It’s Down the Road’s fifth blogiversary!
All month I’m reposting favorite stories from the blog’s early days.
I debuted on TV in 1976, back when stay-at-home moms were still called homemakers. There were enough of them then that locally produced homemaker shows aired in the morning on TV stations across the country. My hometown of South Bend was no exception, and WSBT-TV aired its homemaker show, The Dorothy Frisk Show, live each weekday right after Captain Kangaroo. The cloying strains of its theme music made my brother and I lunge at the TV to change the channel. We found The Dorothy Frisk Show considerably less exciting than staring at the wall and seriously less pleasant than eating Mom’s liver and onions. Dorothy shared cooking tips, interviewed local notables, showed pictures of the new babies in town, and invited musical guests in to entertain the women at home.
My elementary school’s choir was asked to sing Christmas carols on Dorothy’s show one day that December, and another fellow and I were chosen to sing Good King Wenceslaus as a duet. I remember that the news set was in the same studio as Dorothy’s show. It seemed vast on TV, but in real life it was incredibly small. I wondered how the anchors kept from getting in each others’ way!
We assembled on our risers, the bright lights upon us. My buddy and I stepped forward for our duet. We wore simple costumes and mine included a brown cap that slid off my head just after we started singing. I kept my cool on the outside, but inside I was almost panicking. But then I felt the cap brush my left hand on the way down. I grasped it, gently placed it back on my head, and kept singing as if this were part of the act. I watched my partner’s eyes grow wide when he saw it, but he kept singing, too. Even the choir director remarked about it in amazement afterward. My mom, who was along on the trip, was just proud of her son. I don’t know anyone who actually saw me on TV that day!
I didn’t get to use any more of my 15 minutes of television fame until I was in college. I was General Manager of WMHD, the campus radio station. A reporter at WTHI-TV in Terre Haute liked listening to us and wanted to showcase us. She and her photographer came out one afternoon and spent most of their time shooting gripping scenes around the station, such as of records spinning on turntables and disk jockeys positioning the microphone. Then she interviewed me. I thought it was odd that she crouched on the floor, had me sit on the desk, and had the photographer shoot while he stood, but hey, she was the TV professional. I looked down at the reporter as we talked about the station’s eclectic music, from bluegrass to Christian rock to death metal, all selected by the station’s disc jockeys. I had been fairly serious during the interview but at the end I tried to lighten the mood by saying, jokingly, that we liked to “inflict our music on Terre Haute.” Everybody in the room thought it was funny.
When the interview aired, the bad camera angle made it look like my eyes were closed. I also learned a very valuable lesson that day: Don’t say anything in front of a TV camera that you wouldn’t want taken out of context. The way they edited the interview made it sound like we looked down on our college town and enjoyed making our station hard to listen to! The story came last in the newscast, and when it ended, anchors Gary Jackson and Marla Keller were both laughing about it. Gary wouldn’t let go of it, making several cracks as the closing theme ran and they faded to black.
There used to be a huge billboard on the edge of campus with Gary and Marla on it, confidently smiling down on US 40. Whenever I drove by it, I thought about climbing up there and painting their eyes closed!
Originally posted 7/27/2007. Read the original here.
I used to do the morning show on that college radio station.
I had a ball. Read about it and hear me on the air.
