The Perfect Day: April 11, 1966 

Time travel. It ain’t here yet, but when it does, it’s gonna be something. Another shot at revenge or redemption. A chance to spend extra time with friends and family who left too soon. An opportunity to right wrongs. Imagine the line of people outside Mark David Chapman’s nursery waiting to smother him in his crib. Or those willing to pay the greens fee to rent a golf cart and run over a young Donald Trump. Nothing serious, maybe just a case of severe head trauma. 

One of the great deals on eBay over the years has been the ability to grab old issues of TV Guide. For a throwaway periodical that served its purpose after one week, it’s amazing how many are still floating around. I have several New York Metro editions and sometimes I’ll go through a single day and try to figure what I’d watch for 24 hours, starting at 6 AM (where TV Guide’s daily listings began each day). Admittedly lame, but it keeps me out of the pool halls. 

Our time travel trip takes us to Monday, April 11, 1966 and my parent’s living room. 

6:00 AM: We’re limited at the start of the day, with only NBC broadcasting and leaving us with no choice but “Education Exchange” and time to look out the windows and watch it grow lighter outside. If we’re lucky, it’s trash pick-up day and we get to watch the garbage trucks come through. 

6:30 AM: Staying with NBC, there’s “Bwana Don,” a syndicated nature show featuring a guy wearing a safari outfit. 

7:00 AM: A Jurassic-era “My Little Margie” rerun on ABC. The “Today Show” is on NBC, but with a promised look at “medical corpsmen in Vietnam,” I’ll pass. 

7:30 – 9:00 AM: An onslaught of cartoons on WNEW, hosted by Sandy Becker, and ABC. 

9:00 AM: “Girl Talk” with the perfectly coiffed Virginia Graham. Today’s panel is a winner:

Hermione Gingold; Trude Heller, whose Greenwich Village club bearing her name was a hipster destination of 1966; and the alluring Hullabaloo dancer Lada Edmund Jr. 

9:30-11:30 AM: Following a rerun of “Leave It To Beaver,” we go with three straight games shows: “Eye Know,” “Concentration” and a personal favorite, “Supermarket Sweep,” with John Bartholomew Tucker. Maybe it will be one of the episodes filmed at the Bergen Mall Food Fair. 

11:30 AM: The Dating Game is the choice over yet more cartoons at WNEW. 

12:00 – 1 PM: We’re tempted by “Jeopardy” with Art Fleming and the manually operated answer board, but “Romper Room” beckons, a strange hour of educational segments, songs, commercial plugs for Romper Room toys and old cartoons. Plus, the added charm of the live audience of little kids, who would sometimes get fresh with each other, cry or talk over Miss Mary Ann. 

1:00 PM: An ad in TV Guide says “PDQ” is “television’s fastest and most exciting word game” and our decision is made. 

1:30 – 3:30 PM: The early afternoon is dominated by games shows and it doesn’t make any sense to watch a soap opera since tomorrow we’ll be back in 2021. We’re going with “Let’s Make A Deal,” “Password” – with Barbara Feldon and Brian Kelly of “Flipper,” followed by an Art Linkletter doubleheader, “House Party” and “People Are Funny.” Let’s also keep in mind that the Mets are playing the Reds on WOR this afternoon and we can always switch over to that. The ’66 Mets were pretty miserable. 

3:30 – 4:30 PM: School’s out and WNEW has Soupy Sales and Chuck McCann back-to-back. At this point both were a little past their prime as kid’s show hosts but they’re certainly worth our attention here. 

4:30 PM: “Where the Action Is” with guests James Brown and Mickey Rooney Jr., representing the last gasp of the trend of movie stars’ kids trying to build off dad’s brand as rock singers, some successfully (Gary Lewis, Nancy Sinatra, Dino, Desi and Billy) and some not so (Noel Harrison and Rooney Jr.). 

5:30 – 6:30 PM: As we hit the back half of our wasted day, it’s the Three Stooges on WPIX, 

hosted by our favorite uncle, Officer Joe Bolton, followed by Paul Winchell on WNEW (According to TV Guide, “Knuck makes everyone panic when he can’t be found”). 

6:30 PM: We have the option of staying with Paul Winchell (at least until we find out where Knuck has been hiding) or “Surf’s Up” on WOR, a half-hour of surfing films. 

7:00 PM: Reality time with the news. The pick is NBC with the reliable law firm of Huntley and Brinkley, over Cronkite on CBS.

7:30 PM: Primetime starts and it’s an easy choice of “Hullabaloo” over “12 O’Clock High” or the “New York television debut” of Abbott and Costello’s “Jack in the Beanstalk” on the Million Dollar Movie – although it’s difficult to get excited over the lineup of Peter and Gordon, the Cyrkle, Lesley Gore and host Paul Anka. 

8:00 – 9:00 PM: When people try to tell you that TV was better back then, they never sat

through a night like this. At 8, the best choice is “To Tell the Truth” and a half-hour later we get to choose from “The Lucy Show” and “Jesse James” with James Dean-whisperer Christopher Jones. We’ll go with the Western. 

9:00 – 10:00 PM: For seemingly decades, was there ever a single week when Andy Williams wasn’t on TV? Here, he’s hosting the Kraft Music Hall. One of the bits is a “send up,” as they used to say, of “Flower Drum Song” with Andy playing an “Oriental criminologist” … sounds like something that isn’t about to repeated anytime in the next century. 

10:00 – 11:30 PM: We’ll go with Merv Griffin on WNEW, whose guests include Tab Hunter and Totie Fields, making one of her 59 appearances on Merv. For the record, she was on the Mike Douglas Show 71 times. 

11:30 – 1:00 AM; Johnny Carson, with guest Woody Allen, who will surely make many jokes at his own expense about in his inability to “score” – to use the 1966 term – with women. Possibly a show that isn’t about to be repeated anytime in the next century. 

1:00 – 2:30 AM: ABC shows “The Trap” with white guy Sidney Toler as “Oriental criminologist” Charlie Chan. Once ubiquitous, I couldn’t tell you the last time a Charlie Chan flick ran on TV and I don’t believe it’s going to happen anytime soon. 

2:30 AM: We’re on life support here, with most of the stations off the air. CBS is showing a 1935 movie called “Bolero” with George Raft and it’s the only raft available to ride through to the end of the perfect day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Losing My Religion

When they first came on the scene in the early 80s, R.E.M. was the best new group around. They had a sound that combined punk and Americana – before anybody even knew what that was – with indecipherable lyrics that, when you could make them out, were abstract, dream-like mumbles, adding extra significance and meaning to the band’s name.

The cover of their first album, Murmur, pictured a field overrun with kudzu, a commentary on an invasive junk culture threatening to take over not only the South and their home state of Georgia, but regionalism in general. These guys were smart and subversive; the overall vibe was one of Andy of Mayberry on acid.

We saw them at the Capitol Theatre in June 1984, a strange concert that was being filmed for MTV. (Strange on three counts: it was held on a really hot night and the Capitol didn’t have air conditioning; MTV handlers were milling around on the lookout for girls they could fill in the front rows with; and the opening acts were John Sebastian, Roger McGuinn and Richie Havens, each of whom, according to MTV, influenced R.E.M.’s folk-rockish sound. The band apparently disagreed and pointedly opened with a cover of a Velvet Underground song).

Here, they perform “Radio Free Europe” from that night. This is a band firing on all cylinders, and maybe because they made so many videos, did we watch them age over the next 20 years or what?

 

As R.E.M. grew to become an international force of nature and entered a long-term residency on MTV, I started to lose interest. It felt like there were too many people in the room and their music began to change direction. With the inescapable and bleak “Everybody Hurts,” and the bubblegum nursery rhymes “Stand” and “Happy Shiny People,” I was already backing away.

Around the same time, I had similar reactions to a couple of other favorites, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello.

Springsteen began to take on some sort of Dust Bowl affectation, with a lot of desolate ballads, usually addressing someone as “sir” and sung with, I guess, a Western accent. His zillion-selling Born In the USA album was four good songs and the rest filler – if things fall in my favor, I’ll never sit through “Glory Days” ever again. In Costello’s case, I kept buying his records well into the 90s before I realized the music had become not just overly crafted but utterly joyless.

Yet there’s hope. For the longest time I felt the same way about Paul McCartney. His post-Beatles output seemed to be based more on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “All Together Now” than say, “Penny Lane” or “Hey Jude.” His ill-advised teaming with Michael Jackson and the embarrassing videos that followed drove me out completely. But right around the start of the century, Paul seemed to remember he was a Beatle, not a Bay City Roller, and began – and continues – to record albums that play to his many strengths and make me glad he’s still around writing and recording.

R.E.M. broke up a few years ago and when I can find them, I check the latest albums by Springsteen or Costello out of our local library. I always give them a hopeful listen, but we seem to be growing ever-further apart.