Allan Havey and Johnny Carson

One other thought on Johnny Carson. Lots of columnists and commentators mentioned the list of people who tried to unseat The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson as the number one late-night talk show. Nobody mentioned Night After Night with Allan Havey, the Comedy Channel talk show that ran in the early 90s as part of the original lineup on the cable channel that later changed its name to Comedy Central.

It ran briefly, for three years or so, and went through a couple of format changes along the way. It was a funny show with a small, devoted following. It was never conceived as a Tonight Show challenger, but was a first step for a cable network trying to forge an identity. Havey and Night After Night made one of the classiest tributes to Carson and it didn't happen this week. When Carson bid farewell to the Tonight Show in 1992, Night After Night went dark for the evening. It didn't show a rerun, it went dark. The comedy channel put up a graphic for the entire time the tonight show aired (east coast feed) saying it had ceased broadcasting in deference to Carson. I don't know if that was Allan's idea, but it was a solid gesture and should be remembered.

Unlikely Web Site of the Day

Former Lions and Dogs drummer Jade Gurss is now a NASCAR publicity man. If you explore his website, you'll find veiled allusions to KJHK and not so veiled allusions to Lions and Dogs.

Remembering Johnny Carson

Yesterday afternoon I was in a sandwich shop and the radio was playing. A young disc jockey, who said he was 30, talked about Johnny Carson. He wasn't being disrespectful when he admitted that he missed out on Johnny's era and didn't "get" Carson.

His admission made me think how fortunate I was to grow up with Johnny Carson on television. It's hard to gauge the impact of a single personality like Johnny Carson in retrospect. There are so many late night talk shows now and only a handful are any good. None of them have the impact that Carson commanded in his heyday.

If you missed out on the Carson era, imagine a television landscape with no cable and only three networks. It was 1971 and 10:30pm central time and your viewing choices were severely limited. Carson was it. There wasn't any competition. I liked Dick Cavett's show on ABC but it was gone before anybody started getting misty about it.

Furthermore, with the exception of Laugh-In, I can't think of a single topical comedy program from the early 70s. Until Saturday Night debuted on NBC in 1975, Carson was the only guy doing topical jokes. He was the John Stewart of the day.

When I was in kindergarten my bedtime was 10:20pm. It seemed odd that my parents allowed me to stay up so late. I remember that by 4th grade I was required to be in bed at 9pm most nights. Perhaps they let me stay up late in kindergarten because I was in the afternoon session. I'm not sure. I liked to watch channel five news (Kansas City). Weatherman John Yates was my favorite and I liked the segment where they panned the studio camera across six analog dials that showed the temperature, wind direction, barometric pressure, etc. Very low tech, but very popular in the day. It was so popular that channel five panned across those dials when there wasn't any programming, instead of displaying a test pattern.

Occasionally I managed to stay up until 10:30 when they flipped over to Johnny Carson. You knew you were up late when The Tonight Show music started. I wasn't a big Carson fan, but I was a fan of staying up late. I stayed quiet and watched what was on so I didn't draw attention to myself. That was my first taste of late night TV.

In the 1974 movie "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", Alice's son Tommy, played by Alfred Lutter, was living a vagabond existance with his mom as they migrated across the southwest in search of a better life. Alice, played by Ellen Burstyn, worked evenings and young Tommy stayed back at the hotel. In one scene he turned on Carson to keep him company. It was a realistic touch. Carson's target audience wasn't children, but he entertained us, and in some cases, kept us company.

After the Ed Sullivan show went off the air, there weren't many TV outlets for stand-up comedians. The Carson show filled the void. When Johnny moved the show to the west coast in the early 70s, it changed the face of stand-up comedy forever. The show began to feature a preponderance of younger west coast comedians as opposed to the Catskill flavored east coast types. Carson didn't shun the old school all together, but he provided the best vehicle for a new club comedian to make a splash.

Who will be the next Johnny Carson? Everyone wondered when he retired in 1992. The answer is more apparent now than it was then. Nobody.

Chevrolet Sings

Driving a car can be an exciting thing, just ask the folks at Chevrolet circa the early 60s. They issued a driving hygiene record, "Chevrolet Sings of Safe Driving and You" for prospective drivers. A college roommate and KJHK compadre named Michael Bassin turned me on to the cool folk stylings of "(driving a car can be) An Exciting Thing", as well as other cuts, back in the mid 80s. Michael donated the album to the radio station in 1986 and for all I know it's still there. I was surprised today when I googled the term and found this picture and several website mentions. It popped up more than once on the play lists of eclectic radio shows. A copy of the vinyl album went for over 50 dollars recently online and I also stumbled across a blurb about a performer in Colorado who covered the album from start to finish as a performance. The lyrics and spoken word interludes are hilarious and very corny but I can't get some of the acoustic melodies (and earnest harmonica work) out of my head.

Q & A With Todd Gilmore

Todd Gilmore is the K.U. graduate (architecture, '88) who conceived the original "Beware of the Phog" banner that hung in Allen Field House. Our mutual history goes back to the fall of 1983 when I lived on the tenth floor of Oliver residence hall and he had some friends who lived in the same wing. I caught up with him over winter break and asked him some questions.

FJ: The KU men's basketball program was at a relative nadir when you and I arrived at school in the fall of 1983. People may not realize how different it was that year. What do you recall about the basketball program when you were a freshman?
TG: To be honest, I wasn't much of a basketball fan prior to college. I remember my Dad telling me during the summer before I left for KU that they were going to have a good team and I'd heard that Larry Brown was coming in to coach. Fortunately for me, a few of the guys on 10th floor at Oliver (particularly Pat Sieb) talked me into going to that first game and I was hooked.

FJ: What did you like best about living in Oliver Hall besides the clean restrooms?
TG: Walking up 144 stairs into the wind, both ways to get to campus. It was a little more wild freshman year than sophomore year. They ended up moving the guys to the first 5 floors and the girls to the upper floors because we caused "problems". Gobbies out the window were always fun and the yell fights with Naismith. Oh, and you couldn't beat the Pink Floyd paint job down the hall on the 10th floor. I wonder if it's still there?

FJ: People think I'm crazy when I tell them that as students we didn't stand the whole game or try to distract the opposing team's free throw shooters. What else has changed about the Allen Field House experience since the mid '80s?
TG: I think that was the case when we were freshman. But there were fanatics then trying to get everyone to do that and eventually we all started. One of the guys at Oliver was the guy that started the "Whoosh" yell after made free throws. I also remember the seating arrangements were MUCH tighter before they installed the permanent seating on the lower level. We used to stand kind of sideways to fit everyone in and then when we did sit down it was pretty cramped. The new seats gave us more room.

FJ: During the mid '80s, the two biggest personalities in Lawrence were William S. Burroughs and Larry Brown. Did you ever meet either one?
TG: I met Larry Brown a couple of times in passing as he was giving us doughnuts in the morning after we had camped out for some games. I never shook his hand or anything.

FJ: What's your favorite K.U. basketball moment besides watching the team win the NCAA tournament in 1988?
TG: It was the quietest and loudest moments at Allen Fieldhouse in the span of about 3 seconds. It was the night we were playing OU in 84 and Calvin Thompson drained a shot at the buzzer to send the game into overtime. When he let that ball go, it got so quiet as you could almost hear everyone in the building take a deep breath at the same time. Slow motion is what it felt like as halfway through the arc of the shot, the light came on behind the goal and then a HUGE explosion of emotion when the shot went down. I still get goose bumps thinking of it. It was the loudest moment I can remember in the building. (Although, I'm sure there were others, that one has always stuck in my mind.) Unfortunately, OU went on to win in overtime. They cut down the nets in OUR building and my roommate (remember Larry?) took a swing at Billy Tubbs as they headed back to the locker room. (He missed by a long shot as we were all being held back by security, but it was a swing nonetheless :-)

FJ: The Oliver Hall library had a subscription to Playboy but somebody kept tearing out the pictorial pages. Was it you?
TG: No, that wasn't me, but I noticed that some of the pages that hadn't been torn off were stuck together. Whoever kept checking it out must have eaten their French toast with their fingers.

FJ: How did you come up with the idea for the "beware of the phog" banner?
TG: I can't vividly remember any spark where I said, "Eureka!", but it had been something I had been thinking about for a while. I liked the fact that places like New Mexico and Clemson had stadiums with names like The Pit and Death Valley. I thought AFH should have something like that. The Beware of the Phog came from commercials for John Carpenter's movie, 'The Fog'. They used that line and I just changed the spelling. I can't honestly tell you where the pay heed came from. It just kind of popped into my head.

FJ: Where is the original phog banner now?
TG: I've been told that it's in storage and will supposedly be displayed in the new KU athletic hall of fame when it's built. I've heard that there is plans to build it right in front of the fieldhouse.

FJ: It would seem you have some merchandising opportunities there. Did you copyright the phrase "beware of the phog"?
TG: Um. No. We joke about it, but I probably lost out on some pretty good coin by not copyrighting it. Oh well. I just look at it like I've contributed a lot of money to the KU athletic department :-)

Learn more about Todd's unique contribution to K.U. history in this essay and this Journal World story by Joe Gose.

Remembering the Battle of the Bulge

When I worked for the Kansas Audio Reader Network in the late 80s, one of our volunteers, Mrs. A.B. Ewing, told the story of Christmas Eve 1944, and how the Battle of the Bulge came home to Lawrence, Kansas.

Twilight in the borderlands.

Meanwhile in New York

Steve Martin debunks the myth that King Tut was born in Arizona and Woody Allen reports that Daffy Duck is a scientologist. (Thanks Evanier)

Truman's 1947 Diary

I used to have this fantasy where I gained access to the Harry S. Truman archives and discovered a reference to the Roswell incident. You know the bit. I ask to see some papers for a "book I'm writing" and the ambivalent attendant brings me everything he's got and more. I discover a non-descript Manila folder from 1947. It smells musty. In a long forgotten memo, sandwiched between newspaper clippings and boring missives on the state of the White House restoration effort, a brief memo with the President's seal mentions the flying saucer recovery effort in the New Mexico dessert. I glance around to make sure I am alone in the stacks, remove my Minox spy camera, and snap a picture of the first official acknowledgement of the legendary cover-up. Later, I appear on the Donahue show and have Thanksgiving with Whitley Strieber.

It never happened. I always meant to front that fake book idea and drive over to Independence, but do you have any idea how hard it is to get prints made for Minox snaps?

Imagine my delight when the article I was searching for in my deep purple conspiracy dreams was found at the Truman Library recently. Some curious soul found Truman's 1947 diary in a heap of books. Best of all, they transcribed it on line. I quickly turned to the July entries and found that he made no mention of anything extra-terrestrial. Too bad.

There's nothing during the Roswell window. The Truman entries stop July 6th and don't resume until July 21st. Hmm. Furthermore, the 7/21 entry is loose-leaf. The next entry in the book is July 23rd. Is it possible the Roswell entries were removed after Truman wrote them? Perhaps. Maybe it looked like this:

July 10th - Sorry I haven't written. I've just been so busy with work and the commie menace. Just returned from Ft. Worth and a review of the "little green men". I don't know who smells worse, the dead aliens or General Blanchard.

[J. Edgar] Hoover stopped by to tell me who's gay in Hollywood. Bess was not amused by his joke about Edith Head giving good costume.

Or this:

July 14th - Was playing poker with the boys when Rose delivered an update on the flying disk salvage in N.M. It was so shocking I folded with three tens off the deal. It doesn't use gasoline and there aren't any cup holders. Detroit's not gonna like it.

Phoned De Gaulle to wish him and Madame De G. a happy Bastille Day. Forgot about the time difference and ended up waking his French butt out of bed. Played the piano in cross hall until 11pm. Had ice cream in the kitchen, did 25 push-ups, and so to bed.

River City Reunion - Lineup

River City Reunion - September 1987 in Lawrence, Kansas. Roster part two. Here's part one in case you missed it.