If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know that I have a thing for Garrison Kiellor. I think he’s a brilliant talent. He writes a 90-minute radio show 38 weeks a year; he sings; he tells stories; he writes poetry, most of it very funny. Heck, he even created a whole town and populated it with some wonderful characters: Lake Wobegone, “… where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
He also has a five-minute daily show on NPR called “The Writer’s Almanac” in which he features a poem and short commentaries on events from that day in history or gives birthdays of famous people, often literary figures. I get the online version of the show in my email inbox every day, and I love it.
On Aug. 5, “The Writer’s Almanac” featured a paragraph telling us that on that day in 1957, a televised dance and music show, which had been popular on a local TV station in Philadelphia, went national, introducing rock and roll to millions of people. Me included.
I started college that August and lived with five guys in an upstairs bedroom at Mrs. Spanbauer’s house on High Street in Oshkosh. Six guys in one small room with one small bathroom! But we had some privileges. We could use the kitchen, and we could watch TV in her living room, if we were willing to watch what she wanted to watch.
During that freshman year, I had an evening job loading trucks in an Oshkosh soda bottling plant. When I’d get home from my afternoon classes, I’d hustle to change into my working clothes, and then I’d go down and join Mrs. Spanbauer and whatever other guys were there to watch Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.” She was a faithful fan!
I’d kill a half-hour before I had to leave for work watching those Philadelphia teenagers dancing and rating records. I never watched it after my freshman year because I got an afternoon job and couldn’t hang around.
But what a simple concept. Dick Clark played “top 40” records, the kids danced and huge numbers of people tuned in. And every day, some popular singer or group would appear and lip-sync to their hit songs. The show launched the careers of quite a few major pop music stars of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s: Simon and Garfunkel, Paul Anka, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Michael Jackson.
The show popularized a bunch of new dances: the stroll, the Watusi, the mashed potato, the twist. Kids watched the dances and learned the new steps. And the perpetually 26-year-old Dick Clark became an immensely rich and powerful force in the entertainment industry, all because of a simple dance show.
Everybody knew the names of the “regulars,” the kids who danced on the show daily. They weren’t actors or trained dancers, they were “real” Philadelphia high school kids, and the nation watched who was going with who, who was breaking up, who was making up, etc. There was a studio audience, too; kids who were just there to watch, probably hoping they’d get a chance to dance on the show.
But do you know what was always a little puzzling to me and probably to a lot of others as well? There were many black performers on the show, and Philadelphia had a large black population, but I can’t ever remember seeing a black kid on the dance floor or in the studio audience. So I did a little research, and I found out that there was a lot of stuff written about the “whites only” policy of the show.
Clark and his company claimed that anyone was welcome, that it was a “first-come-first-served” situation, but it seems odd to me that none of the black kids got in line before all the regulars! After the show moved to LA in the ’60s, some black kids got to be on the show.
“The Writer’s Almanac” didn’t say so, but “American Bandstand” had a 30-year run on TV. Wow!
