The Husker Du Subliminal Scandal

In the Holiday Season of 1973, commercials were appearing on local TV stations across the US for a packaged family game called Husker Du (not related to the 1980s band by that name). According to advertising, "In Denmark and around the world, Husker Du means 'Do you remember?'" The game, which involved memorizing symbols on a playing board, was promoted as "a memory exerciser that's fun for children and adults alike" and "a great family game that increases your alertness." Nothing nefarious about that. However, it was discovered soon after the commercials hit the airwaves in late November that a single frame spliced in at four strategic points in the 60 second spot shot on 16 mm film flashed the message "Get It" for a fraction of a second, raising concerns about "subliminal advertising."

Recreation of the "subliminal message."

The idea behind so-called subliminal messaging was that viewers would be influenced by the message without actually noticing it. But viewers did notice and complained to the television stations airing the spot and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). According to an article published in the New York Times on December 27, 1973 (and in other newspapers), "The commercial was carried by hundreds of stations across the country, most of which edited out the 'subliminal' frames after being alerted by the television code authority of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) that the advertisement violated its rules. The product's distributor, Premium Corporation of America, also alerted stations after receiving a number of complaints."

Sam McLeod, general manager of the marketing division of Premium Corporation of America claimed he hadn't noticed the "get it" frames when reviewing the commercial for approval, saying, "Unless you know it's there, you don't catch it," and that the subliminal messages were "an honest mistake, the result of deadline pressures to get the commercial into circulation in time for the Christmas season," according to the Times. He also blamed what he called "an exuberant young man" at the Minneapolis-based commercial production firm Lowe & Associates, saying, "The fellow thought he had invented something no one ever thought of before." 

When he got wind of it, McLeod said he sent telegrams to all the stations running the spot telling them to edit out the frames or simply paint them black. "We made every effort to clean it up, and I'd guess we were 99 percent successful," he told the Times, adding that the commercial was not "pitched at the little ones" and that it aired primarily during "adult" programs in daytime and late night. He said he was sure the problem had been cleared up within the first week.

However, according to the article, several stations continued to air the spot unedited, prompting a Washington-based consumer advocate named Robert B. Choate to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the FCC. Choate claimed to have seen the "get it" version airing as late as December 19 at 11:32 a.m. on WPIX-TV in New York and that it was still airing on stations in Chicago, Detroit and Tucson. It was pointed out that the New York and Tuscon stations were not members of the NAB Code Authority.

The commercial was scheduled to end its run just before Christmas 1973, and after that, Husker Du continued to be sold, and advertised, without any major controversies. Several Husker Du commercials from the 1970s can be found on YouTube, but not the "get it" version (although a subtly awkward edit can be detected near the end of one of them). The above illustration is strictly a recreation. 

The 1920s: Birth of the Analog Age

The Ragtime Revolution

The 1920s was the beginning of a whole new era in the United States (and to some extent Canada and England) with sweeping changes in societal norms, new-found affluence, super-fast transportation on land (automobiles) and in air (aeroplanes as they were called then, and the advent of commercial airlines), and new gadgets right in the home for communication and entertainment (telephones, radio, phonographs) that ushered in the Analog Age. In the laboratories even more amazing futuristic devices were being developed.

Before the First World War (known then as just The World War or the Great War since there hadn’t been a second one) there was a stifling sense of Victorian-era moralism in U.S. society where everyone was uptight and proper. Men were supposed to be cold and studious, lord and master over the women and children, and women were expected to be paragons of virtue and modesty, dressed from neck to toe in hobble skirts, flowing tresses and osprey plumes. The showing of any skin beyond the face was immodest and outrageous. Nobody asked their opinion of anything so they’d best keep quiet, and they didn’t have the right to vote. There would be no tolerance of non-conformity from either sex. Home entertainment in the less puritanical households that didn’t forbid virtually anything enjoyable consisted of reading, conversing with family members and guests about quaint topics, and maybe playing something on the old piano in the parlor. Otherwise you had to get dressed up and go into town to see a show.

But victory in a hard-fought war and the cultural and political changes that followed it blew that rigid, unyielding conformity to bits. Indeed the puritanical fuddie-duddies of Big Government tried to keep the populace moral and pure and protect the common good with the enactment in 1920 of National Prohibition via constitutional amendment, forbidding the decadent pleasures of beer and wine as well as hard liquor, but it would all soon backfire in the faces of those arrogant moralists. Otherwise law-abiding citizens rebelled against prohibition law in droves, finding ways to get or make demon liquor for their own consumption, creating a virtual nation of outlaws. Newspapers and popular magazines often mocked Prohibition, and black markets, gangster crime, bootlegging, speakeasies, moonshining and some pretty wild private parties all came as a result of an incredibly misguided government policy.

Meanwhile a new generation of young adults born around 1900 and in the years after ushered in the first viable popular youth culture as they moved away from their isolated farm communities and small towns and found new freedom in the big cities and college campuses. They rebelled against everything their uptight parents’ generation stood for, became enthusiasts of the new “barbaric” ragtime jazz music and danced to it in ways that were positively scandalous. Guys were more casual and laid back, and really didn’t care much about religion or politics. Girls shed the old norms of modesty and virtue and to paraphrase a 1980s pop song, they just wanted to have fun. They shortened their hair and hemlines, danced, smoked (often using fashionable cigarette holders) and even sometimes got intimate with boys. 

Ad for a sexploitation movie "for 

men only" from the Minneapolis

Tribune, October 13, 1928.

Guys and girls also thumbed their nose at the Prohibition that their parents’ generation was imposing on them and the rest of the country, with illegal booze finding its way into frat parties just as other illegal recreational substances did in the decades after Repeal. This new youth culture was both celebrated and condemned in much of the media of the time, such as tabloid-style newspapers, magazines geared to younger affluent readers and the new Hollywood movies.

An ad for the book “The Revolt of Modern Youth” by Judge Ben B. Lindsey that appeared in the November 1925 issue of Physical Culture magazine exclaimed, “modern youth has gotten to the point where it is deliberately experimenting with sexual affairs; that, in effect, a revolt is taking place among the young against the social code…When so many marriages end in divorce, when 50 per cent of young boys and girls are prematurely experimenting with sex, and when a million and a half unborn babies are sacrificed every year, it is surely time that the real facts, and their causes, were discussed openly and freely.”

Wonderful Wireless

The twenties brought the first electronic home entertainment, radio, into the homes of everyday people, not just the filthy rich or the eccentric hobbyists who had played around with radio transmissions from the time Gugliemo Marconi made the first transatlantic radio broadcast way back in 1901. Station KDKA in Pittsburgh is famously sited as the first modern radio station, broadcasting the Warren G. Harding-James M. Cox presidential election returns in November 1920 (Harding won). Prior to that, that station and a few others periodically broadcast programs of music by placing a Victrola (record player) up close to a microphone (“wireless telephone”) hooked up to a crude transmitter, or broadcast somebody blathering about whatever was on his mind into the “wireless telephone.” Alas there were few receiving sets available to the public but appliance stores and department stores began selling “wireless” sets and the more programs going over the air the more sets were sold.

With the success of the election returns, KDKA began broadcasting more scheduled programs of mostly news, music and church services, with no commercials, at least initially. With more scheduled programming, and more stations coming on the air, more people were interested in purchasing radio sets for their homes, an investment that paid for itself with all the free entertainment available.
In the first half of the decade, would-be broadcasters had little idea of what to do with this new medium. Many early station operators were educational institutions, broadcasting lectures and classical music recordings. Some hucksters and preachers acquired a microphone and transmitter to get their message out to the masses, and big city department stores, newspapers and other businesses also got into the radio game early as a service to their communities.

Surprisingly, the business interests that started radio stations in the early twenties did not use the stations to sell their goods and services to the public. The prevailing view in the very early days was that the airwaves were a public trust that shouldn’t be used for commercial purposes. Consequently, many of these new operators found that running a radio station was a lot more expensive and time consuming than they had counted on and many of them wound up shutting down their stations. In order to survive they had to have some source of funding and it was quickly realized that selling time to advertisers was the easiest way to go about that.

Commercial radio, it has been said, began in 1922 when a real estate firm sponsored a program on WEAF in New York. From then on the airwaves were as commercialized as anything else in a nation of free enterprise and while some purists were appalled, the new-found profits from advertising allowed more stations to go on and allowed operators to come out of the sheds and basements they were broadcasting from and build studios big enough to accommodate full orchestras performing live rather than just having a Victrola next to a microphone

By 1926, WEAF became the flagship station of the newly-formed National Broadcasting Company, owned by radio manufacturer RCA, sending top-quality live programming to radio stations across the country via telephone line, and bringing the advertisers' messages to national audiences. The Columbia Broadcasting System, backed in part by the Columbia Phonograph Company linked together a competing network in 1927-28 and NBC meanwhile managed to find enough stations to start a second radio network, initially called the 'Blue' network, (as opposed to the main 'Red' network) which would eventually be spun off into a separate entity called the American Broadcasting Company in the 1940s. By decade’s end there were at least 618 stations on the air across the U.S., and sales of radio receivers topped $600 million.


TV in the Roaring Twenties

Just as radio was coming into the homes of Americans, television was already being invented, not by one man but by many scientists and engineers working in laboratories in the United States and England.

1927 depiction of television apparatus.

The concept of television goes all the way back to 1873 when it was discovered, apparently by accident, that the electrical resistance of the element selenium varied in proportion to the light shining on it. The discovery proved that it was possible to transfer light variations into electronic signals, thus making it theoretically possible to send photographic images by wire.
In 1923, Dr. Vladimir Zworykin invented the iconoscope, which would function as the “eye” of a television camera. Through the decade of the twenties a number of television systems were developed, most involving large mechanical scanning disks attached to electric motors, arc lights and lots of wiring. The resulting transmitted picture was fuzzy and very small. Several public demonstrations of television were made by early developers such as AT&T’s Bell Laboratories and RCA. The early apparatuses were not practical for home use, but the possibilities were realized early on.
The New York World observed in 1928, “Three years ago…television was a dream…Now it has stept out of the laboratory and into the sunlight…Few will now doubt that the time is coming when pictures and scenes of all kinds will be broadcast over great distances, as sounds of all kinds are broadcast to-day. Men may sit in their homes seeing and hearing plays; may watch and hear orators; may bask in the sunlight of Cairo while gazing at a blizzard in Montreal; may even see history made on the battle-field.”

The Literary Digest for August 11, 1928 went on to say, “As a result of experiments being conducted simultaneously in London and New York City, other editors are predicting that movies will soon be broadcast by radio, so that the person provided with the proper receiving set can have his screen theater at home; or even his baseball game and championship fight.

But not so fast, cautioned Franklyn F. Stratford in the publication Radio Broadcast. “Any one who hesitates to buy a radio receiver because he fears that one equipped with television features may be put on the market before he can realize his investment, is taking a position almost as ludicrous as that of a man who decided not to buy a gasoline-driven automobile because some inventor might devise a vehicle which would run ten centuries on the intra-atomic energy of a pound of sodium bicarbonate. The every-day application of television is a remote possibility in five years, a fair possibility in ten, a probability in fifteen. Many good radio receivers, appealing to ear only, will issue from the factories, play their melodies in millions of homes, and succumb to old age and new tastes, in that time.”

Beyond the Crash

With the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, the “Roaring Twenties” came to an end as the nation sank into a national depression where unemployment was high as well as uncertainty about the future. But on the positive side, Prohibition was repealed in 1933, and the Analog Age was just beginning. The radio business grew considerably as people sought the comfort of home entertainment by national and local stars signed by the networks and stations to perform. If you worked in radio during the Great Depression, your job was pretty secure.
Radio programming in the thirties evolved into many of the categories that were staples of television programming decades later, such as situation comedies, drama, quiz shows, variety shows, etc. As the nation entered a Second World War in the forties, radio became more important than ever to bring on-the-spot news and information as well as entertainment in times of continuing uncertainty.
Television development grew by leaps and bounds in the thirties, although it was still beneath the radar of most Americans who were quite content listening to the radio and letting their minds fill in the pictures.

Privacy concerns about new technology including 
television were pondered as far back as 1927.

In 1929 Dr. Zworykin, who had invented the iconoscope early in the decade, invented the cathode-ray picture tube, which eliminated the need for a mechanical scanning disc and was the first step toward the development of the standard analog receiver that lasted until the end of the 20^th Century.
In spite of the Depression, experimental television broadcasts were occurring through the 1930s, primarily in New York City after NBC built a television tower atop the Empire State Building in 1931, and were being seen on the few receiving sets in operation in the area. Television was formally introduced to the public at large at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt having the honors of being the first president to give a live speech on television. NBC and parent company RCA announced they would begin regular television broadcasts and would begin offering television sets to the public. It all came to an abrupt delay at the end of 1941, however, with the U.S. entry into the Second World War
And even before black-and-white TV started coming into people’s homes after the war, color television was already being invented, with an experimental color TV system developed by CBS demonstrated as far back as 1939 and 1940. The picture quality was said to be really good, but this system had its share of drawbacks and was ultimately scrapped in favor of a “compatible color” system introduced by RCA in the early 1950s.
The Analog Age was here to stay…at least until digital took over.



Sources:

“This Fabulous Century, 1920-1930” Time-Life Books, 1969, 1974

Life (old humor magazine) various issues, 1922-1929

“Revolt of Modern Youth” ad, Physical Culture, November 1925

“Doubts About Television” Literary Digest, November 6, 1926

“Another Step Toward Television” Literary Digest, February 12, 1927

“Television Makes its Bow” Literary Digest, April 23, 1927

“Television Not Yet on Tap” Literary Digest, August 27, 1927

“Colored Films, Talking Movies, and Television” Literary Digest, August 11, 1928

“What Goes On Behind Your Radio Dial” NBC Radio booklet, 1943

“The History of Radio Station WDGY—A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota” by Jerry Verne Haines, December 1970

“TV Book” edited by Judy Fireman, Workman Publishing Co., 1977

“TV Guide Almanac” compiled and edited by Craig T. and Peter G. Norback, Ballantine Books, 1980

Fred is Dead: Recalling Flintstones Bedrock City

You've seen them on TV and in comic books. Now -- visit the Flintstones in their own Bedrock City at Custer, South Dakota, on highways U.S. 16 and 385.

You'll see Fred and Wilma - Barney and Betty and, of course, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm. Visit the firehouse, the Bedrock bank, city jail, oodles of stores and The Bedrock Theatre, where you'll enjoy Flintstone films showing continuously. Dino is twenty feet high, perched on one of the many rocky ledges that add to the fabulous beauty of the sixty acres that comprise Bedrock City and camping area. Modern bath houses and rest rooms add to the comfort of campers and travelers and a drive-in and souvenir shop add to the enchantment of Bedrock. The cool dry nights and balmy days assure you a delightful vacation in the heart of the beautiful Black Hills, just a short distance from Mt. Rushmore and the buffalo herds. Remember!! There is only one Bedrock City in America!

--1967 Flintstones Bedrock City brochure

Soon there would be another Bedrock City, in Arizona, plus two in Canada, making a total of four Bedrock City theme parks in North America. All of them are gone now, victims of changing times, licensing issues and new generations of kids disinterested in such schmaltz.

I never did make it out to Flintstones Bedrock City. It's a shame too. The original Flintstones-themed park in Custer, South Dakota was in a state that bordered my home state of Minnesota. But when my family went on a trip, at least when I was in tow, we either went up north or out to Wisconsin. Never west. Come to think of it, I never saw nearby Mount Rushmore in person either.

Being enamored with Fred and Barney from age five on, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it as a kid, and would have still gotten a kick out of seeing it as an adult. I heard about it when I was a kid. I knew some kids who had been there, some telling me it was pretty neat, others saying it wasn't all that good and I wasn't missing anything. Certainly it was no Disneyland. It was a roadside attraction, not a destination. It had cement "Stone Age" buildings and cement statues of Flintstones characters that weren't exactly to Hanna-Barbera's specs. Postcards feature employees posing in character costumes that look rather hideous, or shall we say, primitive.

The first Bedrock City park in Custer, SD opened in 1966, the year the Flintstones left prime time network television after six seasons. But the show became even more popular in syndicated reruns, usually running in late weekday afternoons to the delight of millions of children coming home from school. Myself included. In my home town of Minneapolis, for a time in the early 1970s, it was shown twice a day by independent station WTCN-TV Channel 11, mornings and afternoons, plus two back-to-back episodes on Sunday mornings. I wanted to hang out with Fred and Barney, and be their pal. In a way, I was kind of able to do that when I watched the show. But if I had been able to go to the Bedrock City theme park, I'd be able to walk into their homes, stroll down their main street and ride in their cars. I could have acquired inexpensive Flintstones merchandise at the souvenir shop, and I could have enjoyed the local cuisine, Bronto Burgers and Dino Dogs. Truly a three dimensional version of a one dimensional cartoon.

Here's a few postcards from the park in South Dakota, circa 1969.

"In front of a skyscraper under construction stand Barney and Fred waiting for their families to take a ride in their sports job (sic). They stand on the main street of Bedrock City, Custer, South Dakota."

"Stopping in front of the Souvenir Shop, Fred and Barney chat awhile before leaving for work."

"Pebbles rides the saber-toothed tiger to visit Bamm-Bamm at Barney Rubble's home."

A second Flintstones park opened in Arizona in 1972. It was smaller, but some say it was better. Two more eventually popped up in Canada, but they were fairly short lived. Over time, the parks were updated, but not too much. The twenty-foot Dino statue at the South Dakota park was repainted in different colors over the years. The cement character statues were replaced with fiberglass ones that were more to specifications, at the demand of the current owners of the Flintstones intellectual properties of the time.  The franchise had changed corporate hands a number of times over the years, eventually ending up under the auspices of Warner Bros, originator of the Looney Tunes cartoons.

The Flintstones continued to be seen in perpetual reruns on local stations, including WGN in Chicago and its vast cable network, well into the 1990s. Eventually, the show would become an exclusive of Turner Broadcasting's Cartoon Network, later being shuffled over to the Boomerang channel, which is seen on far fewer cable and satellite outlets. As this happened, the Flintstones began to fade from the public consciousness. Recent generations of kids have little clue and no curiosity about the Flintstones. There are still Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles cereals featuring Fred and Barney on the box, and Flintstones Vitamins remain the best-selling children's chewable, but that has more to do with the buying decisions of the parents than the demand of the kids, as had been the case when those products came out decades ago.

The Bedrock City parks in South Dakota and Arizona finally closed in 2015, and perhaps it's amazing they lasted that long. People lost interest, kids no longer care, and the current owner of the Flintstones intellectual properties, Warner Bros, had no interest in renewing the licenses to use the characters. The Stepford Children of today don't give a damn about such things. Same reason why Toys R Us and most other toy stores went out of business. If it's not an app they are completely lost and clueless. They're not even kids anymore, they are mutants.

An interesting and in depth history of the Flintstones theme parks can be found here:  https://www.theawl.com/2016/03/amidst-of-the-rubble-of-bedrock-city/

The Squirt Soft Drink Subjective Color Acid Test

On July 25, 1967, television viewers with black-and-white TV sets were startled to see flashes of color on their monochrome screens for about ten seconds during a 60-second soda-pop commercial. A letter to a columnist in the September 14, 1967 Detroit Free Press asked, "Before I see an eye doctor, let me ask Action Line: Is it possible to pick up color TV on a black and white set? I SWEAR I saw a Squirt soft-drink commercial in color. Not pink elephants Green Squirt!" The image was described in the newspaper column as a red, green and blue sign that had flashed on the screen.

A viewer in Chicago told Popular Photography magazine (July 1968), "I saw pink! It knocked me for a loop...the letters S-Q-U-I-R-T looked greenish or light turquoise...and it kept up for maybe 10 seconds." (Meanwhile a viewer in San Francisco claimed he didn't see anything colorful.)

   

It was the national debut of an experimental television commercial using a special production process that would give the optical illusion of color. The commercial first aired a few months earlier locally on KNXT, the CBS-owned television station in Los Angeles, and viewers there were just as stunned. Squirt and its advertising partner Color-Tel Corporation of Los Angeles, at the time decided to make no prior announcement of this experimental commercial, preferring to see just how viewers would respond. And respond they did. Within hours, thousands of viewers were asking if they really saw what they thought they did, color on their black-and-white TV screens, according to Popular Electronics magazine (October 1968).

The burst of color was not "living color" (as NBC frequently touted in the 1960s), but something called "subjective color." The process was developed by James F. Butterfield of Color-Tel, a corporation founded in Los Angeles in early 1966. It gave the illusion of color by pulsating white light in a particular sequence for each color with a rotating device attached to a regular black and white TV camera lens. Butterfield had found in his many years of research that the human brain perceives colors through complex electronic codes. Butterfield was able to figure out the individual codes for the colors red, green and blue, and by pulsating white light in predetermined patterns with the device on the camera lens, could induce the brain of the television viewer to perceive color. Beyond that, ordinary monochrome equipment could be used in filming or taping, broadcasting and viewing.

There were a few drawbacks. The images were nothing at all like true color TV. It didn't have the intensity or range of colors. As the technology currently stood, the effect could only be used on still images. The "subjective color" could only be seen in about one-fourth of the TV screen area, and, because it relied on flickering light, there was a lot of flickering. It was also found that some people could not perceive the colors at all, yet some people diagnosed as color-blind could see the colors.

Nonetheless, Popular Science, in its August 1968 issue, saw many possibilities for the technology, particularly for special effects. "Color will appear in cartoons, commercials and special presentations. Polka-dots on a clown's suit will be seen as red flashing dots. You'll see the designs and lettering on a cereal box in pulsating green and blue. A girl will plant a kiss on a boy's cheek--and a red lipstick print will appear on your screen."

Popular Electronics (October 1968) went on to report, "Right now, Color-Tel engineers are checking into the possibility of using electronic color for such things as color radar displays, color computer readouts, and perhaps even color sonar pictures. It may be true that, in its present stage of development, Butterfield's process is nothing but a scientific curiosity — however, 25 years ago, so was television."

Popular Science predicted, "You can expect color on your black-and-white TV by this fall [1968]." But there was one giant flaw in that rosy prediction. By 1968, black-and-white TV was well on the way out. The vast majority of programming (outside of old movies and TV shows) were being broadcast in "living" color by then, and while most U.S. households still had black-and-white TV sets (color sets were big, bulky and expensive in those days), more and more homes were purchasing color television sets every year. Had James F. Butterfield perfected the process ten or fifteen years earlier, in the 1950s when 90 percent of television broadcasts were black and white, it might have had more of a serious impact.

Although James F. Butterfield had many patents to his credit before his death in 2013, it appears this experiment didn't go as far as the press of the time might have suggested it could. Color-Tel last renewed as a corporation in 1972, and we can not find any evidence of other "subjective color" broadcasts beyond the Squirt commercial.

When the Grinch First Stole Christmas

On Sunday, December 18, 1966, the Dr. Seuss TV special "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" was shown for the first time on the CBS Television Network. The Grinch was so mean, he preempted "Lassie," although young fans of the beloved collie probably didn't mind. The half-hour animated special has been shown every year since and has been seen by countless millions, most of whom at this point in time were born decades after its original broadcast.

The issue of TV Guide from that week (December 17-23, 1966) featured a "close-up" of the special along with an ad for the soundtrack album in its local programming pages, plus a three-page article about it in the national section, with some interesting insights.

"How the Grinch Stole Christmas" had already been a best-selling children's book, first published in 1957. When Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) teamed up with Chuck Jones, head of MGM's animation department to adapt it for television, a few details had to be worked out. For instance, what color is the Grinch, actually? In the book he was drawn in black and white with red eyes. It looked good on paper, but in the TV special, where things had to be in fuller color, it was decided the Grinch was green.

Also, according to the TV Guide article, "In studying the 'Who's,' whose village the Grinch invades on Christmas Eve, Jones discovered that 'Lady Who's don't have high-heeled shoes--they have high-heeled feet,' and the little girl, Cindy-Lou, 'is not a regular little girl--she has antennas.'"

Production of the special took nearly a year, was made up of more than 25,000 individual drawings, or cells, and according to TV Guide it was at the time "the most expensive half-hour animated cartoon ever created for television." Well-known monster movie actor Boris Karloff narrated the special, virsitle voice actor June Foray ("Rocky the Squirrel" among many others) voiced Cindy Lou, and Thurl Ravenscroft (voice of "Tony the Tiger" of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes fame) sang, "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch."

Theodor Geisel was 62 at the time, and although he had been married for 39 years, they had no children. "Kids frighten him," an unnamed friend is quoted in the TV Guide article. The article went on to tell an interesting story about Geisel and his relations with kids. "Once, in Cleveland, autographing his books at a department store, Ted found himself facing a hostile group of children, who finally told him that one of their number could draw better than he could. Geisel invited the boy to join him at the blackboard.

"'By God, he could draw better!' Geisel recalls."

Theodor Geisel died in 1991 at the age of 87. But it was predicted, even back in 1966, that Dr. Seuss would live on. "I predict that Dr. Seuss will emerge as one of the great classics of this era. In 2059, children will hoot for joy when they come across Seuss books," said Rudolph Flesch, author of "Why Johnny Can't Read" in TV Guide. Added Bennet Cerf, head of Random House, which published the Dr. Seuss books, "We have some great names on our list--Faulkner, O'Hara, Capote. But Ted Geisel is the only real genius among them."

Barry ZeVan, Tom Ryther and JFK

Anyone who was at least five years old on November 22, 1963 remembers where they were when they first heard the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and later died. Those who were children then most likely heard about it while in school. Adults heard about it in all different ways, likely either from a television or radio report or through word of mouth.

Whenever I interview someone who was around then, especially people who had careers in media, I like to ask them where they were on that fateful day. I've had the pleasure of talking many times to a couple of talents I grew up watching on television in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, Barry ZeVan and Tom Ryther. The two of them were colleagues and friends who worked together in the Twin Cities market in the 1970s and 1980s, and separately in various other cities. They didn't meet until about seven years after the JFK assassination, but when it happened both of them were young broadcasters, 26 years old at the time, and they both have their own unique stories of where they were when they first heard the news.




KSTP-TV ad promoting Barry ZeVan
 the Weatherman from 1971.

Recalls Barry ZeVan:

I had been attending one of the first BPA (Broadcast Promotion Association) conventions at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco from the 16th to 19th of November, 1963. I had friends in Yuma, Arizona, who asked if I could drive there to visit for a day, and since I had the time, I decided to do so. I arrived in Yuma the night of the 20th, spent the day of the 21st there, then started to drive back home (which was Idaho Falls, Idaho, at the time) the morning of the 22nd. For some reason, I chose to not have the radio on while driving, but decided to turn it on around Noon, Pacific Time. I had just crossed the Colorado River into Needles, California, to get on the highway that would lead me to Las Vegas and northward to Idaho. Just north of Needles, after a commercial had played, I heard Fulton Lewis, Jr., a highly-respected newscaster and commentator, talking about Presidential succession. I thought to myself, "Why?'. Then he stated, for those just tuning in, President Kennedy had been killed. I screamed and nearly went of the road, just south of Searchlight, Nevada (Harry Reid's hometown).

Because there were no cell phones then, I had to wait until I got to Boulder City, Nevada, to call my wife to assure her I'd be driving all night to get home, and for her to not worry about the survival of this country. When I got to Las Vegas about a half-hour later, I heard on the radio all lights on The Strip and downtown, on Fremont Street, would not be lighted until Midnight that night. It was raining and snowing, mixed, that late afternoon and evening, and very chilly for Las Vegas that time of year. The skies were crying, too. I drove through blizzard-like weather all the way to Idaho Falls, which I reached about 7 the next morning. I never turned the radio off. At about 4 a.m., I heard the comforting words of then Senator Hubert Humphrey and Rhode Island's Senator John Pastore, reassuring the nation that all would be well, regardless of the horror we all endured the preceding day. I didn't know at that time Senator Humphrey would become a very good friend to me in later years.

The night I emceed Vice President Mondale's pre-inaugural banquet at the Washington Hilton in January, 1977, former Vice President Humphrey was in the audience and I got to introduce him to come to the podium for his remarks that evening. I told the preceding story (regarding my memories of him that early November 23rd on the snow-swept highway in Southern Idaho), and how he'd inspired me and the rest of the nation, I'm certain, to know we would survive the event of that terrible preceding day.



Tom Ryther became the KSTP-TV sports director in 1971.

Tom Ryther was on the air on radio station WIBV in Belleville, IL, a suburb of St. Louis, when the news broke. His story appeared in my web article, The RYTHER Factor.

It was high noon on that day in 1963, and we had an old newspaper guy who was our news director and all he did was rip and hand us the news copy [off the news wire]. He hands me this thing, ‘There have been shots fired in Dallas. It is believed that President Kennedy has been wounded.’ I was on the air reading a newscast, and I said, ‘We’ll bring you further details as they develop.’ Al [the news director] goes to lunch. When he came back I said "Al, what the…the President of the United States has been shot!"

In the hour after the first bulletin had cleared the wire, while the news director was out to lunch, Tom ran back and forth between the newsroom and the studio, getting reports from the Associated Press and United Press International wires and getting the information on the air as quickly as possible while playing records and taped commercials in the interim. Finally came the bulletin, which he read on the air:

“Word just in from the Associated Press, President John F. Kennedy has died of wounds suffered in Dallas during a motorcade. It is unknown at this time who did the shooting. Investigations are underway.”

Luckily I had gotten some training so I had some experience, [and] I had a cool head that day.

As a journalism student in 1958, Tom had actually met then-Senator Kennedy when he went to Washington with other journalism students as a guest of Sen. Stuart Symington of Missouri. The future President met with the students outside of Senate chambers and answered questions from the students, including Tom. He says:

I never wrote a story about it, but I was in on the interview. I sat there, asked him questions, talked to him. Great charisma.

(Find out about Tom Ryther's memoir, "The Hummelsheim Kid" here.)

Television Listings--November 22, 1963

Banner headline on the November 22, 1963 edition of the Minneapolis Star evening newspaper read, "PRESIDENT SLAIN Sniper Cuts Down Kennedy, Texas Governor in Dallas Parade". It had news and photos about the infamous day in history when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Meanwhile on television, all of the networks broke into programming as soon as the story hit, and presented wall-to-wall news coverage for the next several days.

But the television program listings carried in the paper were submitted in advance, and on page 23A we see what would have been on had the President not been slain. In those days in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, WCCO-4 was CBS (as it is now), KSTP-5 was NBC, KMSP-9 was ABC and WTCN-11 was independent. Since the Star was an evening paper, the listings start at 4 p.m. Friday and go through 3 p.m. Saturday. Everything listed was preempted that day (although we are not entirely clear what WTCN did that day, as it had no network affiliation at that time).

In addition to the listings, ads on the page promote Lee J. Cobb, Harry Guardino and Gena Rowlands in John O'Hara's "It's Mental Work" on "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater" on NBC that night, and local late night movies on Channels 9 and 11.

Programs highlighted by the newspaper included:

6:30--77 SUNSET STRIP. "Lover's Lane," a drama featuring guest Preston Foster.--ch. 9.

7:30--ROUTE 66. "Kiss the Monster, Make Him Sleep." James Coburn and Barbara Mattes appear in drama filmed in Minneapolis.--ch. 4.

7:30--MOVIE. "Goliath Against the Giants." Brad Harris stars in drama shown for the first time on TV in this area. --ch. 11.

8:30--TWILIGHT ZONE. "Night Call." Gladys Cooper is splendid in a weird little story about an elderly invalid who gets phone calls without the aid of the phone company.--ch. 4.

9:00--ALFRED HITCHCOCK. "Body in the Barn." A suspicious woman is positive that her neighbor has been murdered by his wife, and she wants justice done. The story is well paced and cast. Lillian Gish, Peter Lind Hays and Maggie McNamara have the leads.--ch. 4.

9:00--JACK PAAR. Guests: Liberace, Milt Kamen, Cassius Clay and Mary McCarthy.--ch. 5.

10:30--STEVE ALLEN. Guests: Joe Flynn, Janice Baker, Jack Carter and comedienna Gina Wilson. --ch. 4.

10:30--TONIGHT. Guests: Kirk Douglas, Dave King, Henny Youngman and the Willis Sisters.--ch. 5.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

12:30--SPORTS SPECTACULAR presents charity basketball game between the Harlem Globetrotters and Prince Phillip's Taverners.--ch. 4.

12:30--AMERICAN BANDSTAND. Guests: Johnny Mathis, Connie Stevens, Johnny Crawford and Annette.--ch. 9.

1:15--FOOTBALL. Minnesota vs. Wisconsin.--ch. 4.

Richard Dawson and the worst TV special of all-time

   With the passing of Richard Dawson on June 2, 2012 at age 79, there were many tributes reflecting on his career as an actor and as the smooching game show host of Family Feud. Forgotten in the tributes, a 1979 ABC-TV prime time special that marked a low point in his career, the “Playboy Roller-Disco Pajama Party.’ The program was so dreadful, a news anchor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area slammed it on the air during a local update.

   Airing on Friday, November 23, 1979, the “Playboy Roller-Disco Pajama Party” was described by a reviewer in the St. Paul Dispatch as “plotless, pointless crap” and “one of the most preposterous and insulting programs in the history of television.”

   The show took place at one of publisher Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansions, and opened with Dawson, dressed in a brown turtleneck and tan sport coat saying, “Welcome to Hef’s Place... Everything around here is well built.”

   Featuring the “top Playmates of 1980,” Dawson was described in a review as “drool(ing) and sigh(ing) as Bunnies and Playmates frolic at a pool and waterfall at Hefner’s Playboy Mansion West in Los Angeles.” The first part of the program included shots of “young women gently smoothing oil on their well-tanned skin” and others roller-skating in “skimpy swimming attire” to the disco hit sung by special guest Donna Summer. “Tops and bottoms swing in slow motion. A Bunny in a blue, star-bedecked bra gasps in athletic rapture as a camera approaches for a close-up…Hefner, in a pale-blue jumpsuit and unexplained Indian headdress, leads a long line of disco skaters. Two women duel with Popsicles.” Disco might have been pronounced dead in 1979, but it was alive and well at “Hef’s Place.”

   The Village People and Chuck Mangione were among other guest entertainers appearing in the show, and meanwhile Dawson pursues a lil’ blonde cutie named “Dorothy,” (the late Dorothy Stratten, as a matter of fact) who at first rejects his advances because she’s only interested in roller-disco. It might have been Playboy but there wasn’t anything all that sexual outside of innuendo and mild titillation, as this was still network television in the late 70s.

   The “pajama party” part would come in the second half of the hour-long special, after “a word from your local ABC stations.” In the Twin Cities, KSTP-TV Channel 5 anchorman Ron Magers appeared live for an “Eyewitness News Update,” starting off with a statement that was not in the script.

   “I want to assure that this is a local news update and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Playboy Roller-Disco Pajama Party,” he proclaimed. He read a couple news headlines and then said, “For those of you who may have turned off your television sets in disgust, I want to assure you we’ll be back in 30 minutes with local news.”

   Within seconds, KSTP’s switchboard was inundated with calls that came in for more than thirty minutes, most of them supporting Magers’s comments, according to a switchboard operator there in a news story. The New York Times and Associated Press picked up on the story, which was in turn picked up by news outlets across the country. In the ensuing days the station received calls from all over giving kudos to Magers.  KSTP general manager Ralph Dolan had no comment about the incident.

   Magers told the Associated Press that he was required to appear with a news update during the show and he wanted people to know he was not part of it. “In my opinion, the program was blatantly sexist and of no redeeming social value,” he told the AP.

   Ron Magers was at the time the most popular news anchor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market and so he could get away with such a bold move. Anyone else who tried that most likely would not have made it to the late-evening newscast that followed the Playboy special.

   Today Ron Magers calls Chicago home, arriving there from the Twin Cities in 1981 and working for two different network-owned stations through the years. He remains as one of the most popular—and occasionally controversial—anchors in that city.

 

  

Cops vs. reporters, 1970s style

   Dennis Anderson had a long and storied career at WDIO-TV Channel 10 in Duluth, Minnesota and satellite station WIRT Channel 13 in Hibbing that spanned from when the stations first went on the air in the volatile mid-1960s until his retirement in May 2011. Spending most of his years as the lead anchor on the station’s newscasts he was known for his signature sign-off, “Good night everybody, and be kind.” But as a reporter-photographer for the station in 1971, he was caught in a tangle between the TV station and city police, resulting in a confiscated camera, allegations and counter-allegations of harassment and a lawsuit that determined the rights journalists have in the face of police power.

   When WDIO came on the air in January 1966, it was the scrappy newcomer in a small city with two well-established TV stations; CBS affiliate KDAL-TV Channel 3 and NBC affiliate WDSM-TV Channel 6. WDIO was the area’s first full-time ABC affiliate and it was clear from the get-go that the station came to shake things up in the Duluth media establishment.

  The approach to news was hard-hitting, with an emphasis on exposés and investigative reporting. Critics variously called it bombastic, sensationalistic and muckraking, but the approach grabbed the public’s attention, the solid journalism behind it kept that attention, and by March 1971, the upstart television station in Duluth was number one at 10 p.m., with an astounding 56 percent audience share.

   After working for the station early on as a reporter, Dennis Anderson left WDIO in 1968 to accept a job as news director and lead anchor at another ABC affiliate, KTHI-TV Channel 11 in Fargo. But the departure didn’t last and in 1969 he returned to WDIO to anchor a new consumer watchdog segment on the newscasts called Action Line.

   As the lead investigator for Action Line, Anderson looked into, and attempted to resolve complaints written in by viewers. But in 1971, the mild-mannered reporter was caught in the middle of a sometimes intense, sometimes bizarre feud between the TV station and Duluth police.

   It started with a couple of different Action Line segments uncovering alleged misconduct within the ranks of the Duluth Police Department. The first involved a viewer complaint about a used car dealership. The subsequent investigation found a few police officers were repairing and selling used cars to an unlicensed dealership in their spare time, and were allegedly circumventing state law by falsifying title transfers. The City of Duluth had also been investigating the case, but WDIO-TV brought it to the public’s attention and it eventually resulted in the conviction of one officer.

   A second Action Line investigation turned up police documents, provided by a confidential source, that were found to have been tampered with to protect a prominent local citizen who had been arrested for drunken driving.

   Then just after midnight on March 29, 1971, there was a report of a break-in at the Ski Hut sporting goods store in Duluth. Serving as both reporter and cameraman, Dennis Anderson hustled to the location, armed with a portable film camera and a Sylvania Sun Gun lamp.

   Police were on the scene and soon captured two suspects inside the building while Anderson at first kept his distance, staying behind the building. When he got word that the suspects had been captured, he went to the front of the building and began filming through a store window.

   As the arresting officers lead the two suspects out of the building in handcuffs, Anderson stood about eight to ten feet away on a public sidewalk and began filming, using the Sun Gun lamp to provide light. Sgt. Richard Gunnarson, who was holding the door open as officers walked out the suspects, shouted “No pictures!” twice at Anderson, who then turned off the lamp. The police sergeant then demanded the WDIO camera from Anderson, and he handed it over.

   Lt. Alexander Lukovsky, who was also at the scene, talked to Anderson and offered to give back the camera under the condition that Anderson check with the Detective Bureau to determine that the film he had shot did not contain information that could possibly harm the case, and that the suspects were not juveniles (which state law prohibited being identified) before going on the air with it. When Anderson told the police lieutenant that he couldn’t guarantee any of that, the camera was taken down to police headquarters.

   WDIO news director Richard Gottschald was furious. He went to police headquarters and demanded to know why the camera was confiscated. Police claimed that the bright lights being used by Anderson were impeding the officers in their line of duty but Anderson claimed they said nothing to him about the lights and that an officer in fact had asked him to turn the light on to aid the police.

   WDIO reported on the controversy in its newscasts and the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union got involved on the station’s behalf, while a police union president accused the station of conducting a “subtle, continuing campaign to deride, humiliate and persecute us,” in a lengthy article that appeared in the November 13, 1971 national section of TV Guide titled “Hassle In Duluth.” The union called for a sponsor boycott of WDIO newscasts, which proved to be largely unsuccessful.

   The camera was returned to the station within days, unopened and the film inside unprocessed, but that wasn’t the end of the controversy. The station (then not owned by Hubbard Broadcasting, Inc.) filed suit in US District Court (with Dennis Anderson also named as a plaintiff) and the feud between the station and the police only escalated.

   According to the TV Guide article, employees of the station were claiming police were engaged in a “campaign of petty harassment” against them, with radar speed checks set up on the road leading to WDIO’s hilltop studios on 10 Observation Road, and near the home of news director Richard Gottschald. Station employees said they were stopped and ticketed for minor infractions on a regular basis, and the news director, who made an extra effort to watch his speed knowing police were laying in wait, happened to let down his guard one night and sure enough was nailed for going a few miles over the limit.

   Police in turn complained the TV station was harassing them with reporters tailing squad cars in hopes of catching police committing some small infraction. “For a while, the squad cars and TV cars were chasing each other’s tails around Duluth in kind of a Marx Brothers game of tag,” according to the article in TV Guide.

   Finally on February 7, 1972, United States District Court Fifth Division ruled in favor of WDIO and Dennis Anderson, saying that the seizure of the camera “was wrongful, and in violation of plaintiffs' rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, because [it was] not made pursuant to a valid warrant or arrest. Also, despite defendants' argument, it is clear to this court that the seizure and holding of the camera and undeveloped film was an unlawful ‘prior restraint’ whether or not the film was ever reviewed.”

   The Court went on to rule that “Plaintiffs' right to use a light in the taking of photographs at night should not be restricted except, and unless and until so ordered to the contrary by police in their reasonable belief that such is interfering with or endangering them in their work…There was no evidence of such interference by plaintiff Anderson here.”