Two anniversaries today in 1965: The Beatles’ “Beatles VI” reached number I, where it stayed for VI weeks …
… while the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” was their first number one single:
Who is Ronald James Padavona? You know him better as Ronnie James Dio, whose death in 2010 ended a career of remarkable breadth:
Willie Ford of the Dramatics:
Rik “The Rocket” Emmett of Triumph was born …
… one year before Neil Tennant, one of the Pet Shop Boys:
Today in 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” was played around the clock because it hit number one:
One year later, Dick Clark made his first appearance on ABC-TV’s “American Bandstand”:
Today in 1972, Paul McCartney and Wings began their first tour of France:
Birthdays begin with Ronald Belford. Who, you ask? Bon Scott of AC/DC:
Debbie Sledge was one of the Sister(s) Sledge:
Peter Marc Almond sang for Soft Cell:
Jim Kerr led Simple Minds and was married to Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders:
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:
It is generally not considered a good career move to be indicted for drug trafficking, as Jonathan “Chico” and Robert DeBarge were today in 1988:
Birthdays begin with Jaimoe “Johnny” Johanson, drummer for the Allman Brothers:
Greg T. Walker played bass for Blackfoot:
Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode:
Carlos Cavazo of Quiet Riot:
Graham Jones of Haircut 100:
WisBusiness.com interviewed a few Wisconsin business executives, and found them complimentary of the Walker administration and its approach to Wisconsin’s employers so far:
“We did very well,” said Kurt Bauer, CEO of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby.
“We’ve seen some historic reforms both within the budget and within the first six months of the session that have really changed the business climate and how business leaders around the nation see Wisconsin.” …
Brandon Scholz, CEO of the Wisconsin Grocers Association, said he, too, was pleased with the budget bill because it didn’t include new regulations, tax hikes or fees and “does not make it tougher for companies that drive our economy and hire people.”
“This is a good budget because it doesn’t impose any additional burdens on the business community,” he said.
Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, also lauded Walker and the Legislature.
“This budget will protect and enhance some of the key investments in small business formation in Wisconsin, which is an area where Wisconsin has great potential to improve,” he said.
“Creating 10,000 new businesses over four years will be a tall order, but it’s achievable if the state and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. foster the right conditions and provide appropriate incentives. Technology-based businesses create jobs that pay well above the statewide average, and Wisconsin is poised to compete on a global basis.”
Not everyone is pleased, of course. One displeased person has good reason; the other does not, and he is …
“Gov. Walker’s budget includes tax breaks for manufacturers even if they cut jobs,” said Assembly Democratic Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, a former Midwest regional administrator to the U.S. Small Business Administration. “Unfortunately, this budget also slashes funding by nearly a third for job retraining programs that companies support and that help match workers with new jobs.”
Barca said Walker and Republican legislative leaders should be using targeted tax cuts that focus on economic development initiatives directly targeted at producing jobs.
In other words, Barca wants to go back to the approach of the Doyle administration, which resulted in the crappy economy and business climate the Walker administration is trying to undo, plus a multi-billion-dollar budget deficit to boot. Voters had their say about that approach Nov. 2, which is why Barca is now in the minority party in the Legislature. (And how did Barca get to the SBA? Because his Congressional career ended at the hands of former U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann, that’s how — fortunately for Barca before Bill Clinton’s term as president ended.)
The valid objection:
Jeff Hamilton, president of the Wisconsin Brewers Guild and Milwaukee’s Sprecher Brewing Co., said he was disappointed Walker didn’t veto a provision in the budget that small brewers believe will harm their ability to expand.
“Generally, the majority of this budget is a good thing,” he said. “But business models that were available to us before this budget no longer exist, so our company has been devalued and opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop their businesses have been taken away and we’re not too happy about that.”
He said his association is working with several legislators do away with the changes.
Hamilton also bristled at comments by Walker that craft brewers didn’t understand changes to the state’s beer distribution rules in the budget.
“For him to say that was insulting to small brewers because it implies that we don’t know anything about our business or the government affairs that affect it,” he said.
Hamilton echoes a point made in this blog and by others — that government has no business picking winners and losers, whether that means a kind of business (green energy, for instance) or a specific business (MillerCoors over Anheuser–Busch in this case).
Bauer made another point about which I will quibble:
… passage of a balanced budget without raising taxes … “sends a message to business leaders in our state and nationwide that Wisconsin is no longer in denial about the seriousness of our chronic budget deficits. It has created a positive buzz for our state.“
He said the balanced budget contrasts Wisconsin “very nicely” with the neighboring states of Illinois, which has raised taxes, and proposed tax hikes in Minnesota.
“It also removes uncertainly about the future direction of the state for business leaders, which positions Wisconsin better than many other states which lack the courage to make the tough but necessary choices to get their fiscal houses in order.”
Removing uncertainty is good. (The substantial uncertainty about what Barack Obama wants to infest upon business has much to do with why the U.S. economy is how it now is.) The budget, however, is only legally balanced, not factually balanced, because state law requires only that the budget be balanced on a cash basis, and not on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, as most states require. Given that Wisconsin was one of only two states to have a GAAP deficit every year during the first decade of the 21st century, I’m guessing the state still has a substantial GAAP deficit.
Even though, as Hamilton puts it, “the majority of this budget is a good thing,” it’s far too early to claim that the state’s economy will improve. For one thing, if the recall elections go the wrong way, further initiatives to improve the state’s business climate would be stopped by a Democrat-controlled Senate, or even a one-vote-majority GOP Senate if that one vote is Sen. Dale Schultz (RINO–Richland Center). (Of course, Democrats are deluding themselves in thinking a Democrat-controlled Senate will be able to roll back, for instance, public employee collective bargaining restrictions given Walker’s strongest veto pen in the nation.)
The bad business climate this state has had throughout the 2000s will require much more repair, in reducing taxes, defanging overaggressive regulators, reducing taxes, reducing the size and scope of state and local government, and reducing taxes. Progress depends on what happens in the August recall elections and the November 2012 elections, and what the Legislature and governor do in between elections.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Florida) wasn’t talking about Wisconsin, but what he said about the country as a whole particularly applies to Wisconsin: “We don’t need new taxes. We need new taxpayers.” As in those filling new jobs created by entrepreneurs.
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.
Today in 1967, the Beatles released “All You Need Is Love” …
… which proved insufficient for the Yardbirds, which disbanded one year later:
Trumpet players must recognize the birthday of Carl “Doc” Severinsen, who led the “Tonight” show band and was principal pops conductor for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra:
The aforementioned “All You Need Is Love” was released on the 27th birthday of Richard Starkey, better known as Ringo Starr:
Warren Entner of the Grass Roots …
… was born one year before James Rodford of The Kinks:
Larry “Rhino” Reinhardt of Iron Butterfly:
Lynval Golding was one of the Fun Boy Three:
An optimistic view of today’s economy comes from Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein:
Back in May, before it became the conventional wisdom, we wrote that the US was in for another “soft patch” but the best course for investors was to ignore it (link to May 23 MMO).
At the time, we said the massive drop in production in Japan would cause business disruptions in the US, particularly in the manufacturing sector and for automakers more than anyone else. In addition, the wicked tornado season appeared to have postponed some home building. Our bottom-line was that these disruptions would be temporary. Any weakness in the second quarter, we thought, would be made up in the third and fourth quarters. …
The debate appears to be over and we say “hasta la vista, soft patch.” It’s over. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any more tepid data over the next few months. Real GDP growth in Q2 is going to be weak – and the pessimists will moan and cry about it for months. But more timely reports have already turned for the better. …
Shipments of “core” capital goods, which exclude defense and aircraft, were up 1.4% in May and up at a nearly 15% annual rate in the past three months.
In addition, housing starts increased 3.5% in May while building permits rose 8.2%. Permits are now 4.6% higher than a year ago. With the exception of late 2009 and early 2010, when that sector got a temporary boost from the homebuyer tax credit, this is the first time since early 2006 that permits have beaten year-ago levels.
The big report this week will be on employment for June, to be released early Friday morning. Private sector payrolls only expanded 83,000 in May. But, given the drop in unemployment claims, we think the job market re-accelerated in June.
Forbes.com columnist Brian Domitrovic could count as an optimist given that he sees economic growth as substandard — that is, economic growth of the 1980s:
In the long, quarter-century booms of the second half of the 20th century, the economy grew at 3.3% per year. This was precisely the rate of GDP expansion from 1945 to 1973 and 1982 to 2007.
But coming out of deep contractions, the rate of growth was a point higher, some 4.5% per year, for extended runs. 1947-1953, for example, a period following a steep GDP trough, growth averaged 4.6% per year. After the three Eisenhower recessions of 1953, 1957-58, and 1960, the JFK-LBJ years of 1961-1969 saw growth at 4.8% annually. And the Ronald Reagan “seven fat years” of 1982-1989, which put stagflation to pasture, had growth of 4.3% per year. …
In 2010, supposedly the first full year of recovery, the economy grew at a 2.9% rate. The comparable year of the Reagan recovery, 1984, saw two and a half times that number, 7.2%. …
I take a special interest in this question because one of my research concerns is why growth in the great runs of the 20th century was actually so – substandard. Booms in the 19th century – for example, 1875 to 1892 – saw growth sustained for decades at 5.3%. A growth rate of 5.3% means that in just twenty-five years, the economy is two-thirds larger than under a rate of 3.3%.
What was the secret to the outsized growth of the 19th century, particularly its latter portion, the Gilded Age? There were great technological innovations and large population increases, to be sure – but these things came in the 20th century as well. What was different back then was the absence of macroeconomic institutions.
There was no Federal Reserve, and there was no income tax – both would be created in 1913. Therefore, there were no instruments through which the government could conduct monetary or fiscal policy. Government’s role in shaping the economy was confined to regulating trade and enforcing contracts.
No wonder we had such an incredible boom. The funny thing about it was that whenever the great run flagged in the 19th century, it correlated with attempts to introduce monetary and fiscal policy. …
The fundamental lesson of American political economy since the halcyon days of the industrial revolution is that our economic greatness issues from the disinclination of the government to intervene in our monetary and fiscal affairs.
Two years ago, officials said, the worst recession since the Great Depression ended. The stumbling recovery has also proven to be the worst since the economic disaster of the 1930s.
Across a wide range of measures—employment growth, unemployment levels, bank lending, economic output, income growth, home prices and household expectations for financial well-being—the economy’s improvement since the recession’s end in June 2009 has been the worst, or one of the worst, since the government started tracking these trends after World War II.
In some ways the recovery is much like the 1991 and 2001 post-recession periods: All three are marked by gradual output growth rather than sharp snap-backs typical of earlier recoveries. But this recovery may remain lackluster for years, many economists say, because of heavy household debt, a financial system still damaged by the mortgage crisis, fragile confidence and a government with few good options for supporting growth.
Current policies have not stimulated business hiring. If job creation occurs at the same rate as in the 2003–2007 expansion, unemployment will not return to pre-recession levels until 2018. If job creation continues at the low rate of the past year, unemployment will remain permanently high. …
Even with strong economic growth, it will take time for unemployment to return to normal levels. If employers add an average of 260,000 net jobs per month—the rate the payroll survey showed during the late 1990s tech bubble—then unemployment will not return to its natural rate until August 2014.
If employers add 216,000 net new jobs per month—the rate the household survey showed in 1997, the year of the greatest job growth in the tech bubble—unemployment will return to its natural rate in October 2015.
These are optimistic assumptions. The late 1990s was a period of unusually strong economic growth. During the 2003–2007 expansion, employers added an average of 176,000 jobs per month. If the recovery takes that more recent pace, unemployment will not return to normal rates until January 2018. Matching the rate of job growth in the recovery from the last recession would mean Americans would wait seven years for unemployment to recover.
The problem is at the consumer level, confidence is low and that is because, as you showed, showed we had underemployment with one out of every six Americans. The worst element of that is that among the unemployed, against the American history, more than approaching half, have [been] unemployed for over six months. That is historically unprecedented in the United States. That is a phenomenon that is seen often in Europe, rarely seen here. In 2007 the average time to get a new job was five weeks. It’s now near six months. And that implies a whole segment of the population, the more elderly or the middle-aged who may never get employed again.
Taxing the “rich” (which we now means anyone who has more money than government employees) will not improve the economy, given that taxes subtract from the economy. (Even the Keynesians believe that.) Increasing government spending harms, not helps, the economy. We see that by the wonderful effect of the $787 billion “stimulus” package President Obama signed into law more than two years ago. Obama inherited a bad economy, but under his watch the economy has gotten worse.
Remember that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours. Ronald Reagan said that recovery would take place when Jimmy Carter was added to the ranks of the unemployed. I’d love to have Barack Obama and all his apparatchiks added to the unemployment rolls, not to mention the Protestarama participants, merely out of principle. (The next time the state has a budget deficit, remember: Each state employee costs taxpayers on average $71,000 in salary and benefits.) But I don’t think that would help. In fact, I am thinking that the party currently in power in Washington and the party previously in power in Madison may have damaged our economy beyond human repair.
Can one wish a happy birthday to an entire band? If so, wish Jefferson Airplane a happy birthday:
Or perhaps you’d like to celebrate Bill Haley’s birthday around the clock:
Gene Chandler:
Who is Terrence “Jet” Harris? He is credited with popularizing the bass guitar in Britain and helping give Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones (who ended up in Led Zeppelin) their starts:
Rik Elswit of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show:
Madison native John Jorgenson of the Desert Rose Band:
Michael Grant of Musical Youth, which asks you to …
The latest state business climate ranking shows that Wisconsin has ascended from disaster area to, well, mediocrity.
CNBC’s America’s Top States for Business 2011 ranks Wisconsin 25th, up from 29th in 2010. Wisconsin ranks below Minnesota (seventh), Iowa (ninth), Indiana (15th), Missouri (16th) and Illinois (19th), and ahead of only Michigan (34th) among Midwestern states.
The CNBC comparison “measures the states by their own standard: the selling points they use to attract business. We separate those pitches into the ten categories, which are then weighted in the study based on how frequently the states use them as selling points.” Which is an interesting approach. Most business climate comparisons rate states based not on the seller’s perspective, but the buyer’s — that is, the perspective of businesses that have to deal with the tax and regulatory structures of each state, as well as the other things that go into a state’s share of the U.S. economy.
Wisconsin ranked (the higher ranking the better, of course) 13th in the cost of doing business (income and property taxes, office and industrial rental costs, and utility costs), 15th in education (K–12 and post-high school), 19th in quality of life, 21st in technology and innovation, 22nd in infrastructure and transportation and in “economy” (including “projected budget gaps and surpluses”), 23rd in cost of living, 27th in access to capital, 28th in business friendliness (“the perceived ‘friendliness’ of their legal and regulatory frameworks to business”), and 46th in workforce (“the education level of their workforce, as well as the numbers of available workers,” worker training programs, and level of unionization, because “While organized labor contends that a union workforce is a quality workforce, that argument, more often than not, doesn’t resonate with business”).
It is interesting to note that our 13th ranking in the top factor in this survey, cost of doing business, was basically negated by the second factor, “workforce.” The workforce ranking also seems to belie the state’s education ranking (is it possible that state schools are, dare we suggest, overrated?) while demonstrating again that in the minds of business (that is, the employers of most workers), unions are fundamentally anti-business.
The next point perhaps explains why Wisconsin finished where it did in the Midwest:
In 2011, for the first time since we launched the study, states are de-emphasizing their cost of doing business — including taxes and utility rates. That could be because states are facing pressure to raise taxes or lower business incentives in order to balance their budgets. …
Rather than crowing about their low costs, states are increasingly accentuating the positive aspects of a negative economy—like a plethora of available workers.
Wisconsin is one of those states that already raised its taxes — $2 billion of tax increases by the spendthrift Doyle administration and the previous tax-wasting Legislature. Illinois raised its taxes earlier this year, and Minnesota is about to raise its taxes because Minnesotans cannot stand the thought of a government shutdown. So perhaps next year’s comparison will raise Wisconsin’s standing in the Midwest.
Until then, certainly 25th is better than, say, 30th or 44th. It is not, however, something to crow about, which may be why the Walker administration didn’t send out a news release trumpeting a 25th ranking. The various subrankings also seem to indicate that Wisconsin needs to do a lot more work, and not just in taxes, to improve the state’s business ranking.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 