The Northward Contrail

One Saturday night

Late one Saturday night in 1981 I was in the dark, the bedroom illuminated only by the glow of a Hitachi portable black and white television. Our parents would sometimes let us stay up late on the weekends and watch Saturday Night Live. That's what I was doing. This particular episode stood out because of two sketches - one incredibly silly (if over my head at the time), and one that sort of frightened me. About a dozen years ago, when you could catch reruns of the '81 season on cable, I saw those sketches again, but since I didn't have the VCR ready (and wasn't aware the episode was on) I couldn't tape them. Thankfully, it's Hulu to the rescue.

Here's the one that frightened me a little. Yeah, now I can appreciate its silliness and the cheesy way it was done, but when you're a kid and you see this (especially in the dark, and without any warning), it sort of creeps you out a bit, and in a way it haunted me for years. (Maybe it was the Piscopo factor? I don't know.)

And here's the one I loved for its silliness. The cutaway to the chorus of doctors is what I remembered, but until I saw it again a few years ago I'd forgotten it got just a little out of hand. It's a little tasteless, but when you remember this man had a hand in writing it, that explains a lot.

Unfortunately, only part of the episode is available, and you don't get to see this little gem (yes, Joe Patroni himself actually sang). Nor do you get to see the performance by Miles Davis this episode featured that, while not Miles at his best, still blew me away when I saw it on that rebroadcast back in the '90s. Still, being reunited with at least those two sketches from that dark night thirty years ago is worth something, at least for me. (By the way, there's a review of the episode here.)

On days that start getting longer again, eventually

We're back from our trip, and done with Christmas for another year (and I hope to have more to say about both in coming days; the trip ended up being better than I anticipated, while Christmas Day itself, while not exactly like the one I wrote about yesterday, wasn't bad either). I've always thought it a little sad that there's such a buildup to Christmas, and then it's gone. The handful of days between Christmas and New Year's Day are always a time I enjoy, because you're just playing out the string before hanging up a new calendar and everything begins anew.

It's in that spirit I offer this essay about my favorite Christmas-themed television special, courtesy the folks at the AV Club. For me, the really moving part came with these words in the closing, which resonated with thoughts I've had about life's melancholies and minor keys, and the glimmers of light in life's darknesses:

A story doesn’t have to have actually happened to be true. Every word of the Christmas story doesn’t need to be literally accurate for its underlying sentiments—peace and hope and joy—to still speak to us, just as no one would ever argue A Charlie Brown Christmas is non-fiction, but it touches something deep and true in many of us. The great old Christmas carols—“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” or “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” or “What Child Is This?”—are all in minor keys, because they express the world’s longing for something better. Yet life will never be perfect. Even when that something better comes along, the minor key never really goes away, just as the melancholy never quite seeps out of A Charlie Brown Christmas, even during the sing-along at the end. But where those songs and the Bible verses that inspired them look to the heavens for the miracle that will lead us forward, A Charlie Brown Christmas invites us to look to each other, to gather together during the darkest nights of the year and create our own kinds of light. The days will start getting longer again eventually. We just have to wait.

Mr. Rooney

Over the weekend there was a passing. It's significant to me not only because his career spanned most of the history of commercial television, and not only because his passing means yet another veteran of the Eyeball Network's salad days has left us, but it hits home because Andy Rooney was, above all else, a writer. He knew the value of words and the power of language. Sometimes it misfired on him, and spectacularly. But more often than not, I appreciated what he did. I have several of his books, and some of them contain the transcripts from his long-form specials from the 1960s and 1970s. It's writing of the sort you never encounter on television these days, and a sad reminder that although we have hundreds of channels, so little of it is worth the viewing. (I'd dearly love to find some of those specials he did with Harry Reasoner, but they're hard to find; nevertheless, bits and pieces are out there, and since he also served as a producer on some special projects for CBS News, you'll sometimes stumble across a piece on YouTube that definitely shows his influence.)

I also make my living with words, and maintain this blog as a home for the random thoughts that fit nowhere else in my day: the ruminations, complaints, grievances, puzzlements, irritations and occasional appreciations. In its own way, it's my "few minutes" with you each day; it's my own "back of the book" piece, same as Andy Rooney had at the end of 60 Minutes.

But instead of puzzling over something or voicing some random complaint, today's post is squarely in the "appreciation" category. I shall miss him.

My neighbor

After the sadness of the previous two posts, some inspiration and hope may be appropriate as we move on with life.  Thankfully, I didn't have to look too far for those things.  A thread on a discussion board led me to a couple things that warmed my heart as few other things have in a long time, and served as a fond remembrance of a good and gentle man I loved to watch on television growing up.  The first is this beautiful piece, which I believe originally ran in Esquire about 15 years ago.  I loved it then, and I still love it. 

As if that's not enough, this utterly awesome piece of video seems like something out of a movie script, but actually happened. The line from Proverbs about "a gentle answer turneth away wrath" comes to life in this scene.

Let these two things warm your heart and lift your spirits on this Wednesday.

I know the type

There was the time, early in Wide World's run, when Jim McKay and I checked into Ricky's Studio Inn in Palo Alto, California, a few days before the next U.S.-USSR track meet, held at Stanford University.  That establishment was so sprawling that guests were ferried to their rooms aboard golf carts.  On the way over, our driver, an eager Stanford student, asked if we were with ABC.  When we said yes, he exclaimed, "Golly, I'd do anything for a chance to work in television sports."

I remembered what had resulted for me years before from serving a hungry man and his family late one night at the Wayside Inn.

"Okay, come over to the production truck outside the stadium Friday morning. We'll find something for you to do.  It'll give you a foot in the door."

"Friday?" he said.  "Gee, I can't.  I'm going water-skiing."

When he dropped us off, Jim said, "That kid will go through the rest of his life saying, 'I could never get a break.'"

                    -- from Roone: A Memoir by Roone Arledge (p. 59-60)

Submitted for your approval

While I'm too busy today with too many other things, check out what the A.V. Club has now started doing: reviewing episodes of The Twilight Zone, starting with the pilot and moving forward.  Utterly awesome.  While you're at it, check out this piece about "The Arena," a Studio One written by Serling.

So much for that

A couple mornings ago we were doing the usual morning-get-ready stuff.  Hubby likes to turn on one of the local stations for weather and news.  Since my tolerance for broadcast news is incredibly low (and since my tolerance for most local news outlets is roughly equal to my tolerance for fingernails on a chalkboard), I'll find something else to do while he watches the morning news program. 

It's your typical program: male anchor, female anchor, weather guy who tries to be funny, and a little bit of an effort to be informative but mostly a lot of fluff.  And a lot of happy-talk.  Anyone who has ever known how I am in the morning knows that I do not do happy talk.  There was a reason I watched Don Imus for so many years; he was the only person on in the morning whose demeanor was as gruff and cranky as mine is in the morning.  (It's also why I wish they could find a way to bring Hughes Rudd back from the dead.)

Anyway, the content of this morning news program is your typical casserole of what passes for television news these days, and that's anything of any real substance either being mishandled or just given a two-sentence summary in the studio, in between the co-anchors trying to be your funniest, bestest friend ever.  What gets the longer play are the touchy-feely stories, or the "news you can use" stories, usually your consumer-oriented stuff.  But, once in a while, you'll spot something fishy about these stories.  I did the other day.  One video piece presented under the guise of "news" was so blatantly, obviously a VNR that I saw red.  And it was full of half-truths.  And yet this station was presenting it just like it was the Gospel. 

Now, the temptation was very strong to do more than just yell at the television.  I had serious thoughts of getting in touch with the station and saying, "Look, I saw this, and I know what you did."  Because what I teach my students is the exact opposite of this.  I teach my kids about VNRs.  I spend so much of my career trying to get them to realize they are being manipulated in subtle ways, because everybody -- be it politicians, be it corporations, be it celebrities, be it whatever -- is trying to persuade you, and it ain't your best interest they have in mind.

But as I was honing my ire into a fine spear's tip, I remembered something.  The station that aired this VNR is one of the very TV stations we're wanting to build an alliance with at work.  And for that to work, it's very important I do nothing to offend them.  We need them a lot more than they need us.  Yeah, I could fire off an e-mail full of indignation, but not only would it accomplish precisely nothing, it would also probably cost my students internship opportunities and our department a valuable partnership.  They hold the cards. I don't.  Yes, stuff like this turns my stomach.  I know what the true ethicist would do.  But their station represents opportunities for our kids.

And, besides, if I complained about it, it would accomplish nothing.  The ethicists in our trade (and I'm one) can rail about the use of VNRs, but it's widespread; much as we despise them, they're not going away.  I know full well I could complain about that VNR and even if I got a "yeah, you caught us" from the news department, be it in two weeks or two months I'd see the same damn thing happen again.  It's because VNRs offer an easy and tempting fix to the age-old problem of "we need content, we need it cheap, and we need it now."  It's the very problem the creators of VNRs know about when they create them, just as the creators of press releases rely on newspaper editors needing material to fill out a page.  It's widespread.  To use the old analogy, complaining about it is like complaining about speeding at the Indy 500.  It's just the nature of the beast, especially during a time when media outlets have an insatiable desire for content and yet don't want to spend what it would require to get true high-quality content (and during a time when, for most people, content goes in one ear and out the other anyway).

Oh, well.  At the very least, I've come away with another example I can use in the classroom.  The older I get, the more I believe that the present-day state of our profession is hopelessly lost.  However, I can make a difference for the next generation, and that's why I work so hard to train them properly and train them well, for someday when they are calling the shots, there's hope for them making the right call.

(And, one day, if I do strike oil in the back yard or win the lottery or whatever, I'm starting my own television station.  It's going to hire the best journalists it can -- nobody can work for our news department unless they've had at least two years working a beat at a newspaper -- and it's going to seek out real news and present it each morning, evening and night with absolutely no crap, no fluff, no snappy theme music, no "we're pretending to be your best friend" sloganeering.  It's going to be what broadcast news should be.  It's going to be great.  And it's going to crater in the ratings and drive me to bankruptcy in less than three months, I'll bet.)

The morning ritual

There was a little ritual I had every morning when I was a high school student.  I had to be up by a certain time each morning, because I had to watch A.M. Weather.  And if I missed even a little bit of that show, I wasn't happy.

I'm not sure how I discovered this little show.  It was one of those things that had been there forever, and maybe one morning I happened across it and was taken by it or mesmerized by all the maps or something like that.  But it became a morning ritual.  Every morning I had to be up in time to catch it, from the underwriters' billboards at the top of the show (Phillips 66!  Showalter Aviation!  The Gorman-Rupp Company!) all the way through to the very end.

As fascinated as I became by how different the show was, the more I watched, the more I picked things up.  I learned little things about how weather works.  And it was also my first exposure to aviation weather forecasting, too.  A.M. Weather had a lot of support from the aviation community (those underwriters' billboards were the way I first became aware of the AOPA and the Ninety-Nines, for instance).  There was a lot of information packed into each of those little 15-minute programs.  Joan and Carl and Wayne and the other forecasters who'd occasionally fill in became a familiar presence, and I admired how they presented so much good information so quickly.  Plus, they didn't fool around with happy talk; they cut the crap and got straight to the point, which is appreciated very much when (like me) you're not a morning person.

After high school ended I stopped watching, for there was no longer a reason for me to be up that early, and a few years later the suits at Maryland Public Television made a business decision and took the show off the air.  To this day, A.M. Weather is mourned by many, especially in the aviation community, and despite some rumblings here and there, efforts to bring it back have not worked out.  But it's still loved, and still missed.  Thankfully, a few episodes are still out there, and you can get a little taste of what it was like if you click here.  (Somewhere in my sea of junk, I have an episode on videotape.  I recorded it one morning to needle a friend who was amused by my fascination with the show.  I seriously need to find that tape.)

All of this came full circle a few weeks ago, as I was completing my application to join the Ninety-Nines.  On the application, you're asked how you became aware of the organization.  So help me, what did I write? Something to the effect of, "I first became aware of your organization because of A.M. Weather."

Little show, you are gone but not forgotten, and you are missed.  And if by some miracle you came back, I'd make room for you in my mornings once again.

The unthinkable

Over the weekend -- and I'm not sure what set it off, but it happened -- my Cold War fascination was reawakened.  I spent a lot of time in the giant rabbit hole that is the Internet, reading up on weapons systems and Soviet politics and atomic tests and people like this guy.  And, too, reading up on incidents that brought the unthinkable frighteningly close to becoming reality (this is a too-brief list, but it's a start at least). 

And I spent some time thinking about the various audiovisual content produced during that time.  There's always this old standby, along with this somber contemporary...then there's this and this, and while I have yet to watch either (but I know I'll probably have to, in the name of some research I may undertake in the future), I understand full well each is still a kick in the guts a quarter-century later. 

One thing I'd forgotten about, but happened to find bits of online, is this documentary.  The scenario may have its flaws, but it's interesting to see the actual system depicted as it theoretically would have operated, using the actual hardware, in the first segment.  Then from there, though it has a lot of talking heads, it remains interesting in its own way -- and, since it's from a time when my own consciousness of the Cold War was just starting up, it sends chills of familiarity down my spine.  I remember the controversies over the MX Missile, for instance...and, of course, in 1979 there was no way of knowing that the Cold War was a few years away from getting extremely frosty (or that this guy would scare us all to death).  Or, for that matter, of knowing that a decade later, things would radically change.

I know there's still danger out there, and that in its own way the times in which we now live are more uncertain.  In some ways, it's a safer world; in other ways, it's not, and though we don't think about it that much there are still scenarios that could play out and bring global destruction.  Nevertheless, as someone whose childhood fears became a fascination with the Cold War, it's interesting to spend time with these kinds of things. 

Even if, sometimes, the memories they bring back make it a little harder to get to sleep at night.

Stuff you gotta do

Taking a day off from blogging because there's stuff I gotta do today.  So, instead, here's Roy Clark.