The Unbearable Lightness of Talking: Joe Franklin

This is a guest posting from my friend and resident East Coast media maven Mike Korolenko.  

Joe Franklin.  I’m sure none of you out here (or at least those who didn’t grow up in New York City) know who he was.  He passed away recently at age 88.  A New York television and radio fixture, he sat in his chair on the set of his show and looked like a little Jewish Hobbit.  When all the other talk shows had gone off the air, you could still turn to WOR channel 9 (which usually ran things like “Million Dollar Movie” – which today would be “Two Hundred Million Dollar Movie” – and old cartoons – they actually aired cartoons from the silent era) and there would be Joe.  Good ol’ Joe, who never seemed to age and who looked as comfortable as your uncle sitting on a chair in your living room.

There were other pretty amazing shows on local New York television in the early 60s.  Sandy Becker had a strange kids show with really bizarre characters he created like Norton Nork and Hambone.  Sonny Fox’s Wonderama had adult humor that went way over the heads of us kids and he would also occasionally interview people like Senator Robert Kennedy.

But none could beat Joe.  For a kid who’d secretly stay up late with his older brother, sitting close to the old black and white television set (in a Mahogany armoire-looking thing with doors, if you can believe it) so as to keep the sound low and not wake the parents, watching Joe was a treat.  It made both of us so ready for the late 60s because watching Joe’s show was somewhat like having an LSD flashback (I wouldn’t know, of course – that’s what friends tell me).

His soothing, sonorous voice (or at least as sonorous as Joe could possibly be) would slowly make you nod off, unless he had some third rate comedian on who suddenly screamed the punch line to a joke.

And his show went on and on, for years.  Long after all the other shows I used to watch faded away, unpreserved and one feels, unmourned. 

Come the early 70s, I suddenly realized just how surreal Joe’s show was – he’d start the show, surrounded by hundreds of mementos dating back decades and, in a very serious, somber voice would say: “Our first guest is Janet Moscowitz and her penguin troop.  Just wonderful – the penguin troop is currently appearing in the Central Park Children’s Zoo. They’re truly, the best troop of penguins I’ve ever seen. And, a little later in the show (pause as if trying to remember the names) John Lennon and Yoko Ono will join us”.

In 1984, when he appeared in Ghostbusters playing himself, interviewing one of the heroes, Dan Akroyd’s Stan, the New York audience at the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village went nuts and applauded.  And it was a brilliant scene – it was so true!  Of course The Joe Franklin Show would be the first talk show a Ghostbuster would appear on!  And naturally, Joe’s first question would be: “Have any of you seen Elvis and is he well?”

The other thing about Joe was, he was real.   He wasn’t a huge star.  He was just Joe and I saw him numerous times walking on the streets of Manhattan.  New Yorkers, usually a people who can’t be easily roused passing some famous person on the street, would see Joe and big smiles would appear and hellos and hand waves would follow.  And Joe would say, “Why hello!  Good to see you!”

Franklin is listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest running continuous on-air TV talk show host.  From the time I was 12 years old until I was well into my forties and would visit New York twice a year to see my parents, I would watch Joe.  Joe, the nice somewhat odd uncle who was always such a sweet man to all his guests, no matter who they were, whether they were a mattress stuffer from the Bronx or Harvey Fierstein

According to the New York Times obituary on Joe, “Franklin was a fixture on late-night radio and TV in New York, working at WJZ and WOR, and recently at the Bloomberg Radio Network”.  Apparently the last two weeks of his life was the only time he actually missed a broadcast in 60 years.

His talk show was first on in 1950!  Imagine, four years before I was born.  I’d never realized that.  Even in changing times, Joe was a constant in New York.  And, again, I always marveled that he treated all guests with the same courtesy and as if they were the most important people in the world.  (“Thank you Joe Ferber for that fabulous display of stringing pearls.  Coming up next we have (pause as if forgetting) Madonna.”)

According to numerous accounts of Joe’s show, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbara Streisand all got early exposure on his show.  He even interviewed Cary Grant once – at least, that’s what my mom told me.

According to Joe’s website:

“He also interviewed offbeat characters who would give "The Joe Franklin Show" a "great uniqueness. On any given night you might find a world renowned artist sitting next to a balloon folder from New Jersey."

The day the news of his passing hit, comedy writer Chris Regan tweeted: "Before YouTube, Twitter, etc., the ambitious-but-not-necessarily-talented had few options. Places like The Joe Franklin Show gave them voice."

And now another person, not only from my childhood but from my teenaged years through early middle age, is gone.

To end my short piece on Joe, I’ll once again quote the Times’ obit:

He was remembered as a "NYC legend" and "radio and TV icon who was the spirit of a hard-working New Yorker" by fans on Twitter. Others said that his "accidental absurdism was like an Ionesco play every night" and that "Joe Franklin was every New Yorker's oddball, congenial neighbor."

Let’s not quite end here – let’s end instead with a quote from Joe himself:  “It's nice to be important, but it's even more important to be nice”.   What a sweet man.

---

Television and Touchdowns

“Turkey Day”—Thanksgiving Day, 1948.  West Seattle High School played Wenatchee High School to a 6-6 tie in the annual championship high school football game in Memorial Stadium.  In those days before pro sports in Seattle, this game was a very big deal (which may give you an idea of how small a deal Seattle was at the time.)  This time, though, it became even bigger:  it was televised.

The 1948 Turkey Day Game (from Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Although it had to scramble and improvise, and the set-owning public in the area was miniscule, tiny KRSC TV was under pressure from the FCC to live up to the terms of its license, and it made its debut with this game.  Rain turned the field soggy and muddy and shorted out the occasional cable.  The camera sat high in the stands, with a second to show close-ups of the players in the huddle, and the image was … uncertain.  But it was the first live commercial broadcast in the Pacific Northwest.

As I write this, the nation is preparing for Super Bowl XLIX and the city is in a frenzy over the Seattle Seahawks’ second consecutive appearance in it. Advertisers are shelling out as much as $30 million per minute for showcase ads that, themselves, have become a fixture of American popular culture.  Sports bars with big-screen televisions are gearing up for an onslaught of patrons on the nation’s biggest unofficial holiday, and millions of people are planning Super Bowl parties in their homes.

So at the moment, it’s pretty hard to remember that, not so long ago, football—especially professional football—was a pretty minor element in the American sports universe.  Football was primarily a college sport, and it attracted regional audiences around those campuses.  It was (ostensibly, at least) played by amateurs.  And it suffered from one major defect.

It was pretty boring.

Football’s genetic roots in rugby were still pretty evident in the early 1950s.  The forward pass was allowed, but seldom used.  The prevailing offensive strategy was “five yards and a cloud of dust”. Masses of nondescript young men wearing monochromatic woolen jerseys, identifiable only by numbers on their backs, surged forward until they could go no further, other masses then surged the other way, and somebody might finally kick a field goal.  The “hash marks” were located only 20 yards from the sidelines so that if a play were run to either side, the ball would be placed on one of them, limiting the possible direction of the next play.  And if you missed any of the action, there was no going back; you simply missed it. Although free substitutions were allowed after 1950, players often played both offense and defense, and there was no predictable time for a pause to allow an essential element of television:  commercials.

If you lived in one of the many cities without an NFL team, your best option might be thousands of miles away (in Seattle, many were fans of the San Francisco 49ers.)  And that didn’t provide much entertainment, because until 1956, no national network televised regular season games.

BUT … there was huge potential, and the networks recognized it.  This was a sport with swirling, violent and yet strangely graceful action to it, especially when West Coast coaches started using the forward pass more.   The 1958 NFL Championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, one of the first televised live nationwide, turned out to be an all-time classic, the first championship game determined by sudden-death overtime (some critics still call it “the Greatest Game Ever Played.”)  The formation of the rival American Football League in 1960 spread the pro game into neglected cities in the South and further into the West, and the competition between the two leagues led to rule changes that sped up the game.  The hash marks moved in to the center, increasing the flexibility of the field of play. Videotape had emerged in the late 1950s, and in 1963 a CBS director named Tony Verna figured out how to rewind it and replay it immediately so that action could be reviewed and even studied in slow-motion by armchair referees. The advent of color television in the 1960s meant that uniforms became designer showcases with bright colors and graphic logos.

And the money flowed.  Joe Namath signed with the New York Jets for $400,000 in 1965 (a figure that would insult even an undrafted rookie today) and used his notoriety and brilliance to become a pop culture icon.  The first Super Bowl in 1968 was a bit shaky, but it quickly grew into the behemoth it is today.  Football became prime-time entertainment with Monday Night Football in 1970 and spread to Thursdays and Sunday nights as well. 

It’s hard to believe that, when this all started in 1948, the most popular sport on television was …

boxing. 

It’s one of the most stunning transformations in American culture ever. 

Oh, yeah.  Go Seahawks!

Needling the Media

“Freedom of the press is great—IF you own a press.” It’s a cliché in media, but it’s been especially true in the television era.  Television made media access a privilege, not a right.

In the early 1970s, I worked for a non-profit community organization:  the Central Seattle Community Council (later the Central Seattle Community Council Federation—try answering the phone with THAT every day.)  Straight out of college at the time of Seattle’s Boeing depression , with a B.A. in English, I was not highly prized on the job market.  Fortunately, a remnant of the War on Poverty offered a job training program, and I became a Public Relations trainee with a minimum wage.

As a Creative Writing graduate, I wrote.  I wrote Press Releases, I wrote newsletters, I wrote Annual Reports, I wrote and edited a monthly newspaper, I wrote correspondence.  I learned to use ditto machines (hand-cranked cylinders printing blue ink on white paper with ungodly smelly (and no doubt hazardous) chemicals) and mimeograph machines (electric printing devices using stencil masters and ungodly smelly (and no doubt hazardous) chemicals).  My work life was spent behind an IBM electric typewriter, formulating position papers and fact sheets on the community issues we were organizing around:  racism, unemployment, housing discrimination and neglect, preventing construction of a ten-lane freeway through the community, and public transportation.  I was the Voice of CSCCF (which we all pronounced “KissKfuh”)—and I was pretty good at it.

With one exception:  television.

The problem was simple:  television is a visual medium.  It requires images, and, in particular, moving images.  Moving images doing dramatic, compelling things.  I was the voice of an organization that wanted community activists to talk, usually at great length, and about issues like mortgage loan redlining. 

We held press conferences.  Yawn.  A few print reporters and, if we were lucky, a TV camera crew would dutifully attend, and our ISSUE OF URGENT IMPORTANCE (IOUI) would get a couple of column inches in a community newspaper and, if we were lucky, a ten-second mention on the local TV news. We held media events, like planting a community garden on abandoned housing property (it quickly went to seed).  Yawn.  From a television standpoint, covering this event was literally as exciting as watching grass grow.

Seattle’s Central Area was, at the time, the heart of Seattle’s ghetto.  Generations of racist real estate and banking practices had concentrated black residents within its boundaries, and the neighborhood had suffered from years of governmental neglect.  Worse, the Boeing depression had hit especially hard here, forcing people with few reserves to board up their houses and leave.  CSCCF advocated governmental action to end banking discrimination and promote reinvestment in these houses (an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences:  much of this came to pass and is, today, called “gentrification”—and it’s still forcing poorer residents to move away.)  But how does one make such esoteric issues television-friendly?

That’s how I found myself at one of those boarded-up houses one drizzly, gray January day, organizing a Press Conference.  We were announcing some new proposal for housing (a long-forgotten plan called Urban Homesteading, I believe), and we wanted to somehow dramatize the need.  The Central Area was full of such crumbling houses, and there was no dispute that they were public health and safety hazards.  Among other things, they attracted rats and garbage and served as convenient shelter for drug addicts and prostitutes.  Their very presence in a neighborhood drove down the value of nearby houses and increased the chances that they, too, would soon be abandoned.  We wanted to show this.  What better way than to invite the media to visit?

The problem was that we chose the wrong house.  Yes, plywood covered its windows and the lawn was unmowed, but inside it was still relatively pristine.  Not a rat in attendance, nor any holes in the walls.  And the television crew was due to arrive at any moment.

We’d made sure that the electricity was off, so at least they’d have to set up generators for their lights.  And what little furniture remained was, if not tattered, at least rather dingy.  But something was still lacking, something that would signal danger. 

One of my colleagues casually produced a hypodermic needle and placed it behind the couch.  Where he got it I never asked.  As the TV crew arrived and toured the living room, the reporter dramatically “discovered” it. Drama!  Danger!

The story ran that night as a feature.  And I completed my training in PR with a successful foray into media manipulation.

Competitive Pathos

“Would YOU like to be QUEEN FOR A DAY?”

 Well, not really. Wrong gender.  But for many television-viewers in the 1950s and early 60s, it was an attractive fantasy.

I didn’t watch too much daytime TV, of course; I was working my way through the primary grades at the time.  But when I was home sick or during the summer, I got to be exposed to my mother’s world, a world of limited options reduced even further by progressive disease.  She had multiple sclerosis, and by the time I was ten she was effectively bedridden. The television was an unremitting presence in our household. For her, unable to work, take a walk, or even, eventually, to read, the world outside the home existed primarily through the medium of television. And that put her on the extreme end of the intended audience spectrum for daytime television.

The day belonged to women.  Not ALL women, of course, but a default subset:  middle-class, assumedly white, stay-at-home mothers. 

It was largely programming inherited from depression-era radio:  soap operas telling tales of lost romance, failed romance, found romance and romantic revenge; chatty talk and interview shows focusing on home and family life; variety programs; and some sitcoms.  White, middle-class women defined the ideal role of white, middle-class women throughout each weekday.

And the most telling of them all was the weirdest of them all, a proto-reality show:  Queen For A Day.

The ubiquitous game shows and panel shows (like What’s My Line?) featured celebrity repartee and personality.  Of course, they also rewarded arcane knowledge (or at least the illusion of such; as the quiz show scandals revealed, a number were rigged.)  But QFAD took a different tack:  it made misery a competitive sport.  Beginning on radio in 1945, it made a flawless transition to television in 1948 (locally in Los Angeles), moved to NBC in 1956,  and flourished until 1964.

The premise was simple:  the host, unctuous and relentlessly cheery Jack Bailey, would interview a series of contestants who had, in some way, fallen on hard times.  A child with a life-threatening illness, sudden widowhood, devastation from a natural disaster … Bailey, in an upbeat Southern drawl, would coax the details from each woman before a live and appreciative audience (predominantly women.)  The audience would then vote with applause, measured by an “Applause-O-Meter”, and the winner would be “coronated” with a velvet cape, a crown, and showered with prizes. The losers would receive a small consolation prize and return, presumably, to their miserable lives.

For a pre-adolescent boy at the dawn of the Mad Men era, QFAD sent a powerful message.  Other quiz shows rewarded contestants, generally men, for knowledge, wit, and skill.  Queen For A Day rewarded contestants, usually women (although experiments were tried with King For A Day) for dependence.  A man (Bailey) could solve their problems, literally with the wave of a wand and some expensive gifts—IF they were submissive and pathetic enough. Men on the big-money shows like Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question retreated into isolation booths to answer the questions; women on QFAD enlisted the emotional support of their peers.  And Jack Bailey would send them away with a final benediction:  "This is Jack Bailey, wishing we could make every woman a queen, for every single day!"

A relic of the 1950s?  Perhaps.  But occasional attempts to revive have been made throughout the years, the most recent in 2011. 

If you’re so inclined, you can watch a complete episode of Queen For A Day at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMj2lwaSnhY .