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‘BZ Boston notes

Back in September, WBZ 1030 AM in Boston celebrated its 90th anniversary. On WBGH TV, Boston’s PBS station, veteran ‘BZ announcer Gary LaPierre, now retired, talked about his start at the station, only a few months before the Beatles came to Boston. Note: Paul and Ringo are still working!

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Another great veteran of WBZ radio, Dave Maynard, died recently. After retiring, Maynard’s familiar voice continued to be heard on the station, doing commercials and promos.

Samjay pointed out that the thing everybody uses to set their car’s dashboard clock, WBZ’s on-the-hour tone, is gone. I had noticed a while ago that it was about ten seconds late, and under the assumption it had mistakenly been put before the delay circuit, I sent a note to the station asking about it. Not much later, the tone once again was synched with the radio-controlled wall clocks in my house, but now the tone is gone. Whuzzup with that?

Follow-up: I wrote to the WBZ engineer, and didn’t receive a reply, but the time tone is back. It’s not hitting exactly on top of my radio-controlled clocks, but I’m not going to quibble over 8-10 seconds.

Created in America, Made in China

China has come a long way, very quickly, from supplying McDonald’s with Happy Meal toys covered in lead paint. Last week, WBUR’s (Boston University Radio) On Point with Tom Ashbrook had a show about corporate espionage by Chinese hackers.

[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2012/02/onpoint_0216_hacking-americas-future.mp3|titles=On Point with Tom Ashbrook – China hacking]

Listening to this exchange was, for me, frustrating. There’s a lot of alarmist talk in the show, but why was it okay for American corporations to send their manufacturing jobs to China in the first place? Why, only now, with the theft of proprietary information, is China being seen as a threat? And if these victimized companies have such sophisticated intellectual property, why couldn’t they invest more in better protection against online attacks? In the old days, employees would have to be moles, or be corrupt and willing to sell secrets, for serious damage to be done. Now, just having an Internet connection is all it takes? Seems to me this is a case of reaping what you sow.

A cool guy with the right stuff

John, we hate to trouble you with this, but we’re having a little problem with your wife.

My wife?

Yes, she won’t cooperate, John. Perhaps you can give her a little call. We have a phone right here.

A little call?

The national problem was this: John’s wife, Annie, was at home with some of the wives of the rest of us watching the countdown on television. The only member of the press inside the house was a writer from Life named Loudon Wainwright [father of singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III – Doug], but outside, in the yard, was the nuthouse scene we described last time, all the TV crews and the reporters, baying for their scraps of information about how Annie Glenn was bearing up. At this point into the picture comes the Big Dipper, namely, Lyndon Johnson, who was vice president, of course … (and) he wants the Life reporter to get out of the house, because his presence will antagonize the rest of the non-TV reporters who can’t get in, and they will not think kindly of the Vice President … So the situation finally boils down to this: Johnson is waiting out of sight a few blocks away in a limousine, waiting for his cue. Johnson’s emissaries are saying that Life, in the person of Loudon Wainwright, must depart from the house so that the Vice President of the United States and his TV friends can come in … Wainwright is no fool and doesn’t particularly care to get caught in the middle like this, and so he offers to bow out, to leave. Annie shows her strength and tells him, “You’re not leaving this house” … NASA is freaking out, so finally the problem is bucked up all the way up to John Glenn himself … He says, “Look, if you don’t want the Vice President or the TV networks or anybody else coming inside the house, then that’s it, as far as I’m concerned, and I will back you up all the way.”

– “Post Orbital Remorse, Part Two: How the Astronauts Fell from Cowboy Heaven,” by Tom Wolfe, Rolling Stone, January 18, 1973, pg. 26.

I read that article when I was a senior in high school. It describes a scene that’s an audience favorite in The Right Stuff, the movie adaptation of the book that Tom Wolfe wrote based on his four-part series in Rolling Stone about the Mercury space program. I was in the first grade, 50 years ago, when John Glenn flew around the world three times. My son was in the first grade when John Glenn went into space a second time. Glenn wasn’t the first man in space, and he wasn’t the first American in space, but his flight is memorable to me, because it’s the first one that I remember from when it was happening, probably because the school played a radio report of the event over the classroom speakers.

This is a NASA video about John Glenn’s flight in the Freedom 7. Glenn is now 90 years old, which means he’s a year younger than Stephen Colbert’s mother and, no, that’s not Glenn in the preview frame.

TV at its best

After getting all serious from watching Z, on the Roku I’m enjoying a totally weird episode of Thriller — Boris Karloff, not Michael Jackson — from 1960. Mort Sahl has kidnapped Sue “Miss Landers” Randall (from Leave it to Beaver), to protect her from Werner “Colonel Klink” Klemperer, who wants to kidnap her!

Dragnet on the Net

A TV show I enjoyed a lot as a kid in the 60’s was Dragnet. When I was older I learned that Dragnet had not only been on TV in the 50’s, it had first been a radio show. The revived Dragnet returned with its old formula, and supporting cast members, intact. In the intervening years Sgt. Joe Friday had apparently been overlooked for promotion, despite his unbroken string of cracked cases and successful arrests.

In the Fifties, Dragnet dealt with some hard facts of life, such as drug addiction and sex crimes. When Jack Webb returned as Joe Friday ten years later, he used the show to crusade against the growing influence of the youth culture. There was an anti-Summer of Love attitude, and Hippies were depicted at best as misguided and confused kids, or as drug addicts hiding behind the trappings of Eastern religion. Parents were concerned about the rapid pace of change in Sixties, and many were struggling with rebellious teenage children. In 1968 the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and Webb offered a clear, unwavering view of right and wrong. It’s my opinion that the popularity of Dragnet helped to get Richard “Law and Order” Nixon elected in 1968.

Even the growing ranks of comic book collectors, empowered by the Batman TV show, weren’t spared Webb’s critical gaze, as seen in the infamous “Superfan” episode. I saw this when it first aired, and it starts off nicely enough, with a brief history of Hollywood, but towards the end it’s painful for an old fanboy to watch, because I have to admit there’s a lot of truth in what Stanley says.

Getting back to Dragnet in the Fifties, the link at the end of this sentence searches eBay for Dragnet OTR. “OTR” stands for “Old-Time Radio,” and as you can see there are plenty of sellers offering Dragnet radio shows. Anybody who buys one of these collections is wasting their money, because they’re available for free on Archive.org, from a wonderful organization of enthusiasts called the OTRR — the Old Time Radio Reseachers Group.

If you don’t feel like downloading and unzipping the files, you can listen to Dragnet on Tunein.com. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing that for the past few weeks. It’s interesting to compare the radio and TV versions of Dragnet. For example, here’s an episode from 1955 called The Big Deal.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/01/The+Big+Deal.mp3|titles=Dragnet “The Big Deal” 4/19/55]