The Perfect Day: October 7, 1966

Back in April, we time-traveled to April 11, 1966 and spent – or maybe wasted – the entire day watching television. Six months later, and courtesy of an old issue of TV Guide (Front cover headline: The Vietnam War: Is TV Giving Us The Picture?) we’re back in my parent’s living room for 24 hours of television. Today is October 7, 1966. It’s a Friday, clear skies and temperatures in the low 70s.

6-7 AM: Your usual educational and religious time-fillers as the networks meet their FCC requirements. We yawn our way through Education Exchange and Sunrise Semester.

7-8 AM: An ancient rerun – even by 1966 standards – of My Little Margie is on Channel 7, before we switch over to Sandy Becker hosting cartoons on Channel 5.

Dancing Bear

8-9 AM: According to TV Guide, “Captain Kangaroo and Dancing Bear show films of their visit to Volendam and The Hague.” Did Dancing Bear really board a plane and fly to the Netherlands? He never spoke and always seemed kind of simple, happy to just dance. Did he avoid the red-light district in Amsterdam, where reprobates would have eagerly lined up to take advantage of him?  It could have been worse. The Captain might have brought the Banana Man over with him instead. 

9-10 AM: We’ll keep it on Channel 11 for this hour. Jack La Lanne is on at 9 and we again marvel at his tight jumpsuit and ballet slippers. At 9:30, there’s Biography, a half-hour of flickering newsreel footage of Charles De Gaulle.

10 AM–12:30: A long dry spell of dusty reruns (Racket Squad, Peter Gunn) and game shows (Concentration, Supermarket Sweep). At 10:30, and worth checking out, Channel 11 is showing Mack and Myer, a bargain basement Abbott & Costello often filmed on the streets of New York City.

There is a programming note in TV Guide that a World Series game could be played this afternoon if any earlier game was postponed because of bad weather. There would be no game today and the Baltimore Orioles wrap things up against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday, the season over on October 9. Today, if all the playoff series get strung out to their maximum number of games, the season will end on November 3.

12:30–1 PM: Nothing could have been cornier or less cool than country music in 1966 (Top 40 crossover hit “Flowers on the Wall” by the Statler Brothers notwithstanding), but it’s time for Swingin’ Country on Channel 4, hosted by Roy Clark and Molly Bee. The show only lasted a few months, but marked a cautious start for country music on a major network. In ten years, we’d be besieged with shows hosted by Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Mac Davis, the Mandrell Sisters and Mel Tillis, all of whom were mostly country, veering a bit toward the pop side, and photogenic enough to crack the mainstream.

1–3:30 PM: You can only avoid the endless sudsy stream of soap operas on weekday afternoons by trekking through the desert of buzzers, bells and free money: Let’s Make A Deal, The Newlywed Game, To Tell The Truth, House Party and Password.

3:30–6 PM: Daytime television phases into its next programming block, kid’s shows, and we spend the rest of the afternoon with New York City faves Sandy Becker (he worked a morning and afternoon shift), Chuck McCann, The Three Stooges and those Japanese science-fiction cartoons that were starting to show up on TV in 1966, Gigantor and 8^th Man, both obviously (and badly) dubbed and featuring a cast of annoying characters.

6–7 PM: For this hour we move upstairs to my parent’s bedroom where there’s a portable TV on the dresser that pulls in UHF stations. We play around with the antenna and bingo, it’s the legendary Disc-O-Teen on Channel 47. Imagine American Bandstand, hosted by Zacherle, recorded live in a studio in Newark with real teenagers, not those privileged LA kids on Dick Clark’s show or the professional (and hardly teenage) dancers on Soul Train. (Amazingly, Disc-O-Teen footage survives):

7-7:30 PM: It’s Friday, Sub-Mariner day on Channel 9’s Marvel Cartoon Show. (For the record, the rest of the week ran this way: Captain America (Monday), Hulk (Tuesday), Iron Man (Wednesday) and Thor (fittingly on Thursday). Barely animated and with seemingly the same actor and actress providing all the voices, this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Steamboat Willie.

7:30-9:30 PM: The Wild, Wild West on Channel 2 at 7:30 always maintained a high standard, stayed true to its original concept (James Bond on horseback) and had exceptional production values. Can’t say the same for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. at 8:30 on Channel 4. This is the show’s third season, when its producers became enamored with Batman (and its high ratings) and gave the show a campy, lighter tone. Boy, it sure didn’t work and the show was nearly cancelled before it got credible again, although the damage was already done. All you need to know about tonight’s episode is that the guest stars are Shelley Berman and Carol Wayne.

9:30-10 PM: T.H.E. Cat (acronyms were all the rage back then) was a cat burglar whose last name was also Cat. Everyone remembers the one essential detail (T.H.E. stood for Thomas Hewitt Edward, our hero’s given names), but nobody can recall actual episodes – only the image of Robert Loggia as Cat, tossing a hook tied to a rope over a wall and then scaling it, something that happened every week. Tonight, Cat “investigates the mysterious knifing of a singer’s press agent.”

10-10:30 PM: The three networks are showing Laredo, a Western movie and Twelve O’Clock High. We’ll pass on all three and go with Mike Douglas, who now has a Friday night show in addition to afternoons. What he doesn’t have are guests who might make a Friday night more interesting. Tonight’s top-billed Dr. Joyce Brothers isn’t going to cut it. Not that it matters because at 10:30 we’re switching over to Channel 11.

10:30-11 PM: It’s The Allie Sherman Show, with the embattled New York Giants head coach looking for silver linings as the team goes head-first down the tubes on its way to a 1-12-1 record, including a loss to a first-year expansion team and a defense that will give up 501 points. That’s an average of 35 points a game. One highlight is Sherman’s inexplicable Southern accent, this from a guy who grew up in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College.

11 PM-6 AM: Another slog made more difficult because we’re getting sleepy. There’s news and college football highlights from last weekend. Johnny Carson’s guests are Rose Marie and Roger Miller. Merv Griffin is somewhere in the mix as well. A couple of black and white movies from the 40s, none very promising. The last station to go off the air is CBS at 5:30 a.m.

I need to get out of here before someone catches me, a full-grown adult nobody knows asleep on the couch.