This week in TV Guide: August 27, 1955

It isn't often that a horse race provides the lead story in TV Guide. It isn't often that a weekday afternoon sporting event, other than the World Series, becomes the most talked-about event of the week. But then, it isn't often that you see two horses like Swaps and Nashua, and therein lies the story.

The California-bred Swaps won the Kentucky Derby in May, defeating Nashua, the "Pride of the East," by a length-and-a-half—a "convincing victory," according to Sports Illustrated. Yet Swaps' owner  chose not to run him in the remaining Triple Crown races, returning instead to the West Coast, where the horse remained undefeated through the summer. Nashua, on the other hand, ran in, and won, both the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes; the Derby defeat to Swaps was his only loss of the year. The public, and the horse racing industry, clamored for a rematch between the two, to settle the question of which horse was the year's best.

Before we go any further, you have to remember that two of the biggest sports in the United States, circa 1955, were horse racing and boxing. Professional football was just beginning to outgrow its infancy, but was not yet as popular as its college counterpart. Baseball was, undisputedly, the national pastime, but the World Series was still a month away. Basketball, hockey, soccer—well, those are sports for another day. Horse racing was where the wealthy rubbed elbows with ordinary folk, where educated touts who studied the Daily Racing Forum matched wits against amateurs betting on a hunch or a lucky number. It was a brilliant microcosm of America in the 1950s. And so, when Ben Lindheimer, the owner of Washington Park in Chicago, arranged for a match race between the two horses to decide things once and for all, it captured the attention of the nation.

The race was scheduled for the afternoon of Wednesday, August 31, at Washington Park: just the two horses, the Eastern champion vs. the Western champion for horse racing supremacy. The jockeys, Willie Shoemaker on Swaps and Eddie Arcaro on Nashua, were two of the very best in the game. The prize was $100,000, winner-take-all. CBS would broadcast the race live to a national television and radio audience estimated in the millions, and despite a post time of just past 5:00 p.m. Central time, a crowd of 35,262 came to Chicago from around the country, while millions more tuned in on radio or television. It was the Super Bowl of its day.

After all that, was the race an anticlimax? Perhaps, although championship games have a way of generating a mystique all their own, regardless of the outcome. Arcaro drives Nashua from the start, forcing Swaps to the outside on a heavy track. (The Western champ was also troubled by a chronic foot problem, but the stakes had been too high to even think of cancelling the race.) Nashua wins the race by six-and-a-half lengths, and with it, the Horse of the Year. Swaps would not race again in 1955, but returned as a four-year-old and won Horse of the Year the following season. Nashua continued to run mostly in the East, Swaps mostly in the West, and although they both raced until 1956, the two never met again. 

And even though the names might fade into the history books—unless you're a dedicated sports or racing fan, do you even remember them?—Nashua leaves his mark: his half-brother, Bold Ruler, a champion in his own right, will sire another horse who created a bit of a stir. His name is Secretariat.

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Well, that's quite a way to start the week, isn't it?  There's actually more big-time sports over the weekend, though it doesn't quite create as much of a buzz: the Davis Cup tennis finals between the defending champion United States team and the challengers from Australia. (Saturday, 1:30 pm., Sunday, 1:00 p.m., NBC) The Davis Cup is a team competition spread over three days: two singles matches on Friday, a doubles match on Saturday, two singles matches Sunday. The first team to win three matches wins the Cup, although all five matches are played regardless. The U.S., as defending champion, was seeded directly into the final, while Australia competed against 34 other countries in matches running from March through early August. No matter; the Aussies, with some of the world's greatest players on the team, sweep the Americans 5-0 to take back the Cup; they'll win again in 1956 and 1957.

Musical comedy is always a crowd pleaser, and on Saturday Max Liebman Presents showcases 1943's "One Touch of Venus" in a live broadcast (8:00 p.m., NBC) with Janet Blair, Russell Nype, and George Gaynes. The music is by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Ogden Nash, and the book by Nash and S.J. Perelman; I think there are as many stars in the credits as there are in the cast. The TV production is generally considered superior to the movie version (you can see a clip of it here; it's on DVD), which starred Ava Gardner and Robert Walker, but I wonder how well it did in the ratings? Live "spectaculars" such as this were the brainchild of NBC's Pat Weaver, but the lavish productions were costly (one Liebman special cost $500,000), and the ratings seldom justified that kind of spending. Lawrence Welk is on at the same time as Liebman, and I'd bet the maestro more than held his own.  

You all know the premise of You Are There, right? The show presents a historical event as it might have been covered had television been in existence at the time, with Walter Cronkite as the host and actual CBS newsmen interviewing the participants. I don't know that I've ever seen them do a presentation of an event that actually was broadcast on TV, though, but they come pretty close on Sunday, as the show relives the events of December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor. (5:30 p.m., CBS) As we know, New York television stations carried wire service reports of the attack (no video from Hawaii, of course), but the major radio networks covered the breaking news. I wonder how many of the newsmen on You Are There were part of that radio coverage?

On Sunday's Toast of the Town (7:00 p.m., CBS), Ed Sullivan's guests are Eartha Kitt, the singing Mariners (formerly of the Arthur Godfrey show); comedian Jay Lawrence; German child acrobat "Wonder Boy John;" and the Chicago Festival singers. Godfrey and Sullivan feuded over Sullivan's propensity of featuring fired Godfrey performers (e.g. Julius LaRosa) on his show, so I'll bet Ed loved zinging Godfrey by having the Mariners on. Opposite Sullivan, the Colgate Variety Hour (7:00 p.m., NBC) has Charlton Heston as host, promoting his new movie The Private War of Major Benson with reenactments of scenes from the movie; his guests are singer-dancer Marjorie Fields, Edger Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and comedian Bob Wiliams. 

A couple of prominent shows feature guest hosts this week; on the season premiere of The Loretta Young Show (Sunday, 9:00 p.m., NBC), Rosalind Russell fills in as hostess for the ailing Loretta, who won't return to the show until Christmastime; her Hollywood friends will continue to sub for her until then. Meanwhile, Steve Allen isn't ill, just on vacation after finishing his lead role in the movie The Benny Goodman Story, so Ernie Kovacs guest hosts for two weeks on Tonight (M-F, 11:00 p.m., NBC). Ernie winds up hosting Tonight two nights a week beginning the next season.

Speaking of vacations, Kukla, Fran and Ollie return from the summer break on Monday (6:00 p.m., ABC), and compare notes on what each one of them did on their summer vacations. And they're not the only ones starting the new season; Jane Wyman is the new host and occasional star on the dramatic anthology series Fireside Theater (not to be confused with Firesign Theatre), which returns Tuesday at 8:00 p.m. on NBC. Father Knows Best returns for a second season (Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., NBC), with Scott Paper as the new sponsor, keeping the show on the air after Kent cigarettes chose not to renew. Joe Friday and Frank Smith kick off the fifth season of Dragnet (Thursday, 8:00 p.m., NBC), and  Edward R. Murrow is back, too, with his first Person to Person show of the new season featuring Dick Powell and his wife, June Allyson, plus the famed photographer Margaret Bourke-White. (Friday, 9:30 p.m., CBS)

And in a preview of coming attractions, The Big Picture, ABC's Army documentary, goes off the air on Tuesday, to be replaced next week by a series that revolutionizes the television Western: The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. 

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This week's cover story by Robert E. Johnson begins with an anecdote about "a shrewd operator who studied the best-seller lists and decided the most consistent money-makers were books about Lincoln, doctors and dogs. So he sat down and wrote a book called Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog. There is such a story, by the way, a short story by Christopher Morley that was adapted into an episode of Screen Director's Playhouse; it'll be seen at the end of 1955, with Robert Ryan as Lincoln and Charles Bickford as the doctor. (No note on who plays the dog.)

I digress, though. The point of the story is that health, dogs, and Lincoln are three of the subjects most commonly explored on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life, now entering its eighth season (including radio) and boasting a weekly audience of 40 million. And what we're here to learn about is what makes the ideal contestant—or foil, if you prefer—for Groucho. According to Bernie Smith, head talent scout for the show, that would be "a sexy relative of Abraham Lincoln's who made a lot of money raising dogs and now spends it trying to improve her health by eating baby food." Failing that, school teachers are always popular; in addition to knowing a lot about Lincoln, "a lot of them are good looking, and we always have at least one pretty girl on the show."

Groucho with contestant Jean Moorhead of MST3K fame    

Smith and his staff look through the yellow pages (that was the business part of the phone book, for those of you too young to remember, and it was printed on yellow paper), searching for offbeat occupations; public officials and war heroes are also well-received, and if you've been fortunate enough to have gotten your name in the paper recently (for a good reason), you can expect a call from the show. Once they've been vetted, they're interviewed by members of the staff    in order to compile information that Groucho and his writers can use for his jokes. "If he knows, for instance, that a man was born a block from the Fulton Fish Market," Smith says, "he’s got the basis for a dozen gags."

Johnson's look behind the scenes ends with the story of the female contestant, a mountain climber who'd climed higher mountains than any other woman. Four months later, another contestant, a female aqualung diver who'd gone lower than any other woman. "Now," Groucho said, "all we need on this show is a woman who never did anything!" One hundred fifty letters followed, from women who'd "never been kissed, never had an operation, never been anywhere." One of them wound up a lucky contestant, and ruined her perfect record: she won $145.

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If you've been reading these reviews for any length of time, first of all, you might require a doctor's care, so you'd better check just to be sure. Second, you'll know that one topic I frequently return to is that of movies on TV—or, nowadays, the lack thereof. In 1955, movies comprise between 25 and 30 percent of the average station's broadcast day; when you filter out network programming, movies make up more than half of a station's local schedule. In fact, as Frank De Blois points out, one New York station airs 50 different movies each week, or more than 1,500 bookings (including repeats) over the course of a year. With all those movies floating about, how do stations decide what to show?

William C. Lacey, manager of the film department at WCBS in New York, explains to De Blois his movie programming philosophy. WCBS programs four movies per day, starting with the Late Matinee, which runs Monday through Friday between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. ("Liberally pruned with the editor's shears," De Blois notes). For this time slot, Lacey prefers "romantic adventure stories," such as Salome, starring Yvonne De Carlo, aka Lily Munster. The Early Show, from 6:15 to 7:25 p.m., features "family" viewing, including It's a Wonderful Life—which, as I've mentioned before, was not always limited to Christmastime viewing.

Beginning at 11:15 p.m., The Late Show, perhaps the most famous of the WCBS movie slots, is geared toward an "adult" audience, with "high adventure, romance and an occasional dash of gore." One of this week's features, Susan Hayward's Smash-Up: the Story of a Woman is a good example, as is the station's most popular late night movie, Pygmalion, "which ran 14 times on four channels in New York during a single year." Also in this timeslot: 20 Charlie Chan mysteris, which Lacey bought several years ago; each was run six times, for a total of 120 showings. Chan you beat that?

The most outspoken audience belongs to The Late Late Show, which starts around 12:30 a.m. and runs until nearly dawn. The show boasts of nearly 300,000 regular viewers: "shipyard workers, cab drivers, firemen, waitresses, bartenders, short-order cooks in all-night cafeterias, invalids and people who just can’t sleep." It was temporarly dropped a year or so ago after it lost its sponsor, but viwer outcry was such that the station was forced to bring it back.

Nothing is perfect in TV land, of course, and viewers have complaints about the movies they're offered. Given how the studios view television as a threat to the business, they're reluctant to offer stations anything new; amost all the movies on TV are pre-1950, and it isn't until 1961 and the advent of NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies that movies made post-1950 were shown on network TV. Likewise, viewers get miffed about seeing the same films over and over. ("If you show 'The Bowery Boys' once more," one viewer complained, "I’ll stinkbomb the studio.") And then there are those who complain that the movies are too new: they still want to see Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford.

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Are there such things as celebrity authors anymore? I'm not talking about someone like Stephen King, who I view as more "celebrity" than "author" (and I'm still trying to figure that one out), but authors who are famous for being authors. I noted somewhere that when Colson Whitehead appeared on the cover of Time in 2019, it was the first time an author had been on the magazine's cover since Jonathan Franzen in 2010.

There was a time, though, when it was an event for a mainstream novelist to come out with a new book, and that's the case on Friday's Today (7:00 a.m., NBC), when Herman Wouk sits for an interview with Dave Garroway. Wouk, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Caine Mutiny in 1951, is promoting his new novel, Marjorie Morningstar, which (natch) lands him on the cover of Time, and gets made into a movie starring Natalie Wood, Gene Kelly, and Claire Trevor. 

The reason I point this out, though (aside from having a vested interest in the fame of authors) is that Herman Wouk has a significant link to television. His novel The Winds of War was published 1971, and its sequel War and Remembrance followed in 1978; both were made into huge miniseres for ABC in the late 1980s and were ratings successes (The Winds of War was the most-watched miniseries ever at the time), but they were also expensive; War and Remembrance, which ran for 30 hours, was the most expensive miniseries ever made, and when it underperformed in the ratings (although winning its timeslot), it was one of the factors that cost ABC programming chief Brandon Stoddard his job. ABC lost between $30 and $40 million on the production, and along with the changing times and the growth of cable, signaled the beginning of the end of the prestige miniseries format.

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That's kind of a downer, though, so let's end on a brighter note, with a look at Eddie Anderson, who's risen to fame—an American institution, according to this unbylined article—as Rochester Van Jones, Jack Benny's valet and foil on the latter's popular radio and television series. Anderson's been with Benny since he debuted in 1937 as a gravel-voiced porter; he proved to be so popuar that the Rochester character was created for him. (Jack Benny owned the copyright to the Rochester character, and sold it to Anderson—for a dollar.)

That was 18 years ago, and now he makes upward of $75,000 a year, owns a custom-built sports car, lives in a handsome four-bedroom home in Los Angeles (with a pool), and until a few years ago had a stable of race horses (none of then named Swaps, sad to say). He's at a bit of a loss since the recent death of his wife; he talks about producing a Western with a Negro cast, based on a true-life character. In the meantime, he lives with his adopted son Billy (a former world-record hurdler and professional football player with the Chicago Bears) and Billy's wife and daughter.

Rochester was an enormously popular character, and despite his status as a "colored" servant, he often got the better of Jack, frequently offering acidic commentary that got huge laughts (which is all that Benny ever cared for; he was never selfish about who got them); the writers continuously worked to phase out stereotypical aspects of the character. Anderson remained with Benny until 1965, when the TV show ended, and the two maintained a friendship that lasted until Benny's death in 1974. For many years, Eddie Anderson was the highest-paid black entertainer in the business; he invested his money wisely, and had several business interests. He's a member of the Radio Hall of Fame, and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As a descendant of slaves who traveled to freedom on the Underground Railroad, that's not bad at all. America—what a country! TV  

This week in TV Guide: July 24, 1953

I hope you've been enjoying this series of TV Guides from 1953 Chicago. I know they're a little different from what we're generally used to here, and it can be challenging to write about them. These early issues lack the features we've come to know and appreciate over the years, and the focus at this point remains that of a local publication. And then there's the simple fact that there just aren't as many shows on the air, nor as many channels, as we're accustomed to seeing. Nonetheless, I've had fun looking at them as part of the evolutionary process that has brought us to where we are today, and there's always the chance of finding some gem hidden within the pages. If you have any suggestions as to how I can do a better job of writing about them, though, please feel free to contribute your ideas. "Stop writing" is not, sadly, one of the options.

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Well, look at who's on the cover. Groucho! And he's either pulling our leg, or he's undergone something of a change during the six years he's been doing You Bet Your Life on radio and television. Oh, he's still the wisecracking fast-talker we've come to know and love from all these years; what's changed is the way he looks at people, specifically the contestants on his show. "My estimation of people has risen in the past six years," he says. "There are a lot of wonderful people in the world, and this job has given me a chance to meet them." To critics who accuse him of making fun of those contestants to get laughs, Groucho bristles. "I don't insult the people on my show, I spoof them," he says indignantly. "Others who did insult contestants have failed. You Bet Your Life wouldn't be a hit, if I did. There's a big difference between kidding and ridicule." (I wonder what Groucho would make of today's P.C.-induced chill on comedy?) "I find that they enjoy the fun of the shows, whether they win or not, and they like a lot of spoofing."

Marx enjoys the second career that television has afforded him. "Next to robbing a bank, it's about the easiest of all," he says of hosting You Bet Your Life. "But this is the culmination of years of hard knocks, believe me. Maybe I've earned this kind of job." He still remembers his struggle to make it in show business, starting in 1906 when he was 11. It's been a nomadic life, working the vaudeville circuit before making it big in Hollywood. But now he lives comfortably in Beverly Hills, spends time with old friends and his children, and hosting his weekly show. And after 40 years, he's learned to be unflappable, even when confronted with his sometimes colorful contestants, including a woman with two husbands named Bodovnic (must be something in the water), triplet sisters from Russia, and an Irish janitor working in a synagogue. "I've never been stumped yet," he says. "I guess those years of trouping do something for you.

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What was that I said earlier about hidden gems? Try out this week's starlet, a young woman hoping to make her name someday as the famous daughter of a famous father, but "if she does, it won't be because she tied herself to her father's shirt-tales." The father is Robert Montgomery, film and television star; his daughter is 20-year-old Elizabeth.

Dad's given her some breaks, including signing her as a member of his stock company of actors for his Robert Montgomery Presents summer series. But as far as her career goes, "Any time she wants to discuss her career with me, I'm available. But the decisions are hers." He's given her the benefit of his long experience in the business, though, by helping her in such areas as choosing publicity photos; when he saw one that he deemed "unflattering," he insisted that "Liz rip up the copy and have the negative in the network publicity files destroyed." It's no wonder he acted as President Eisenhower's television advisor.

Liz got the itch to act from watching her father. "I grew up with Dad's acting, which probably raised my hopes of becoming an actress. But I think I'd have wanted that even if Dad had never acted." She's studied with the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and her goal is to follow in his footsteps as a Hollywood star (meaning movies), but she's determined to establish her acting chops first on television and Broadway, and, like her father, prefers comedy. Aside from one appearance on Robert Montgomery Presents, she's done no TV to this point, but that will change this summer, of course. And the elder Montgomery will be on hand, producing the series. No favoritism, though; "She'll have to prove herself."

Well, of course, she does. The mention of her preferring comedy is a prophetic one, given her eight seasons in Bewitched, which was at the time the most successful show in ABC's history and remains one of TV's most beloved sitcoms. She did branch into drama, as we know, with some hard-hitting TV movies, including A Case of Rape, that were as far from the Samantha Stephens role as you can get. And let's not forget her title as "Queen of Password," bestowed on her by none other than Allen Ludden himself. So I think it's probably safe to say that for many people today, Robert Montgomery is remembered as the famous father of a famous daughter.

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Television is, at heart, a medium of illusion, filled with dreams that sometimes come true and sometimes. . . well, a case in point is Bob Hope's season opener, scheduled for October 20 on NBC. He'll be doing the show from the Ohio Sesquicentennial (that's 150 years for those of you in the World's Worst Town™), and according to Dan Jenkins at the Hollywood Teletype, he's "trying to get such guests as Tyrone Power, Doris Day, Ted Lewis—and even Clark Gable." Big names indeed. As it turns out, however, a quick Google tells us that he wound up with Gloria DeHaven, Phil Harris and Ohio Governor Frank J. Lausche. I guess it just goes to show that hope springs eternal, Hope doesn't always come true.

What has the week got to offer us? Well, we've had a format tweak in the listings since we last visited 1953. Now, the weekday morning programs—Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday—are listed collectively. We learn, for example, that on the Paul Fogarty exercise show (9:00 a.m., WGN), the week's schedule includes:

Fri: For a trim ankle and a firm arch.
Mon: Grace and balance hints.
Tues: The "Cleopatra" exercise, for bust and shoulders.
Wed: A smaller, firmer waistline.
Thurs: Thigh and calf exercises.

It's good to know these things; I hate surprises.

One thing I've never been able to get used to is a description of what's on tap in a soap opera. There's a serial on NBC called The Bennetts (10:15 a.m.), a 15-minute affair that, quite frankly, sounds gripping. Check out the plotlines for the next week, if you can stand all the excitement:

Fri: In order to save one friend, Wayne Bennett comes close to losing another.
Mon: The end of the trial indicates it might not be the end of the case.
Tues: An artist gets a commission and a lawyer gets a tip.
Wed: A loan turns out to be a down payment on trouble.
Thurs: Wayne Bennett doesn't like his son's new friend.

This kind of format could be found, in one form or another, into the early '60s, and made a comeback in the last days of TV Guide, when the grid system was dominant.

Something else new for this market: a completely separate program section for WTMJ in Milwaukee. Most of it is simply a repetition of listings from Chicagoland, but it helps keep the two markets separate; we wouldn't want to confuse people by showing them stations they didn't get. I guess early television was more complicated than we thought.

Ethnic comedy was very popular in the 1950s, when cities were more likely to have distinct enclaves where people of various nationalities lived. The Goldbergs (Friday, 7:00 p.m., NBC), which started live as a popular radio comedy, is a prominent example. It's reviewed as the "Program of the Week," and though it's been off the air for almost a year, it follows the same formula which has made the show so successful (with some cast changes, including Robert H. Harris in place of Philip Loeb, who was blacklisted after accusations of being a communist). Most of the credit to Gertrude Berg, who not only plays Molly, the matriarch of the family, but also produces and writes the series. The series has come under criticism from some quarters, "asserting that the show tends to perpetuate the stereotype of the people about whom Mrs. Berg writes." The same charge has been leveled against other shows, Amos 'n' Andy and Life with Luigi, for example; those shows were about, respectively, blacks and Italians, while The Goldbergs looks at the Jews. As is the case with other ethnic shows, The Goldbergs presents its humor within the context of a family trying to assimilate into American society without losing its cultural heritage. "Mrs. Berg treats the characters so sympathetically that the show actually should help, not hinder, the fight against bigotry and intolerance." It should, although I doubt it would be acceptable on television today. Frankly, I've never found ethnic humor all that funny, including The Goldbergs, but that's just me; I certainly don't see it as offensive.

Other things I noticed: The Saturday night fight on ABC (8:00 p.m.) is a welterweight bout between Carmen Basilio and Billy Graham (don't worry, it's not that Billy Graham; his show is on Sunday, natch), while the five-minute news break each morning on WBBM is anchored by one of my favorites, Frank Reynolds, on his way to stardom. Speaking of anchors, if you think it strange that John Daly did the evening news on ABC while hosting What's My Line? on CBS, we also have Douglas Edwards, CBS news anchor, hosting Masquerade Party (Monday, 8:30 p.m.). At least it's on the same network. And, of course, there's Mike Wallace hosting the panel show I'll Buy That, which comes on right after Frank Reynolds (10:05 a.m.), long before becoming television's most feared interviewer. Hey, wake me when Norah O'Donnell hosts Wheel of Fortune.

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Geez, everyone's a critic.

Finally, Merrill Panitt's "As We See It" has a story we quite liked, about a man named Richard Gaughan who lives in New York. Mr. Gaughan is apparently a somewhat excitable young man, and it seems that recently he broke into a CBS rehearsal, stabbed a cameraman, and broke a water pitcher over an actor's head. His reason: "He doesn't like television." Panitt doesn't mention for which show the personnel were rehearsing, which could, I suppose, be considered a mitigating circumstance; were I on the jury, I could been convinced to convict on a lesser charge or, even acquit altogether.

The reason we're reading about this is to contrast Gaughan's reaction with that of "the highly intellectual" Bernard DeVoto, who spent 24 hours watching television, and then wrote about his thoughts on the medium. "It turned out that the time was well invested," Panitt writes, "for he sold the story of his situation to Harper's and Reader's Digest." It turns out that DeVoto is just as unimpressed with television as the unfortunate Gaughan, "who at least wasn't capitalizing on his dislike of the medium" for profit. Of the 24 hours he deigned to watch, he liked Dinah Shore, Kate Smith, and a speech by Charles E. Wilson. As for the rest of it, "he belabored TV drama in general, mysteries in particular, and commercials of all types." Notes Panitt, "Like other stuffy critics, he feels TV owes him the best in programming but the companies that pay for them shouldn't bother him." DeVoto couldn't fairly judge the programming by sitting in front of a TV for 24 hours, and he had to be biased to even attempt such a "stunt." With an attitude like that, it's obvious the man was a communist.

Panitt saves his savaging best for last. While Gaughan was confined to a mental hospital for his physical brand of critiquing, "Bernard DeVoto continues to be locked in by his own reasoning and unreasonable approach to a dynamic, promising new medium. As for the commercials, even dreamy, ivory tower types should know that the man who pays the piper is entitled to call the tune." Come to think of it, even the communists understood TV better than DeVoto. TV  

This week in TV Guide: April 27, 1957

There’s discontent rising in the land, my friends, and it’s about to boil over. It pits neighbor against neighbor, city against city, network against network; and there’s no telling how far it may go before it’s done. I speak, of course, of: Daylight Savings Time.

Daylight Time was scheduled to go into effect for the year at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, April 28. That is, in places where it was observed. And what a mess that was, as TV Guide points out. "Duluth, Minn., and Superior, Wis., lie right next to each other in the Central Time Zone. Both receive programs from the same TV stations. During the winter, everything is fine. Come summer, Superior goes to daylight time; Duluth, however, stays on standard (unless the state legislature passes a new law). To which of the two times should programs be geared?"

See, at this point both the federal and some state governments have left it up to local communities to decide whether or not to go on Daylight Savings Time. Minnesota, as a state, did not observe it; the legislature, however, was in the process of debating a law that would put Minneapolis-St. Paul and Duluth on it, leaving the rest of the state on Standard Time. This becomes a major issue for the networks, who are at this point still dealing with a substantial number of live programs. The advent of tape has helped things to an extent, but it's still confusing, as this example of the Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen shows illustrates. The shows are initially broadcast live at 8:00 p.m. in New York. New York follows Daylight Time.

Instead of being televised [live to other parts of the country], they are recorded on tape. The tape is held for three hours, then transmitted at 8 o'clock Los Angeles PDT. The tape is simultaneously fed back to stations in the Central Standard Zone for broadcast at the usual air time there of 9 o'clock and in the Mountain Standard Zone at 8 o'clock.

Do you have a headache yet? If not, consider that Seattle remains on Standard time, which puts it an hour behind Los Angeles. Seattle is frequent host to televised boxing. With an air time of 10:00 p.m. EDT, this means the main event must begin at 6:00 p.m. PST, with the undercard starting even earlier. As an NBC exec says, "What fight fan wants to watch a fight at 6 o'clock? He hasn't even had is dinner yet."

The effect of this national confusion isn't limited to TV, of course—airlines and railroads have to deal with the shifting sands of time as well. Whatever you have to say about Daylight Savings Time (I'm against it, personally), I think everyone can agree that things were much worse back then.

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As you can see from the cover, the feature story this week is on Groucho Marx, whose show You Bet Your Life is one of the top-rated programs on TV. Groucho was seldom at a loss for words, and this week's interview, conducted at Romanoff's restaurant by staff writer Dan Jenkins (not this one) is no exception.

Groucho on criticism of TV: "I don't see why everybody, including myself, should spend so much time criticizing television. I think television has done a remarkably good job considering the circumstances. If you were the advertising man entrusted with the spending of two or three million dollars, would you try to elevate the public or would you try to find yourself a good commercial show? When the public wants to be elevated, it will do its own elevating."

On Hollywood creativity: "People look upon Hollywood as a great outdoor lunatic asylum. This is not true. There are some very intelligent people in Hollywood—intelligent enough to know what all the rest of the lunatics want in the way of entertainment."

On appearing as a guest on other programs: "I've regretted most of the guest spots I've done. But for one of them, a four-minute spot, I got $25,000. How can I regret that? If somebody wants to spend his money that foolishly, I am quite happy to help him out."

On the unfairness of the TV ratings system: "The only way to judge a show's value is to examine the sales record of the show's product. I think I am safe in saying that De Soto [the car company that sponsored his show] barely existed in the public's mind before You Bet Your Life, and then only as a character who preceded Mark Twain on the Mississippi. I think they know now that De Soto is an automobile. I drive two of them myself, though not at the same time."

On the photographer suggesting Groucho might want to hide his drink before being photographed: "Why? And if it looks like tomato juice, tell 'em there's vodka in it. I don't see why I should hide the fact that I have a drink with my lunch. Let's order a drink for the photographer. He probably needs one more than I do."

On the future: "The future will have a TV screen covering your living-room wall. All in color." Lest this sound too scholarly, considering this has pretty much come to pass, he adds, "The set itself will erupt popcorn at regular intervals. They'll even send a man to your house to put his feet on your shoulders and provide background talking and paper rustling."

♦️ ♦️ ♦️

Saturday morning's presentation of Winky Dink and You on CBS is the last show of the series, to be replaced the next week by Susan's Show, hosted by Susan Heinkel. Susan's Show debuted in 1956 on Chicago CBS affiliate WBBM before moving to the network a year later.* The premise of Susan's Show was pretty simple: using a magic flying stool, Susie would travel to mystical lands, where she would engage in adventures with her dog Rusty. In other words, pretty standard kids' TV fare.

*Chicago was a hotbed of television in the early days, and many series made the transition from local to national broadcasts.

By the way, did I mention that Susan Heinkel is 12 years old? Not only that, she's a show biz veteran, having started her career in St. Louis at the age of three, and she's a hit in Chicago, trailing only the Mickey Mouse Club in the daytime ratings. Notes the article, "Susan ad-libs commercials with astonishing poise." 


Think about that next time you get a bumper-sticker talking about how your kid's an honor student. Impressive, but does she have her own TV show yet?

♦️ ♦️ ♦️

Starting in 1956, Steve Allen hosted his own NBC variety show which, at the beginning, aired opposite that of Ed Sullivan. It didn't run as long as Ed's, of course, but then Allen said his goal was never to conquer Ed, but to coexist with him, which he did for several seasons. Let's see who gets the best of the contest this week.

Sullivan: Ed welcomes Lena Horne, singer; young actor Anthony Perkins, in his TV singing debut; Bill Haley's Comets; comedians George de Witt and Jack Paar; Apaka, Honolulu's top recording star; the Happy Jesters, instrumental group; Heidi, Toronto's adding dog; and Jim Piersall, Boston Red Sox outfielder.

Allen: Steve greets comedians Jack Carson and Don Adams' songstresses Brenda Lee and Abbe Lane, who is joined by Xavier Cugat and his band; and dancers Peter Gennarro and Ellen Ray from the Braodway musical "Bells Are Ringing."

Not bad. You can clearly see Ed's vaudeville roots showing, far more than Allen, who concentrates on more established stars. Abbe Lane, profiled in the front of the magazine, is not only a talented singer and dancer, she's a knockout (with "one of the world's most remarkable torsos"), who's married to the bandleader Cugat (his fourth wife; he later divorces her and marries Charo). Don Adams will eventually become Maxwell Smart, and Jack Carson is a TV mainstay.

On the other hand, it's hard to top the great Lena Horne, and although Perkins is supposed to sing, he's also there to plug the movie Fear Strikes Out, the true story of Jim Piersall's struggle with mental illness.* But the reason I'm giving this one to Sullivan is a more whimsical one: Jack Paar, who's appearing on Ed's show, will - three months later - take over the Tonight Show; the very program that Steve Allen had given up. I love that kind of irony.

*Perkins' widow, Berry Berenson, was killed on American Airlines flight 11 during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

♦️ ♦️ ♦️

Wouldn't be able to get away with this today.

Baseball season! But it's pre-major league baseball in the Twin Cities, so there's no Minnesota Twins. Instead, there's the Minneapolis Millers, the Triple-A affiliate of the New York Giants, who the year before moved from Minneapolis to the brand-new Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington (even though TV Guide, which lacks the subtleties, says the Met is in Minneapolis). The new digs have been built in hopes of luring a major league team, and in time they will—the Washington Senators, who make Minnesota their home in 1961. On Thursday night the Millers take on the Louisville Colonels. A quick glance at the lineups gives me the name of at least one future star, Orlando Cepada, who plays for the Millers before being called up to the Giants, now in San Francisco, in 1958. Cepada is elected to the Hall of Fame in 1999.

There is major league baseball on TV Saturday afternoon, though it isn't seen in the Twin Cities. (Perhaps the Millers were playing at home and the games were blacked out?) Lindsay Nelson and Leo Durocher are behind the mic for NBC as the Brooklyn Dodgers and Pittsburgh Pirates face off from Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, while the irrepressible Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner call CBS's telecast of the Detroit Tigers and the Cleveland Indians in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium.

♦️ ♦️ ♦️

"To a national audience, Mike Wallace is known as the sympathetic quizmaster on "The Big Surprise," which recently left the air. New Yorkers, however, know him as the incisive interviewer on a late evening local program which made its debut last fall and created widespread interest."

And with that, ABC launched the debut episode of The Mike Wallace Interviews (Sunday, 10:00 p.m., ABC), which introduced us to the Mike Wallace we all came to know and love (or hate). I've seen clips of Wallace as game show host, actor and commercial pitchman, and I'm sure that acting experience helped hone his skills when it came to interviewing. Still, it's hard to imagine Mike Wallace as anything other than the newsman and 60 Minutes star, isn't it? Kind of like finding out your parents were once young—it just doesn't compute.

Also, there's a note in the Teletype that confirms "CBS's new Perry Mason show, starring Raymond Burr, will replace Jackie Gleason next fall." Who could have imagined how that would turn out.

♦️ ♦️ ♦️

Speaking of which, we'll end today with the kind of footnote to which I'm so often drawn. Again from the Teletype:

"Charles Van Doren, Twenty-One winner, has signed an exclusive contract with NBC. Tentatively, they'll build a quiz show around him, use him as consultant on educational shows. He'll continue as college prof."

This was, of course, before the Quiz Show Scandals, before he was exposed as being part of the rigged show, before he was fired from NBC and Columbia University. In other words, before everything fell apart.

But as far as this issue of TV Guide is concerned, all of that is in the future. And what impresses me the most is looking at this note, so innocent and without guile. It's not a reprint, it's not a message that blinks on a computer archive. (As you'll be reading it.) No, what I hold in my hands is the actual TV Guide, a historical document, if you will, which came out before anything had hit the fan. It was not only written in the context of the time, it was printed and sold in that context as well. It's kind of like the difference between a lithograph of the Declaration of Independence and the real thing, though not nearly as important, of course. It is, nonetheless, living history. Our history. And that never fails to impress me. TV  

Around the dial

It's Friday, TGIF and all that! What could possibly make the end of the week any better than a spin around the blogs to see what's new - or old, as the case may be.

At Comfort TV, David introduces us to a classification of television called "The Unshakeables," those episodes "that stay with you long after the credits roll." Case in point: “The Invasion of Kevin Ireland,” a 1971 episode of The Bold Ones: The Lawyers. I'll leave it to you to read David and find out why.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear reviews the single-disc excerpt from the boxed set of Jackie Gleason's post-Honeymooners show that ran between 1966 and 1970. Now, it so happens that many of these episodes do feature Honeymooners bits, so if that's your thing you've nothing to worry about, but these also feature plenty more great guests and sketches.

An ad you won't want to miss at The Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland: Tony the Tiger and Groucho Marx.

Inner Toob picks up on something I always enjoy: an episode of a long-running series that allude, in one way or another, to events of a previous episode. Case in point this week: Columbo, and a very subtle mention of one of the Lieutenant's past cases.

Some Polish American Guy Reviews Things, and what Daniel is reviewing this week is "The Seven Lady Truckers," a third-season episode of B.J. and the Bear. There's no reason to tune in for the seven lady truckers, but there's always The Bear, right? Right?

'Tis the week for episode reviews methinks, at at Cult TV Blog the review is of "The Never Never Affair" from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Although, as is usually the case with John, you get plenty more than just a review. I always enjoy his take on these shows. (I still need to get some of his recommendations for my region-free DVD player.)

This has nothing to do with TV, but when I was young I loved Matchbox cars - they were far more interesting to me than Hot Wheels - and so naturally I had to check out this British Pathé film clip on the making of a Matchbox car, courtesy of Silver Scenes.

At Garroway at Large, Jodie reminds us of the wonderful American Radio History website with its treasure trove of issues of Broadcasting and other magazines* (I've made use of that archive a time or two myself); this week, one of those Broadcasting issues includes a review of the first few weeks of Today.

*This, in turn, reminds me to get angry again at the Chicago Tribune for no longer offering their archives for free. Do they really need the money that badly?

I'd say that's a pretty good meal for one day, wouldn't you? If you can finish it all by tomorrow, come on back for more - another issue of TV Guide. TV  

This week in TV Guide: April 27, 1957

There’s discontent rising in the land, my friends, and it’s about to boil over. It pits neighbor against neighbor, city against city, network against network; and there’s no telling how far it may go before it’s done. I speak, of course, of: Daylight Savings Time.

Daylight Time was scheduled to go into effect for the year at 2am on Sunday, April 28.  That is, in places where it was observed.  And what a mess that was, as TV Guide points out.   "Duluth, Minn., and Superior, Wis., lie right next to each other in the Central Time Zone.*  Both receive programs from the same TV stations.  During the winter, everything is fine.  Come summer, Superior goes to daylight time; Duluth, however, stays on standard (unless the state legislature passes a new law).  To which of the two times should programs be geared?"

*I can vouch for this, having been in Duluth before.  The area is often referred to as "Duluth-Superior."

See, at this point both the federal and some state governments have left it up to local communities to decide whether or not to go on Daylight Savings Time.  Minnesota, as a state, did not observe it; the legislature, however, was in the process of debating a law that would put Minneapolis-St. Paul and Duluth on it, leaving the rest of the state on Standard Time.  This becomes a major issue for the networks, who are at this point still dealing with a substantial number of live programs.  The advent of tape has helped things to an extent, but it's still confusing, as this example of the Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen shows illustrates.  The shows are initially broadcast live at 8pm in New York.  New York follows Daylight Time.

Instead of being televised [live to other parts of the country], they are recorded on tape.  The tape is held for three hours, then transmitted at 8 o'clock  Los Angeles PDT.  The tape is simultaneously fed back to stations in the Central Standard Zone for broadcast at the usual air time there of 9 o'clock and in the Mountain Standard Zone at 8 o'clock.

Do you have a headache yet?  If not, consider that Seattle remains on Standard time, which puts it an hour behind Los Angeles.  Seattle is frequent host to televised boxing.  With an air time of 10:00pm EDT, this means the main event must begin at 6:00pm PST, with the undercard starting even earlier.  As an NBC exec says, "What fight fan wants to watch a fight at 6 o'clock?  He hasn't even had is dinner yet."

The effect of this national confusion isn't limited to TV, of course - airlines and railroads have to deal with the shifting sands of time as well.  Whatever you have to say about Daylight Savings Time (I'm against it, personally), I think everyone can agree that things were much worse back then.

***

As you can see from the cover, the feature story this week is on Groucho Marx, whose show You Bet Your Life is one of the top-rated programs on TV.  Groucho  was seldom at a loss for words, and this week's interview, conducted at Romanoff's restaurant by staff writer Dan Jenkins (not this one)  is no exception.

Groucho on criticism of TV: "I don't see why everybody, including myself, should spend so much time criticizing television.  I think television has done a remarkably good job considering the circumstances.  If you were the advertising man entrusted with the spending of two or three million dollars, would you try to elevate the public or would you try to find yourself a good commercial show?  When the public wants to be elevated, it will do its own elevating."

On Hollywood creativity: "People look upon Hollywood as a great outdoor lunatic asylum.  This is not true.  There are some very intelligent people in Hollywood - intelligent enough to know what all the rest of the lunatics want in the way of entertainment."

On appearing as a guest on other programs:  "I've regretted most of the guest spots I've done.  But for one of them, a four-minute spot, I got $25,000.  How can I regret that?  If somebody wants to spend his money that foolishly, I am quite happy to help him out."

On the unfairness of the TV ratings system: "The only way to judge a show's value is to examine the sales record of the show's product.  I think I am safe in saying that De Soto [the car company that sponsored his show] barely existed in the public's mind before You Bet Your Life, and then only as a character who preceded Mark Twain on the Mississippi.  I think they know now that De Soto is an automobile.  I drive two of them myself, though not at the same time."

On the photographer suggesting Groucho might want to hide his drink before being photographed: "Why?  And if it looks like tomato juice, tell 'em there's vodka in it.  I don't see why I should hide the fact that I have a drink with my lunch.  Let's order a drink for the photographer.  He probably needs one more than I do."

On the future:  "The future will have a TV screen covering your living-room wall.  All in color."  Lest this sound too scholarly, considering this has to an extent come to pass, he adds, "The set itself will erupt popcorn at regular intervals.  They'll even send a man to your house to put his feet on your shoulders and provide background talking and paper rustling."

***

Saturday morning's presentation of Winky Dink and You on CBS is the last show of the series, to be replaced the next week by Susan's Show, hosted by Susan Heinkel.  Susan's Show debuted in 1956 on Chicago CBS affiliate WBBM before moving to the network a year later.*  The premise of Susan's Show was pretty simple: using a magic flying stool, Susie would travel to mystical lands, where she would engage in adventures with her dog Rusty.  In other words, pretty standard kids' TV fare.

*Chicago was a hotbed of television in the early days, and many series made the transition from local to national broadcasts.

By the way, did I mention that Susan Heinkel is 12 years old? Not only that, she's a show biz veteran, having started her career in St. Louis at the age of three, and she's a hit in Chicago, trailing only the Mickey Mouse Club in the daytime ratings.  Notes the article, "Susan ad-libs commercials with astonishing poise." 


Think about that next time you get a bumper-sticker talking about how your kid's an honor student.  Impressive, but does she have her own TV show yet?

***

As alluded to earlier, Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen continue their battle for Sunday night ratings supremacy.  NBC attached such importance to Allen's show that he gave up the Tonight Show to concentrate on Ed.  Since we don't have The Hollywood Palace to look at, let's see how Ed and Steve match up.

Tonight Ed welcomes Lena Horne, singer; young actor Anthony Perkins, in his TV singing debut; Bill Haley's Comets; comedians George de Witt and Jack Paar; Apaka, Honolulu's top recording star; the Happy Jesters, instrumental group; Heidi, Toronto's adding dog; and Jim Piersall, Boston Red Sox outfielder.

Meanwhile, Steve greets comedians Jack Carson and Don Adams' songstresses Brenda Lee and Abbe Lane, who is joined by Xavier Cugat and his band; and dancers Peter Gennarro and Ellen Ray from the Braodway musical "Bells Are Ringing."

Not bad.  You can clearly see Ed's vaudeville roots showing, far more than Allen, who concentrates on more established stars.  Abbe Lane, profiled in the front of the magazine, is not only a talented singer and dancer, she's a knockout (with "one of the world's most remarkable torsos"), who's married to the bandleader Cugat (his fourth wife; he later divorces her and marries Charo).  Don Adams will eventually become Maxwell Smart, and Jack Carson is a TV mainstay.

On the other hand, it's hard to top the great Lena Horne, and although Perkins is supposed to sing, he's also there to plug the movie Fear Strikes Out, the true story of Jim Piersall's struggle with mental illness.*  But the reason I'm giving this one to Sullivan is a more whimsical one: Jack Paar, who's appearing on Ed's show, will - three months later - take over the Tonight Show; the very program that Steve Allen had given up.  I love that kind of irony.

*Perkins' widow, Berry Berenson, was killed on American Airlines flight 11 during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

***

Wouldn't be able to get away with this today.

Baseball season!  But it's pre-major league baseball in the Twin Cities, so there's no Minnesota Twins.  Instead, there's the Minneapolis Millers, the Triple-A affiliate of the New York Giants,  who the year before moved from Minneapolis to the brand-new Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington (even though TV Guide, which lacks the subtleties, says the Met is in Minneapolis).  The new digs have been built in hopes of luring a major league team, and in time they will - the Washington Senators, who make Minnesota their home in 1961.  On Thursday night the Millers take on the Louisville Colonels.  A quick glance at the lineups gives me the name of at least one future star, Orlando Cepada, who plays for the Millers before being called up to the Giants, now in San Francisco, in 1958.  Cepada is elected to the Hall of Fame in 1999.

There is major league baseball on TV Saturday afternoon, though it isn't seen in the Twin Cities. (Perhaps the Millers were playing at home and the games were blacked out?)  Lindsay Nelson and Leo Durocher are behind the mic for NBC as the Brooklyn Dodgers and Pittsburgh Pirates face off from Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, while the irrepressible Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner call CBS's telecast of the Detroit Tigers and the Cleveland Indians in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium.

***

"To a national audience, Mike Wallace is known as the sympathetic quizmaster on "The Big Surprise," which recently left the air.  New Yorkers, however, know him as the incisive interviewer on a late evening local program which made its debut last fall and created widespread interest."

And with that, ABC launched the debut episode of The Mike Wallace Interviews, which introduced us to the Mike Wallace we all came to know and love (or hate).  I've seen clips of Wallace as game show host, actor and commercial pitchman, and I'm sure that acting experience helped hone his skills when it came to interviewing.  Still, it's hard to imagine Mike Wallace as anything other than the newsman and 60 Minutes star, isn't it?  Kind of like finding out your parents were once young - it just doesn't compute.

Also, there's a note in the Teletype that confirms "CBS's new Perry Mason show, starring Raymond Burr, will replace Jackie Gleason next fall."  Who could have imagined how that would turn out.

***

Speaking of which, we'll end today with the kind of footnote to which I'm so often drawn.  Again from the Teletype:

"Charles Van Doren, Twenty-One winner, has signed an exclusive contract with NBC.  Tentatively, they'll build a quiz show around him, use him as consultant on educational shows.  He'll continue as college prof."

This was, of course, before the Quiz Show Scandals, before he was exposed as being part of the rigged show, before he was fired from NBC and Columbia University.  In other words, before everything fell apart.

But as far as this issue of TV Guide is concerned, all of that is in the future.  And what impresses me the most is looking at this note, so innocent and without guile.  It's not a reprint, it's not a message that blinks on a computer archive.  (As you'll be reading it.)  No, what I hold in my hands is the actual TV Guide, a historical document, if you will, which came out before anything had hit the fan.  It was not only written in the context of the time, it was printed and sold in that context as well.  It's kind of like the difference between a lithograph of the Declaration of Independence and the real thing, though not nearly as important, of course.  It is, nonetheless, living history. Our history.  And that never fails to impress me. TV