Before HBO, the rise of cable or the invention of the VCR/DVR, Saturday was a vital night of programming for the Big 3 TV networks, not an afterthought as it is today. In the 70's it was a night of classic sitcoms on CBS, and in the 80's NBC and ABC had hit shows like Golden Girls;Hunter;Love Boat; and Fantasy Island. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one of the crown jewels of CBS's Saturday schedule and its last episode aired on March 19, 1977. (It was curious that such a big episode was scheduled in between the February and May ratings "sweeps".)
Although I'd been a regular viewer of the show during its first five seasons, once I was away at college I rarely had the opportunity to watch it - but tonight was an exception. I was in my sophomore year at Penn State where I was attending a branch campus in Beaver County, about 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. It was largely a commuter campus with one dormitory, which I lived in. (I transferred to main campus in my junior year.) The dorm often emptied out on weekends and this weekend when Mary ended her 7-year run was no different. However, I stayed on campus and watched the episode alone in my dorm room on my roommate's little black and white set while I sat on my bed doing school work.
This funny episode (everyone at TV station WJM was fired except for Ted Baxter) ended with the touching group huddle pictured above. It posted a Nielsen household rating of 25.5. Although it wasn't a blockbuster rating like that delivered by the finales of M*A*S*H (60.2 HH rating); Cheers (45.5); or Seinfeld (41.3), it was a solid bump from its 20.5 season average. Hats off to Mary! (Pun intended.)
(Oddly, the final season of Mary Tyler Moore has yet to be released on DVD. However, if you'd like to purchase any of the first six seasons click here.)
Those of us born in the generation that came before the introduction of today's whiz-bang gadgets may appreciate them the most since we know what it was like to have suffered the various inconveniences of life without them. However, these advances aren't always viewed as enhancements. With that in mind, the following list offers younger readers a glimpse of what life was like back in the Dark Ages of the 1960's and 1970's:
Pringles, Doritos, Oreos, M&Ms and French's mustard had just one
variety - and water was from the tap (and it wasn't filtered by Brita).
Major League Baseball often scheduled doubleheaders on Memorial Day, 4th of July and Labor Day. And the World Series was played in the afternoon.
When the phone rang you answered it without knowing who was calling - at home or work. And your pointer finger got regular exercise from dialing the telephone. Additionally, long distance calls was considered a luxury.
Before violent video games, the most raucus game was Rock'em Sock'em Robots.
Baggies were an advance in storage. There was no such think as Ziploc anything.
When the weekend approached you'd go to the bank and estimate how much spending money you'd need to withdrawal. Unless you kept money under your mattress.
Bottles and containers were a cinch to open since they weren't designed to be child-resistant or tamper-proof.
Guests on the Tonight Show stayed put when other guests came on.
There were no signers for the deaf at public events/news conferences.
Fireworks happened only on the 4th of July. (And sometimes when your neighbors had a fight.) Jellybeans were sold only at Easter time.
Diet soda tasted like a witch's brew of chemicals. (Here's to the advanced chemical formulas of the 21st century that made Coke Zero possible!)
Dentists/dental hygienists didn't wear masks, cashiers didn't wear protective gloves. There was no such thing as hand sanitizer and yet we somehow survived.
If a classmate met with "misfortune" no therapists were called in, you went to school the next day just like any other day.
Neopolitan was about as gourmet an ice cream flavor you could get. And before Starbucks there was was only General Foods International Coffee.
Morning paper boys went out before sunrise by foot and their parents didn't worry (except, perhaps, about the occasional ferocious dog).
You either turned a room light off or on, there was no dimmer switch (or ambient lighting).
To do school work students thumbed through an encyclopedia rather than Wikipedia and never doubted the verity of the information it contained.
During snowstorms ashes were tossed onto roads from the back of dump trucks.
Adults knew that Liberace, Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Lynde were "funny" but it wasn't mentioned in front of the children.
Instant potatoes were a time-saving advance in dinner preparation. And Pop Tarts were an advance in breakfast food.
Suburban households sorted their trash and then openly burned what was made of paper.
When taking a trip you unfolded an unwieldy paper document called a "map".
People who suffered from allergies were alergic only to tree pollen or ragweed.
I was suffering from a bad cold the night All in the Family debuted on CBS. For much of the show I was in the kitchen making hot tea with honey and preparing a somewhat flammable throat wrap coated with Vicks VapoRub which I heated over one of the burners of the stove. Because of these preparations I wasn't paying full attention to the program. However, I do remember the warning that came on before the show began about its content. Although I was 13 at the time I didn't worry about my parents changing the channel since Tuesday was my mother's bowling night and dad was dozing in his recliner.
During its first season All in the Family aired on Tuesday but in its second season the show moved to Saturday where it ran for four seasons. It was part of Saturday's legendary lineup along with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett. Some lasting memories I have include Edith going through menopause (a new concept for me) and hearing Archie refer to blacks as "jungle bunnies" (also a first). I watched the show regularly during its first four seasons but that ended once I went away to college. However, this spared me the pain of watching the episode in which Edith died.
The show ushered in a new era in TV in which controversial and political subject matter was addressed. And viewers embraced it - All in the Family became the first TV show to be #1 in the ratings for five consecutive seasons (later joined by Cosby and American Idol). It also begat Maude and The Jeffersons. Indeed, those were the days!
Until 1972 my hometown Pittsburgh Steelers had a long history of losing. This season, however, they finished with a solid winning record (11-3) and made it to the playoffs. On Saturday, December 23 the Oakland Raiders were in Pittsburgh playing the Steelers in the AFC Divisional Playoffs. That afternoon, while the game was being played, I was out collecting payment from customers of my morning paper route (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Since it was Christmas, instead of the usual 25-50 cent tips, I was collecting tips in the stratospheric $2 to $5 range.
When I returned home the game was on the radio, and it didn't look good as the Raiders had a 7-6 lead very late in the game. Then in a flash the tables were turned as a pass by Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw bounced off the intended receiver and landed in the hands of Steelers rookie (and NFL Rookie of the Year) Franco Harris just before it reached the ground. He scooped it up and scooted 60 yards for the game winning touchdown with less than 20 seconds remaining. However, it took five minutes before Harris' catch was confirmed by officials as a legitimate reception. It was even more confusing if you weren't watching on TV as was our case since the game was blacked out in Pittsburgh.
Even today it seems unbelievable that this catch happened. And although the Steelers season ended the following week when they lost to the undefeated Miami Dolphins, it was the beginning of the Steelers becoming one of the most successful and widely followed teams in the nation. (To immerse yourself fully in "Steelers Nation" lore the book The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Pittsburgh Steelersis a good starting point.)
November 1978 was a month like few others for the city of San Francisco. On November 7 voters in California rejected the anti-gay Briggs Initiative which would have banned the hiring of gay teachers. It was an emotional victory for openly gay San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk who had put considerable energy campaigning against it. Then a week-and-a-half later Jim Jones, leader of the People's Temple cult, forced more than 900 of his followers to commit suicide in their Jonestown settlement in the Venezuelan protectorate of Guayana. Jones and many of the victims were from the Bay Area.
On November 27, the Monday after Thanksgiving, disgruntled former city supervisor Dan White snuck into City Hall during the morning and shot dead mayor George Moscone (pictured, near left) at point blank range and then walked down the hall and did the same to Milk. In a somewhat bizarre coincidence, Moscone and Milk had a connection to Jim Jones, who a few years earlier was chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority.
At the time I was in my senior year at Penn State University and in the early stages of coming out so Milk's murder was especially sobering for me. Back than having an openly gay man in such a high profile government position was unheard of, compounding the loss. In 2009 Sean Penn won an Oscar for his portrayal of Milk in the movie Milk. The film was based on the biography The Mayor of Castro St. - The Life & Times of Harvey Milk.
The day before Thanksgiving 1971 was a snowy one in the hills of Western Pennsylvania (about 4" fell). I was in the 9th grade at the time and my dad had gotten four tickets at work to tonight's Penguins hockey game at Pittsburgh's Civic Arena. I went with my older sister Linda, older brother Darrell (home for the holiday during his freshman year at Indiana University of PA) and a neighbor from down the street. The Penguins lost to Toronto 2-1 but it was an enjoyable outing nonetheless.
Walking home after getting off the bus we were playing around in the snow and throwing an occasional snowball. At one point I jerked my head to avoid one being thrown and my glasses flew off. After looking for them for some time with no luck I ran home to get a flashlight (Mom joined us). Finally, in the midst of our search a neighbor approached in his car and stopped when he saw our search party in the middle of the street. He stayed so we could look in the light cast by his high beams and shortly thereafter we found my glasses. We had been out in the cold for close to an hour.
Meanwhile, while we conducted our search another was about to unfold in the Pacific Northwest. A passenger named DB Cooper had hijacked a plane, demanded parachutes and $200,000 (about $1 million in today's $) and then jumped from the plane during a rainstorm into the wilderness north of Portland, Oregon. Although hijackings had become a hazard of air travel since the late 60's, the way this one was carried out made it unique. And although a bundle of deteriorated twenty-dollar bills was discovered in 1980, and traced back to those given him, Cooper himself was never found.
(The book D.B. Cooper: Dead or Alive? provides the full story of this mysterious man and his curious caper.) The following clip goes into greater detail about Cooper.
I was in my senior year at Penn State and had just come home for term break on Saturday afternoon. That evening our TV watching was interrupted by a news bulletin reporting that California congressman Leo Ryan and eight others (including an NBC cameraman and two newspaper reporters) were gunned down at an airstrip in the small South American nation of Guyana. They were there on a fact-finding mission to investigate a cult known as the People's Temple whose members were mostly from California.
As bad as this news was an even grislier story unfolded the next day as the residents of Jonestown, the settlement Ryan was visiting, participated in a mass suicide ordered by their paranoid leader Jim Jones. Although some had been shot most died after drinking a grape-flavored drink laced with cyanide. The number of dead was truly staggering. As the week went on the numbers rose steadily, 100 at first, then 250, 500 all the way up to a staggering final toll of 913. Understandably, this tragedy cast a pall over the Thanksgiving holiday. (A number of books have been written about this event including Raven: The Untold Story of the Reverend Jim Jones & His People.)
One legacy of this tragedy is the phrase "drinking the grape Kool-Aid", which was coined to suggest that someone has been brainwashed.
A new pope, the Village People and the 3-Mile Island meltdown all upended the world order in 1979. But the year's biggest news story was the revolution in Iran, which had major implications for the U.S. since the revolutionaries considered us enemies (the "great Satan") because of our support of the Shah during his 27 years in power. To retaliate they instituted an oil embargo, worsening America's already floundering economy. Their enmity towards us worsened in late October when we allowed the Shah to enter the U.S. to receive cancer treatment.
However, the year was a momentous one for me as I graduated college (Penn State) and joined the workforce, hired at New York ad agency Scali, McCabe, Sloves where I worked in its media department. Seven months after beginning my job a furious mob broke into the U.S. embassy in Tehran (in response to the Shah coming to the U.S.) and took 54 American employees and diplomats hostage.
I was anxious over this turn of events because there was talk that the U.S. might reinstate the draft and go to war. (And less than two months after the hostages were taken the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.) However, after a number of months that possibility seemed to have passed, even if it took more than a year before the hostages were released (444 days, to be exact, with their release occurring the day of Ronald Reagan's inauguration in January 1981).
All of my feelings of anxiety from this grim time in U.S. history came flooding back recently when I went to see Ben Affleck's new movie, Argo, about six Americans who managed to escape the U.S. embassy in Tehran when it was overtaken. The film perfectly captures the pervading sense of despair, impotence and anger felt in America at that time.
Over the past 50 years there have been four very close presidential elections*. One of them - 1976's race between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford - happened to be the first I voted in (but I voted by absentee ballot since I was away at college at Penn State). Ford was the incumbent, immortalized by Saturday Night Live's Chevy Chase for his clumsy (albeit congenial) nature. Meanwhile Carter came out of nowhere (nowhere being Georgia) - trailblazing a path that future Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama would also take.
A month before the election Carter made a campaign stop at the Beaver Valley Mall which was adjacent to campus. It was Saturday morning and a group of us walked there to see if we might catch a glimpse of him. I got close enough to snap a photo (as you can see, of poor quality), but a bit too close for the Secret Service agents when I ducked under some barricades. I'm sure if it had been 30 years later I would have been tackled and 'cuffed rather than just pushed back.
The autumn of '76 was also memorable because I had my one - and only - girlfriend at that time (I came to the realization that I was gay the following summer). And what sticks with me about this election was that Carrie was a Ford supporter. This was hard for me to reconcile because I had the naive notion in my head that everyone in my circle of friends would have similar political leanings. After all, how could someone I enjoyed being with have such a different view when it came to politics? (I had a similar feeling when I joined Facebook and was taken aback by troubling political comments made by some of my "friends".) It just so happened that ours was a short-lived relationship and this would be one of the final nails in the coffin.
On Election night I had sign-in duty at my dorm, a co-ed building in which girls lived on one side, guys on the other. Members of the opposite sex were required to sign in to visit the "other side" after 8:00. I heard election returns in piecemeal fashion and was in bed long before Carter was declared the winner at 3:30 a.m. (I had to be up early for my 8:00 philosophy class.) His victory was delivered by Ohio which he won by just 0.27% - beating Ford by 11,000 votes out of four million cast. Of course, I was delighted - even more so because it gave me bragging rights over Carrie and her vexing choice. (Post script: 33 years later Carrie and I became reacquainted on Facebook).
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about ten hurricanes and the memories I associated with each of them. In this post I've chosen to write of memories I connect with ten post-season baseball games over the past 40 years (not including the 1986 World Series, which I've written about in a previous post).
1969 World Series/Game 5/Mets vs. Baltimore (Oct. 16) - I was home from school (7th Grade) with a cold so I was able to watch the entire game. I wasn't rooting for the Mets because, despite winning 100 games in the regular season, in my eyes their rise was a fluke. (I felt the same when expansion teams like Florida, Arizona & Tampa Bay played in the World Series.) And I certainly didn't think they'd be able to prevail over the mighty Orioles (who had won 109 games), but not only did the Mets do it - but in just five games.
1971 World Series/Game 7/Pittsburgh vs. Baltimore (Oct. 17) - It was a Sunday afternoon when the Pirates won a 2-1 nail biter over the Orioles to win the World Series. My mother and I waited for the game to end before we drove my grandmother home, honking the car horn the entire way. (My dad, never a big Pirates fan watched the day's football games on our other TV.) We also put a big "Bucs Fever" sign in the living room window. Since I was too young to celebrate the Pirates' 1960 World Series victory over the Yankees this one was very sweet. The '71 Series was the first to have a game played at night, a novelty that eventually became the norm by the mid-1980's.
1972 Nat'l. League Playoffs/Game 5/Pittsburgh vs. Cincinnati (Oct. 11) - The game was still being played when I headed out to my weekly Junior Achievement meeting in downtown Pittsburgh, so I brought my transistor radio with me to listen to the closing innings. As the bus I was riding approached the City on the Ft. Pitt Bridge I heard the Reds score the winning run in the bottom of the 9th inning on a wild pitch to advance to the World Series. A similar crushing loss in the bottom of the 9th happened to the Pirates 20 years later when they lost Game 7 of the NL Championship Series to Atlanta. (The Pirates haven't had a winning season since.)
1973 Nat'l. League Playoffs/Game 3/Mets vs. Cincinnati (Oct. 8) - I had just come home from school and turned on the game. As I was changing clothes Pete Rose and Mets shortstop Bud Harrelson got into a scuffle after Rose slid hard into Harrelson at 2nd base. However, the Mets got the last laugh by advancing to the World Series. Like 1969, I wasn't a Mets fan, especially since they barely had a winning record (82-79) and had passed my Pirates in the final week of the season to win the NL East. Two big news events occurred during that post-season: 1) VP Spiro Agnew resigned due to tax problems and 2) Egypt attacked Israel on the eve of Yom Kippur during the weekend the World Series began.
1975 World Series/Game 6/Cincinnati vs. Boston (Oct. 21) - I was in my freshman year at Penn State and watched the game in a friend's dorm room when it went into extra innings, so I saw the Red Sox' Carlton Fisk hit his famous game-winning HR in the bottom of the 12th inning. This game was such a good one that almost forgotten is the fact that Cincinnati won the next day to win the World Series.
1978 AL Tie-Breaker/Yankees vs. Red Sox (Oct. 2)- The Yankees had stormed back in August and September to tie the Red Sox for the AL East crown and played a 1-game tie-breaker. I watched the first seven innings in my dorm's TV room. I left for dinner after seeing the Yankees' Bucky Dent (pictured w/Reggie Jackson) hit his memorable 3-run homer over the Green Monster at Fenway to erase Boston's 2-0 lead. The Yankees won the game and went to the World Series - which they won over the Dodgers for the second year in a row.
1979 World Series/Game 7/Pittsburgh vs. Baltimore (Oct. 17) - The "We Are Family" Pirates defeated the Orioles in a carbon copy of their 1971 World Series championship over them, i.e. after falling behind 3 games to 1, they swept the next 3 games. But it was a bittersweet victory for me because I was living in New Jersey and there was no celebrating crowd. I called my brother who lived down the street and then my parents back in Pittsburgh to share the good news.
1989 World Series/Game 3/Oakland vs SF (Oct. 17)- This World Series is forever known for the earthquake that struck minutes before Game 3 was about to start - and captured on live TV. I had turned on the game about five minutes after the quake hit. Since the Series involved two teams from the Bay Area it was delayed for 10 days.
2003 NL Championship Series/Game 6/Florida vs. Cubs/Oct. 14 - As was my usual habit I went to the gym late after taking a nap (around 9:30). The game was on one of the TV monitors above the treadmills and stairmasters and when I left it appeared the game was in hand with the Cubs leading 3-0 in the top of the 8th inning. If they won they'd advance to the World Series and get a chance to break their 95-year streak without a World Series championship. However, between the time I left and got back to my apartment, about 10 minutes, the game had turned around completely and the Marlins had taken an 8-3 lead! It turned out that an overzealous fan (the infamous Steve Bartman) had leaned over and deflected a fly ball that the Cubs outfielder was about to catch. After that the floodgates opened. (This was was somewhat similar to what happened in the 1996 AL League Championship between the Orioles & Yankees when 12-year old Jeffrey Maier reached out to grab a flyball hit by Derek Jeter that was about to be caught. It was called a home run and the Yankees won the game because of it.)
2009 World Series/Philadelphia vs. Yankees - A novel experience was having someone to watch the games with as my boyfriend David was also a baseball fan. However, we had different ways of enjoying the games. For instance, David was more a student of pitching while I liked high-scoring games. Furthermore, he found it peculiar that I often commented about the appearance of each player as they came to bat (which I thought was normal, especially for a gay man). Lastly, I found it nerve wracking to sit through an entire game, especially if the Yankees had a lead, while David enjoyed watching the entire nine innings. However, one thing we had in common was rooting for the Yankees who beat the Phillies in six games.
