More Recent Boomer TV Happenings:
Speaking of 1967: "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" went on the air in February, 1967. What a show it was! It was one of the pioneers in social protest on television. Although the brothers looked conservative, they were anything but. After only two years, they were canceled. Way to controversial for the censors. The Smothers Brothers opened the door for biting satire on TV, with guest appearances by such notables as Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Dan Novello (Father Guido Sarducci), Pat Paulsen, and Leigh French, the resident hippie. Musical acts, which leaned towards folk music, included Joan Baez, Janis Ian, Peter,Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, and of course, The Smothers Brothers.
1974: August 9, 1974. Nixon resigns as the 37th President of the United States. I can't say it was a sad day for me, but it was for the country. He is the first President to step down facing criminal charges. He dodged being impeached and was let off the hook by President Gerald Ford, who immediately pardoned him. The whole Watergate affair had been painstakingly aired on TV. Maybe it was time to let it go. I'm thinking, how many ordinary people would get a break like that?
1977: Elvis dies. TV reported the death in detail, including the funeral. The autopsy reported his death being brought on by drugs. Fourteen different ones were found in his system, ten of them at lethal levels. His weight at the time of death was 350lbs. Doubts continue to linger about his actually being dead, the cause, and his treatment at the time of death. None-the-less, it appeared the King was dead. He was 42. We do have several excellent Elvis impersonators around the area keeping the legend alive.
1980: The United States hockey team beats the Soviet Union in the semi-finals of the Winter Olympics. I can remember watching this as though it were a mini-Cold War. And we prevailed. It was a huge event and a huge upset. I can remember feeling very proud.
1986: On January 26th, on take-off, the Challenger spacecraft explodes in front of a national television audience. It was a heart-wrenching experience. We had grown accustom to perfection. But the obvious dangers were in an instant driven home. With all this technology, humans still make the critical decisions.
1989: The Berlin Wall comes down. While more symbolic than anything, it was neat to watch people beating on the wall with hammers, dismantling it piece by piece. You can still find pieces of the Wall being sold on e-bay. Seems fitting.
1995: The O.J. Simpson arrest and trial were a TV bonanza. You talk about overdoing something. Here is an ex-football star accused of brutally murdering his ex-wife and her friend, and the TV networks make a spectacle out of it. It started with a car chase around LA in June of 1994, and ended with his acquittal on October 3, 1995. On that October day, 150 million people watched the verdict read. Everyone at the place I was working was gathered around the TV. We were all stunned. It seemed cut and dried. There were no other suspects at the time, and there continues to be no other suspects to this day. Andy Rooney, of "60 Minutes" fame, suggested the reason we were so mesmerized by the trial was because it showed us how you can get away with murder. Andy obviously was not impressed with the jury.
1997: The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, takes place at Westminster Abby. It was viewed by over one billion people worldwide. Just the other day there was another official report stating that by all the evidence, her death was an accident, and not murder.
2001: September 11, 2001. What a miserable day. I got news of the event on the internet. A plane had flown into one of the twin towers. You think probably a private plane where something had gone terribly wrong. Than a second plane hits. Now you don't know what's going on. I'm sure no one, not even the terrorists, thought the twin towers would fall. But fall they did. Before the end of the day, after watching those planes hit the towers maybe a hundred times, the story was beginning to come together. A terrorist attack. Things would never be the same.
2002: "American Idol" appeared in June, 2002. The viewing audience for the last show of the first season was fifty million. We watched Kelly Clarkson win. Just a few weeks ago, American Idol started its sixth season. Opening night saw an audience of 41 million. It has become a marketing phenomena for the music industry. "Dancing with the Stars" adopted a similar format with equally impressive audiences.
2004: The earthquake and resulting tsunami that hit south and southeast Asia was shown on TV having been filmed primarily by vacationers with hand-held cameras. The total killed and lost now totals 229,866. The devastation and strength of such a wave was awesome, and horrifying, to watch. This tsunami became one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history.
2005: Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast near New Orleans on August 29, totally destroying several coastal towns and causing the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain to break, flooding approximately 80% of New Orleans. Eighteen hundred and thirty-six people are known dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. It is the costliest natural disaster in this countries history. And there it was, in high-definition television, for all of us to see. The networks haven't followed the botched clean-up near as closely.
Well, that's some of the most memorable TV moments that I can remember. One of the things that strikes me in looking over the list is how many of them were tragedies. Clearly, that seems to be what dominates the news. Maybe that's a fault of ours. Maybe that's just the news. After all, the status quo and is not very exciting. There were many other highlights that I have failed to mention. If you have some of your own, please send them in.
I hope you have enjoyed the television years. We aren't known as the television generation for no good reason. But it's time to move on.
Next: A visit to 1948, the year I officially became a baby boomer.
|
