Tag Archives: Throwback Thursdays

All Hail the King of Late Night Talk Shows ► Throwback Thursday

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The undisputed King of Late Night is — and forever will be — Johnny Carson. On this day in 1962, Carson took the helm of The Tonight Show, and nothing was ever the same again.

Carson didn’t invent the modern talk show. That honour goes to Steve Allen. However, Carson reinvented the talk show and kept reinventing it night after night for 30 years, racking up nearly 5,000 shows. But it wasn’t his endurance that made Johnny Carson a star. According to Biography:

Audiences found comfort in Carson’s calm and steady presence in their living rooms each evening. Revered for his affable personality, quick wit and crisp interviews, he guided viewers into the late night hours with a familiarity they grew to rely on year after year. Featuring interviews with the stars of the latest Hollywood movies or the hottest bands, Carson kept Americans up-to-date on popular culture, and reflected some of the most distinct personalities of his era through impersonations, including his classic take on President Ronald Reagan. Carson created several recurring comedic characters that popped up regularly on his show, including Carnac the Magnificent, an Eastern psychic who was said to know the answers to all kinds of baffling questions. In these skits, Carson would wear a colorful cape and featured turban and attempt to answer questions on cards before even opening their sealed envelopes. Carson, as Carmac, would demand silence before answering questions such as “Answer: Flypaper.” “Question: What do you use to gift wrap a zipper?”

In August I was thrilled when Variety announced Johnny Carson Returns: Antenna TV to Air Full ‘Tonight Show’ Episodes starting January 1st:

Antenna TV has struck a multi-year deal with Carson Entertainment Group to license hundreds of hours of the NBC late-night institution. Antenna will run episodes that aired from 1972 through the end of Carson’s 30-year reign in in 1992. Because NBC owns the rights to “The Tonight Show” moniker, Antenna TV’s episodes will be billed simply as “Johnny Carson.”

“This is not a clip show. This is full episodes of Johnny Carson, the man that everyone in late-night agrees was the greatest host of all time, airing in real time as he did back in the day,” Sean Compton, Tribune’s president of strategic programming and acquisitions, told Variety. “Tuning in to ‘The Tonight Show’ is like taking a walk down Main Street in Disneyland. The minute you step in there, you feel good and you know it’s a place you want to stay. We cannot wait to bring this show to fans who remember Carson and to a new generation of viewers who have never had the chance to see Johnny in his prime.”

Starting January 1st we’ll see more comedy brilliance like this:









Bill “The Falafel King” O’Reilly Born ► Throwback Thursday

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Yes, he actually said this without a hint of irony

If there’s any single person that I wish we could throw back, it’s Fox “News” fabulist and serial exaggerator Bill O’Reilly. 

Loofah Lad is a Fox “News” anchor, both literally and figuratively, because he’s the highest rated liar on Fox, just not the only liar.

O’Reilly calls himself a cultural warrior battling all those forces of evil that most of us accept as part of a multiracial, pluralistic society. Entire books and websites have been written about this man, so I won’t bother. However, the reason he’s perfect for this rubric is he wants to throwback the country to the lily White suburbs of of his ’50s Levittown, where he grew up; a man so uncomfortable around Black folk, that every time he brings up the issue of race, he embarrasses himself.

Bill is a Catholic, who is getting a divorce. He’s now engaged in an ugly battle with his ex-wife, where he’s been accused of domestic violence:

The transcript includes testimony from Larry Cohen, a psychologist appointed to interview and make assessments about each member of the family during the dispute. (Note that “M.” refers to O’Reilly’s daughter.)

“M. [his daughter] reported — having seeing an incident where I believe she said her dad was choking her mom or had his hands around her neck and dragged her down some stairs.”  

 Meanwhile, The Falafel King lectures and hectors ‘Merka to live exemplary lives.

Can we throw him back already?

As is traditional in his falsely titled No Spin Zone, we’ll give Bill the last word:

Frederick Douglass Escapes ► Throwback Thursday

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Born into slavery in what might have been 1818, Frederick Douglass eventually became an icon of the Abolitionist Movement.

Although it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, Sophia Auld, the wife of Douglass’ owner Hugh, taught him the alphabet around the age of 12. When Hugh Auld heard of this he forbade the lessons, but Douglass had already tasted education and couldn’t get enough of it. He continued to learn from the White children around him and read whatever he could get his hands on. According to Biography: 

It was through reading that Douglass’ ideological opposition to slavery began to take shape. He read newspapers avidly, and sought out political writing and literature as much as possible. In later years, Douglass credited The Columbian Orator with clarifying and defining his views on human rights. Douglass shared his newfound knowledge with other enslaved people. Hired out to William Freeland, he taught other slaves on the plantation to read the New Testament at a weekly church service. Interest was so great that in any week, more than 40 slaves would attend lessons. Although Freeland did not interfere with the lessons, other local slave owners were less understanding. Armed with clubs and stones, they dispersed the congregation permanently.

After 2 unsuccessful attempts to escape, Frederick Douglass finally freed himself from the shackles of slavery on this date in 1838. After his escape he married Anna Murray, a Free Black Woman, and they lived for a while under the assumed name of Johnston, eventually settling back on Douglass as their married name.

Douglass subscribed to the anti-slavery weekly The Liberator, published by William Lloyd Garrison. He started to tell his story of life as a slave in Abolitionist meetings in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had a large free Black population. Eventually Garrison wrote about Douglass and urged him to write his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was published in 1845.

The book, translated and sold around the world, was a best seller. However, there was a downside to fame. Douglass had to escape once again, this time to Ireland, where he lectured for 2 years until his supporters could purchase his freedom.

Douglass returned home and continued to fight for the end of slavery. He published several other books: My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), which was revised 11 years later. He died of a heart attack or stroke in 1895 after being honoured at a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. Thousands attended his funeral. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, where Susan B. Anthony is also buried.

Launching Throwback Thursday with The Westerfield Journals

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RECENTLY REDISCOVERED: These are the pages in my journal I thinking
aloud before I have my first-ever interview for my first-ever writing job.

I must have impressed because I was hired for Record Week soon afterwards.

Back in the day, long before there was a computer on every desk, I kept a journal. 

I now have more than a dozen of them weighing down one of my shelves. They are all a multi-media hodgepodge of words, collages, to do lists, calendars, phone numbers, and naked, uninhibited thoughts. Just the usual, yannow?

I’ve recently posted a few of the pages of my journal on my facebookery and people seem to like them. My friend (and former workmate at Island Records) Kathy Hahn reminded me how much she loved reading through my journals and how they anticipated internet postings, but in an analog format. It was a truly Smack My Head moment. I had never considered that before, but she’s absolutely right. Page after page of my journals mimic what I would later try to recreate on the innertubes.

In college I wrote a regular column called “Octoroon Expressway” for the alternative
newspaper. The journals have lots of collages made from 4 for a Quarter booth pics.

Maybe it’s a side-effect of aging, but I’ve been rifling through my past a lot lately. With my journals it’s been fun to see what I had written years ago. Some of it I remember writing. A lot of it I had forgotten about totally. Some of it I wouldn’t dare publish today, despite it being obvious humour that more obviously failed. I clearly had no standards back then. Now I have some.

Several years ago an unnamed friend at an unnamed publishing company
was convinced a compilation of my journal pages would make an interesting book. It was something I had never considered before, but she convinced me to go through all of my journals and highlight interesting pages with
Post It Notes. She thought some pages could be published
“as is” while some would need some text for context. However, she thought a compilation would provide a time capsule of the era.

I did as she asked and then packed all my journals and sent
them to her. She had them for so long that became worried that I’d never
get them back. Whenever I’d request them, she’d tell me that she thinks
she had her editor convinced, just give her a little more time. Eventually, the publisher passed on the project and I finally got my journals back. She had them for almost 2 years.

My staff photographer was longtime friend Steve Feldman

Now, as I launch a new totally original feature (because no one has ever used the expression Throwback Thursday before), I thought it would be nice to show a few pages from my journals every once in a while.

My new totally original feature Throwback Thursday will be, like my many journals, a hodgepodge of ideas and thoughts. However, the connective tissue will be that they will all be about history, whether it’s my history, or that of the world at large.

If you follow my Twitter of Facebook feeds, you will know I often exclaim that history is complicated. Hopefully, Throwback Thursday will simplify some of that complexity.

Throwback Thursday will provide a bit of fun for me as well. I’m looking at it as an archaeological project, whether I’m mining my own life, or digging up little-known facts and events from history.

So, dear readers, tune into the Not Now Silly Newsroom every Thursday at this time for a look back on people, places, and events that will delight, infuriate, or simply confound you.

Two journal pages that describe a Paul McCartney concert in Toronto, followed by a Bob
Marley concert in Detroit the next day, and being hassled by the cops in Southfield, Michigan.

The gal in the photographs only went out with me for my Paul McCartney All Access passes. We never dated again.