m. arrived, and O’Connell announced that several arrests were made at a senior skip day … for La Follette. Specifically, some of her classmates.)
Finally, something you almost never see anymore: A TV station signoff:
I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program Friday at 8 a.m.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill. (that is, the state whose finances are worse than Wisconsin’s), WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
On the opposite side of me will be former state attorney general Peg Lautenschlager. As a part-Norwegian, part-German, part-Polish pundit, in all the years I’ve been doing media punditry, I believe this is the first time someone on a panel has had a longer last name than me.
The Independence Day holiday is not always a three-day weekend, but when it is, it’s my favorite weekend.
One reason is fireworks, one of the lesser known fields of endeavor that has seen tremendous advancements over the years.
We decided to watch, schedules and weather and so on permitting, as much in fireworks as we could get to over the next few days. There were fireworks Friday, there are fireworks Saturday through Monday, and there is even a display Tuesday night. (Which we were going to until a wave of illness and fatigue hit the house.)
Our fireworks odyssey starts with these photos Michael took at the Waushara County Fairgrounds in Wautoma Friday:
On Saturday, we went to Princeton (where we once went hoping the booms would induce labor):
On Sunday we went to Murray Park in Ripon:
On Independence Day, we saw the Fond du Lac fireworks from a distance:
Want to see everything as a slideshow?
Between my former and current blogs, I wrote a lot about automobiles and TV and movies. Think of this post as killing two birds (Thunderbirds? Firebirds? Skylarks?) with one stone.
Most movies and TV series view cars the same way most people view cars — as A-to-B transportation. (That’s not counting the movies or series where the car is the plot, like the haunted “Christine” or “Knight Rider” or the “Back to the Future” movies.) The philosophy here, of course, is that cars are not merely A-to-B transportation. Which disqualifies most police shows from what you’re about to read, even though I’ve watched more police video than anything else, because police cars are plain Jane vehicles.
The highlight in a sense is in the beginning: The car chase in my favorite movie, “Bullitt,” featuring Steve McQueen’s 1968 Ford Mustang against the bad guys’ 1968 Dodge Charger:
One year before that (but I didn’t see this until we got Telemundo on cable a couple of years ago) was a movie called “Operación 67,” featuring (I kid you not) a masked professional wrestler, his unmasked sidekick, and some sort of secret agent plot. (Since I don’t know Spanish and it’s not subtitled, that’s about all I can tell you.) The highlight of the movie is a duel between a 1965 Dinalpin A110 (apparently a Mexican-built Renault Alpine) and an airplane equipped with machine guns:
Unlike James Bond’s Aston Martins (apparently MI6 has more budget than whatever these guys work for), the A110 doesn’t have any special features at all, but our hero thoughtfully threw a bazooka in the trunk before he left. (Note to self: Check Army surplus store to see if they have any bazookas on clearance.)
The Dodge Challenger in “Vanishing Point” didn’t have a name, but its driver didn’t have a first name either:
The same year “Vanishing Point” was released, “Two-Lane Blacktop” featured a new Pontiac GTO and a 1955 Chevrolet 150 with a much-more-powerful-than-stock V-8:
(The Chevy, painted black, was driven by Harrison Ford in “American Graffiti.”)
Another early example is Eleanor, the Mustang featured in the original cult classic “Gone in 60 Seconds“:
I stumbled upon an early formula for TV series success: Cool car + cool theme music = something I’d watch. Although I didn’t watch much of this, one early example was “Mannix,” which combined the theme music of Lalo Schifrin (whose birthday was earlier this week) and, at first, the only Oldsmobile Toronado convertible and then a Dodge Dart GT convertible into a series in which the hero, by one count, was shot 17 times, knocked unconscious 55 times, and drugged 12 times:
There was a TV series, “Chase,” that ran one season on NBC in 1973. (It was repeated on USA Network one mid-1980s summer.) That show must have been a gearhead kid’s dream, because it featured (1) a souped-up Plymouth Satellite, (2) a motorcycle, (3) a helicopter and (4) a police dog. Unfortunately, other than listings of the series, there is no online evidence the series ever existed.
After “Chase” exited, Jim Rockford drove onto the scene:
Unlike a series you’re about to read about (the literary types call that “foreshadowing”), someone thought to replace Rockford’s 1974 Firebird with a 1977 Firebird when Pontiac replaced the dual round headlights with quad rectangular headlights. “The Rockford Files” was also known for epic car chases every other episode or so. (I wrote about the 10 best movie car chases for the previous blog, but that too has gone into e-heaven, it seems.)
One of the most famous series of the ’70s was “Starsky & Hutch,” which featured a red Ford Torino with a Nike-like white swoosh. I’m sure no one would have connected that car to belonging to the police, right?
In late 1976 Motor Trend did a story about the S&H Torino and, pointing out that Ford had just canceled the Torino, noted that “insiders are looking for a spectacular crash in an upcoming script,” and wondering with what the Torino would be replaced. The answer, of course, was … another Torino, something sort of noted in the “Starsky & Hutch” movie, when the Torino that was driven off a dock was replaced by … another Torino driven up by Paul Michael Glaser (whose movie part was played by Ben Stiller) and David Soul (whose movie part was played by Owen Wilson).
Speaking of movies …
(By the way: Pontiac never made a LeMans four-door convertible in 1976 or any other year.)
After Smokey drove onto the screen, along came “CHiPs”:
The coolest wheels were the motorcycles, of course. (At the time the California Highway Patrol was using Kawasakis instead of Harley–Davidsons or, apparently now, BMWs.) This was the first series, however, where I noticed that the same cars were passed every week, and the same vehicles were in the middle of each week’s epic crash. (In fact, one bad-guy car became Ponch’s car, a Pontiac Firebird with both the Trans Am shaker scoop and the Formula Ram Air scoops.) The other thing that annoyed me was the episode in which Ponch and Jon were assigned to a squad car because of bad weather, and their boss told them it was a new squad, when in fact it was about a three-year-old car. (Even though we didn’t own any Chrysler products, I could tell the difference between a full-size Dodge Monaco and a mid-sized Dodge Monaco!)
While Ponch and Jon were patrolling the freeways of southern California, Bo and Luke Duke were racing and being chased by the crooked establishment of Hazzard of some unnamed Southern state:
(Non-Wisconsinites may not know that Tom Wopat, who played Luke, is a native of Lodi. Non-Madisonians may not know that I went to high school with Tom’s cousin. And in some future blog, I may write about the incongruity of the family relationships about three cousins living with an uncle who is the father of none of them, once I figure out the Clampett family.)
The bad thing about “Dukes” (other than Bo and Luke’s several-episode departure due to a salary dispute in which they were replaced by, you guessed it, two other cousins who looked just like Bo and Duke) is the number of people who took perfectly good 1969 Dodge Chargers and ruined them by making Dukesmobiles.
And then we move to Hawaii:
What was not to like about this series? The lush scenery of Hawaii, and a charismatic star who drives a Ferrari! Add loyal friends, an amusing antagonist, mostly good stories, babes easy on the eyes (although Magnum never seemed to connect with them; perhaps that was part of his appeal too, that he was as much a klutz with women as his male viewers), and perfect targa-top-friendly weather.
Proving that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Magnum’s success bred several imitators, including “Hardcastle & McCormick,” with the latter … well, the first-season titles explain the premise:
Related to McCormick’s Coyote (which was actually a modified Manta Montage) was the “Hawk,” a heavily modified AMC Javelin for the miniseries “Wheels,” Arthur Hailey’s fictionalized retelling of Lee Iacocca’s battle to create the Ford Mustang. (“Wheels” should not be confused with “The Betsy,” a movie about the creation of a fuel-efficient car that was named to the 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made list in The Official Razzie Movie Guide.)
Down under, Australian director George Miller was making considerably darker movies with a Ford Falcon Interceptor, “the last of the V-8s”:
I’m not sure how integral to the part the Ferraris (a 365 GTS/4 replica on a Corvette chassis and a very real Testarossa) driven by Miami–Dade Police Detective James “Sonny” Crockett were, but they certainly fit in with the series feel:
It is interesting to note that very few TV series or movies have featured America’s sports car, the Corvette. (The aforementioned Corvette-powered Daytona replica doesn’t count.) The Vette was integral to “Route 66,” of course:
Robert Conrad exported a C3 convertible to Vienna to channel his inner Rick Blaine in “Assignment Vienna“:
Just after that, before the scientific accident that turned him into the Incredible Hulk, Bill Bixby drove a white Corvette in the two-season “The Magician”:
There was the movie “Corvette Summer,” but the custom Vette is, frankly, an abomination, with asymmetrical hood scoops and, stupidly, right-hand drive:
Then you have to go all the way to a series by Jim Rockford’s creator, “Stingray,” which featured a ’65 Corvette driven by, of course, Ray:
So apparently I need to create a TV series, with Lalo Schifrin creating the theme music, where the hero drives a Corvette. (Particularly today, National Drive Your Corvette to Work Day.) That will have to be my weekend project. (Perhaps an out-of-work journalist who secretly performs feats of derring-do, rights wrongs, punishes the bad guys, and blogs? Naaaaaaahhhh ….)
The newest project of the Ripon Channel, the Ripon Channel Report, is now online with some guy they got off the street to host it:
(Also available on Facebook.)
Since I have neither a Teleprompter nor a UFB (earpiece), the whole thing has sort of a 1980 vibe, doesn’t it?
Ripon Charter Cable subscribers can see the Ripon Channel Report weekends on channel 97, and Charter digital subscribers in the Ripon area (including, I think, Princeton, Green Lake, Berlin, Omro and the Town of Algoma) can see the Ripon Channel Report on digital channel 986.
The subject of this post requires its own soundtrack:
Family Radio has been broadcasting and advertising that the end of the world will occur Saturday at 6 p.m. wherever you are.
RBR.com reports:
According to a fact sheet published on the group’s website, this is what is about to happen: “On May 21, 2011 two events will occur. These events could not be more opposite in nature, the one more wonderful than can be imagined; the other more horrific than can be imagined. A great earthquake will occur the Bible describes it as ‘such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.’ This earthquake will be so powerful it will throw open all graves. The remains of the all the believers who have ever lived will be instantly transformed into glorified spiritual bodies to be forever with God.” The rest will be “thrown out upon the ground to be shamed,” and will experience “horror and chaos beyond description.”
There will be an interim period running from 5/21/11 until 10/21/11, when Family Radio says final destruction of the Earth take place.
The Family Radio website notes that it is still accepting donations, and although its donor computer operation is said to be undergoing maintenance, the group says it has representatives on hand to process donations from call-in givers. It accepts credit or debit cards.
So any ministers reading this apparently need not bother to prepare a sermon or homily for Sunday.
I pointed out in selecting Family Radio my “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes” Loser of the Week that evidently Family Radio was unfamiliar with Matthew 24:36, which readeth: “But of that day and hour knows no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”
Oh, but Harold Camping, owner of Family Radio, has an explanation:
In the Bible a wise man is a true believer, to whom God has given a profound trust in the authority of the Bible. True believers have been in existence since the beginning of time. But the timeline of history as it is revealed in the Bible was never revealed to the hearts of the true believers. For example, throughout most of the church age it was generally believed that Creation occurred in the year 4004 B.C.
However, about 35 years ago God began to open the true believers’ understanding of the timeline of history. Thus it was discovered that the Bible teaches that when the events of the past are coordinated with our modern calendar, we can learn dates of history such as Creation (11,013 B.C.), the flood of Noah’s day (4990 B.C.), the exodus of Israel from Egypt (1447 B.C.) and the death of Solomon (93l B.C.)*
However, it was not until a very few years ago that the accurate knowledge of the entire timeline of history was revealed to true believers by God from the Bible. This timeline extends all the way to the end of time. During these past several years God has been revealing a great many truths, which have been completely hidden in the Bible until this time when we are so near the end of the world.
(The essay gets more creative from there, believe me.)
So Camping is, similar to Matthew Harrison Brady (that is, William Jennings Bryan) in “Inherit the Wind,” a believer that the Earth is only tens of thousands of years old. I am neither a scientist nor a theologian, but it seems rather presumptuous to limit God to a 24-hour day, does it not? The Episcopal Church, to which I’ve belonged for a decade, describes itself as a tricycle of Scripture (the big wheel), tradition and reason. And there is no real reason that evolution is incompatible with God’s creation.
The minister who married my wife and me claims that there is only one verse of the Bible, John 3:16, that does not require an additional verse to back it up. Matthew 24:36 has two — Mark 13:32 (“But of that day and that hour knows no man, no not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father”) and, from my favorite book of the Bible, Acts 1:7 (“And he said to them, it is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has put in his own power”). Moreover, the quoted words of Jesus Christ would seem to have paramount ranking as a source of information for Christians, would they not?
A Brief History of the Apocalypse has a listing of predictions of the end of the world dating all the way back to 2800 B.C. A real wave of apocalysomania took place in 1000 A.D., which I guess would have been Y1K. (I remember Y2K, when driving back home after a sumptuous not-really-millennium meal we listened to that paragon of reason, Art Bell, report about mysterious blackouts. Bell somehow neglected to mention that the University of Wisconsin football team’s going to back-to-back Rose Bowls must have been a sign of the end times.) And we’ve had predictions of the end practically every year since 1972. (No, Richard Nixon’s reelection was not one of them, but at the University of Wisconsin, Ronald Reagan’s reelection was.) Before Pat Robertson was claiming that 9/11 and hurricanes were divine retribution, he predicted the end of the world would take place in the fall of 1982. (Breaking up with my first girlfriend and losing my job in the same week seemed like the end of the world, but it wasn’t.)
I recall two specifically. In 1978, Pope Paul VI died, and then his successor, John Paul I, died a month after becoming pope. Newspapers at the time noted the legend of St. Malachy, an Irish priest who wrote down descriptions of every pope from Peter forward. When the list of popes runs out, the legend has it, our time runs out. And there is only one pope left on the list, Benedict XVI’s successor, who by the way is supposed to be the Devil incarnate. (That should make the next College of Cardinals meeting after Benedict’s death really interesting.)
The other prediction, in 1982, was not exactly a prediction of the end, but of galactic disorder caused by all the planets in this solar system lining up. Leonard Nimoy narrated an episode of “In Search Of” that warned of the calamity on the way. Nimoy’s most famous character, Mr. Spock, would have pointed out that such a theory is illogical because the planets are not all on the same plane. (To which Dr. McCoy would have contributed, “How do I know? I’m a doctor, not an astronomer!”)
The planetary alignment previously occurred Feb. 4, 1962; astrologer Jeane Dixon predicted that the Antichrist would be born the next day. (Which means the Antichrist is actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.)
Remember the earthquake that destroyed Taiwan and created the tsunami that killed millions May 11? You don’t, because the prediction of someone named Professor Wang didn’t happen. Of course, this year is less than half over, so we may still enter thePhoton Belt (no, that was not an episode of Star Trek) before the end of the year.
The next prediction of our doom is Dec. 23, 2012, according to the Mayans, whose calendar runs out on that day. (So don’t bother getting Christmas presents next year, and you can skip gassing up the snowblower, when by then gas should be about $14 a gallon.) But if that prediction isn’t accurate, there are plenty of others waiting in the wings. For instance, back in 1960, Science magazine predicted that on Nov. 13, 2026, the world’s population would reach infinity.
Judging from the reactions, I am one of the few people that, until yesterday, was not on Facebook:
But now I am. I found out that there was no one by my name on Facebook, so if you do a search for my name, you are guaranteed to find me. (I am also on LinkedIn, and you can see from the right side of this page that I am Presty1965 on Twitter.)
Until now I had assumed that Facebook was, well, too social for, you know, a business magazine publisher/editor/pundit. Then I was advised by someone considerably more savvy than I in social media (you know who you are, Todd, and thanks) that if it were a country, Facebook would be the third largest country in the world. (I wonder if Facebook is run any better than countries one and two … or for that matter this one.)
Since I have this blog linked to Facebook (as well as LinkedIn and Twitter), I assume all the people I have now Friended and vice versa will find out that, wow, Presty is really a right-winger. (I’ve been a proud member of Hillary Clinton’s Vast Right Wing Conspiracy since the 1990s.) The thing, however, is that (1) I am perfectly capable of not talking about politics (remember that the phrase “the personal is political” did not come from the right side of the political aisle), and (2) I have no problems arguing ideas because ideas are supposed to be argued, and the way one improves the process of delivering opinions is to debate opinions. And, now that I think of it, there is a (3): If you don’t like a blog entry, don’t read it.
I will be a guest on WTMJ-TV’s “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes” Sunday at 10 a.m.
