Arlene Dahl's Beauty Spot, circa 1966

When you've seen as many of TV Guide's listings from the 1960s as I have, you get used to certain things that probably haven't been on TV in at least 40 years. One of those things is the daytime five-minute newsbreak. All three networks aired these, primarily in the '60s and '70s, and the faces of these brief news updates were quite well-known: Edwin Newman and Floyd Kalber on NBC, Douglas Edwards on CBS, and Marlene Sanders on ABC, among others. In the mid-60s, however, ABC had a five-minute break of another kind.

It was called Arlene Dahl's Beauty Spot; in last Monday's listing, it aired at 3:25 p.m. CT. Arlene Dahl, the host, was a Hollywood actress who achieved quite a bit of success thanks to her talent and her, well, anatomic assets.* However, she was no dumb blonde—actually, she was a redhead, but you get what I mean—and in 1954, while her acting career was still going strong she branched out into Arlene Dahl Enterprises, marketing cosmetics and designer lingerie. She also had her own syndicated newspaper beauty column, and later she became vice president of an advertising agency. Somewhere in there, she also gave birth to Lorenzo Lamas; her husband at the time (the second of six) was Fernando Lamas who undoubtedly looked marvelous.

*She's also yet another celebrity who hales from Minneapolis, graduating from Washburn High School, which is where I might have gone had we remained here during my teen years, rather than being exiled to the World's Worst Town™. She was a few years ahead of me, of course.

On September 27, 1965 the five-minute Arlene Dahl's Beauty Spot began on ABC; it would run until June 24, 1966, following Never Too Young, and later, Dark Shadows. Here's an episode, to give you an idea of what to expect the next time you see Arlene Dahl in the daytime listings.


TV

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