Thanksgiving 1978, Redux!

I've just re-written and combined the two posts I had done for the Newsday TV Book for the week of November 19-25, 1978, so...
CHECK IT OUT RIGHT HERE!

Newsday TV Book, November 11-17, 1973.

I tolya I'd be right back! And here I am, with Valerie Harper to boot!

I've read that Harper was active in liberal politics, and this article by Carol Burton shows us that if you called her a snowflake, she'd have had no choice but to cop to it. It was her first role!

The TV Line has the lowdown about the whereabouts of the Three Stooges and how their slapstick was apparently too heavy for WPIX. Also the future not-Chastity Bono, the soon-to-be-unemployable Tex Antoine (yes, the drunken weatherman who joked about the attempted rape of a child on-air), and the bird-spirited (and possibly brained) Barbara Seagull, nee Hershey.

Sometimes I leave the ads until the end of the post, but today I feel like having a little cheesecake right up front! This tasty slice is courtesy, as usual, of Holiday Spas, still practicing their "body magic" in my hometown Plainview at this time...

Here's another ad, or a conglomeration of ads, for pre-winter renovating, and in a color setting.

Well, orange, anyway.

Airport took off as the ABC Sunday Night Movie, and Viskupic took that whole National Airlines "I'm Tammy, fly me" thing very literally.

I didn't show a weekday morning last time, so here's Monday, mostly because I love the entry for The Little Rascals. "Oh, look honey--Freckles Spear is in this one!"

If you got up at 5am to watch five hours of Princess Anne's wedding... I don't even know how to finish that sentence, I find it so unrelatable. (Of course, I was four, so I doubt I was making it through an entire episode of Courageous Cat yet.)

Now here are the listings for Wednesday afternoon, which includes the

FIRST HICKS NURSERIES CHRISTMAS AD OF THE SEASON!

WITH SANTA HIMSELF!!!

 

Sorry. I'll compose myself.

The ABC Afternoon Playbreak ("A Special Act of Love") sounds like a hoot, dudnit?

Since I've already shown you the early listings, here are the rest, with Brian's Song, James Brolin Trapped in a department store, and The Black Tourmet at 4:05am, with "things that go wobble, wobble on the wall." Huh? (Ask reviewer John Cashman, I guess.)

Friday's late-night listings offer little for 70's stoners besides Bowie at the Marquis Club. (Twilight Zone, Joe Franklin, and Reel Camp, however, might have made for suitable enhanced viewing, too.)

And now, all day Saturday. That's right--all damn day! I'm not playing around!

The next TV Book covers Thanksgiving week, but guess what? I already scanned it a few years ago! So you don't have to wait to see it--just click RIGHT HERE!

And if that's not enough to entice you, here's the cover of that issue, with Snoopy and Woodstock dressed as pilgrims to promote the debut of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving!

Newsday TV Book, November 4-10, 1973.

We're a third of the way into November and man-oh-Manischewitz, we need a little Christmas, right this very minute! I always advocate easin' into the season, however, and since we are still two-and-a-half weeks from Thanksgiving, I'm gonna write up two TV Books from this month in 1973.

First up is this issue with a Bernie Cootner illustration on the cover, for the Public Broadcasting Service series "The Men Who Made the Movies," premiering locally on WNET channel 13.

Esteemed Newsday reviewer Joseph Gelmis wrote the accompanying story, with anecdotes about directors Raoul Walsh and Frank Capra, including one involving the abuse of John Barrymore's fresh corpse. Oh, you Tinseltown scamps! (This is part one, the rest is attached to the Saturday afternoon listings.)

The TV Line addresses such topics as Bea Arthur's face, Don Galloway's cars, and the song used on WCBS' reports on unclean eating establishments in New York City. By the way, that song, "No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach's In)," was not actually recorded by The T-Bones, which was a bunch of guys appearing as the band; the music on their albums was mostly performed by The Wrecking Crew.

I decided to scan all day Sunday, although now I forget why. Interesting to see King Kong vs. Godzilla on a Sunday afternoon, though. (Plus the John Cashman reviews are succinct and snarkilicious, as always.)

Monday afternoon's schedule has a Gary Viskupic drawing for a Louis Armstrong tribute airing that night. Satchmo died two years earlier.

Carroll O'Connor had a special on CBS called "Three for the Girls," a three-act appreciation of the various women in a man's life. Nowadays, this would undoubtedly get him called out as a woke beta male by the insufferably ubiquitous Bro-stocracy.

Here are Tuesday's evening and late listings, focusing of course on Election Day results.

Wednesday had a Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour close-up, showing Sonny Bono with his then-daughter, the deadnamed Chastity (later Chaz). This very photo is used on Chaz' Wikipedia page, erroneously dated 1974.

Thursday's late sched brings a close-up on The Graduate, with a scene from the film. Newsday would use a Viskupic illustration for the next broadcast a year later, and it's quite a bit more striking.

Now here's all day Saturday, including the late-morning liftoff of one of the Skylab missions (although the internet seems to disagree about the mission number and date). My aerospace engineer dad worked on Skylab, specifically the waste management system--or as he liked to humbly say, the toilet.

Here's an ad for Custom Meats (with my local-est location in Farmingdale), and an offer to harvest a free turkey for the upcoming holiday.

This full-color ad spread is nothing all that special, other than depicting a handy squirrel in carpenter coveralls. (Okay, I guess that's pretty special.)

Finally, the back cover for The Colonial Shoppes and their Election Day sale. This exact ensemble would be advertised six months later for forty-five bucks more--still a damn good price for biscuit-tufted furniture with hand-matched patchwork, IMHO...

Next week's issue, coming right up! Valerie Harper is on the cover, with more Chastity, more Viskupic, and the first Hicks Nurseries Christmas ad of the season! It really IS the most wonderful time of the year!

"The Graphic," Volume 1, Number 6 (Saturday, July 28, 1945).

This nostalgia piece is a little different from what I typically post, but it's regarding some items in my collection that puzzle me a little bit. First, I have no recollection of where I picked them up, but I suppose they must have been in a stack of random papers. Second, I'm having a hard time finding out much about them, other than the information they provide themselves.

The cryptic items are two consecutive issues of The Graphic, a World War II regimental newspaper that was "published each Friday in the interest of all 16th Infantry personnel." (The two I have, however, are labeled as coming out on Saturday.) They were published immediately post-war, about four months after the Battle of Remagen, in Bamberg, Germany.

The earlier paper I have is Volume one, Number six, from Saturday, July 28, 1945. A cover article says it is the first issue to be formatted as a tabloid. The later is Volume one, Number seven, Saturday, August 4, 1945. This later one is called an anniversary issue, marking the end of three years overseas for the Sixteenth Infantry, and features a short but powerful article by future director Cpl. Samuel Fuller called "Die Sixteenth Infantry Hat Ein Haus Eingeschlagen." He translates this to "The Sixteenth Infantry has struck a house." Superimposed over the article is the only color in either paper: the Big Red One.

Fuller, in case you're unfamiliar, directed the brilliant 1980 war film The Big Red One, based on his experiences in the 1st Infantry Division so nicknamed. I surmise that he wrote this piece after he helped liberate the concentration camp at Falkenau (three months earlier), which he documented on 16mm film. He died in 1997.

I can’t find any mention of these fascinating papers anywhere, but when I took them to a flea market a few years ago, the seller in an expansive booth of WWII memorabilia dismissively told me he had stacks of them laying around (at home, not the market) and they’re essentially worthless. They seem pretty compelling to me, but I assumed he was telling me the truth since he wouldn’t even look at them, much less did he offer to buy them from me. But if they’re so ubiquitous, why can’t I find out a damn thing about them? Why have I never found one on eBay? I've even sent messages to an active Facebook group honoring the 16th Infantry, never to receive a response.

I've decided to reprint them here, to see if they garner any interest from WWII buffs, or anyone. My dad was with the 15th Army Air Force, but regretfully I never asked him about the war in the sixteen years I had with him, before he died unexpectedly in '85. My brother has some small notebooks in dad's handwriting titled "Record of Sorties," describing the missions he flew in simple, bureaucratic detail, as they were occurring (I guess, considering all the technical minutiae).

That's in contrast to these newspapers, which have a vibrancy to their tone. Largely covering the lives of soldiers trying to return to normal (albeit while still overseas), they contain accounts of social and sporting events, cartoons about their peculiar circumstances (by Frank Interlandi, who went on to a career as a Los Angeles Times editorial cartoonist and abstract Impressionist painter), and articles acting as guides to what they could expect next, and how best to utilize the government benefits due them. 

The hopeful elation of this new peace was obviously tinged with uncertainty, I feel that in these pages. Surely they knew they would continue to bear a weight, but now one that brought on more than just a weariness of bones.

The scans are top of page and bottom of page, I didn't bother trying to combine them fearing a loss of legibility. I edited them the best I could, eliminating some excess margins. I felt they looked best as color scans, lightly sharpened and brightened with a little contrast added. The difference in clarity between these and grayscale scans, I found, was negligible. I kept the color, for its character and unembellished verisimilitude (in other words: keepin’ it real!). The deeply-yellowed pages, for the record, are soft, not brittle.

I hope to add more description in order to make them more search engine-friendly, but for now I just want to get them on here. I'll have the other issue up at a later date, in the meantime please comment with additional info, thoughts, suggestions...

The big headline on the front page gives one an idea of where their greatest interest lie:

"BEER HAVENS OPENED FOR [ENLISTED MEN]"
with the subtitle
"16th Soldiers Can Buy Beer In Local Taverns; Ten Pubs In Operation."

(Oh, and don’t miss “Jive Time In Czechoslovakia.”) 

(click to enlarge and clarify)

Check back for the other issue, one o' these days (probably with some TV nostalgia nuttiness in the meantime, however)...
UPDATE!
I decided to give the full page edit a shot in order to see how it looks, so here's a preview of the next issue, and that incredible Sam Fuller piece with the Big Red One emblem over it (not to mention there's a message from Ike himself). I’ve also written out the full text at the DPiMR Facebook page, which you can read HERE.

Thanks for looking, and remember: share, share, that's fair!