I was in grade school on the south side of Chicago when I began listening to the radio. It was AM in those days, and the format was Top Forty. There were two big stations in Chicago, WLS and WCFL. Since they both played the same music, they differentiated themselves by the personalities of their disc jockeys. One did a lot of comedic bits and spotlighted local comedians. And one of those was Bob Newhart.
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I heard him long before I met him. I remember sitting in the cafeteria CBS had set up in the basement of New York’s Madison Square Garden to feed the hundreds of staff members it had brought to the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Believe it or not, in those days the political conventions meant something and, in part because of legal requirements, they were extensively covered by broadcasters.
Just two years out of journalism school, I had been sent by my employer, WBBM-TV, the CBS owned station in my hometown Chicago, to manage our coverage. Along with me was a terrific video crew and a wonderful reporter who needed no supervision and little assistance, and an anchorman who definitely needed both. Those are stories for another day. Today, I just want to talk about the voice.
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It was my last year of grade school, and I faced all the usual crises. My family was about to move about five miles closer to the center of the city because my parents wanted me to attend a different high school than the one serving our current neighborhood. I was about to lose most of my grade school friends because only two others were switching to the same high school. And for some reason the girls, who I had recently become interested in, were not so much interested in our current hero, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn. They had eyes only for the blood sidekick Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum.
McCallum died yesterday in New York City at the age of ninety.
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There are some people you just think will be around forever. Betty White was one of them. I cannot claim to have watched her first television program, the self-produced “Life with Elizabeth.” I was only one year old when it premiered in 1952. And coming in the days before television programming could be recorded, or prerecorded, there is no record for me to review, or add to my insanely enormous collection of television programming.
But as to the rest of it, the game shows including Password, Match Game, Tattletales, To Tell the Truth, The Hollywood Squares, and the $25,000 Pyramid. Or the soaps and dramas, The Bold and the Beautiful, Boston Legal, and the comedies/variety programs including The Carol Burnett Show. Her biggest roles include Sue Ann Nivens on the CBS sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1973–1977), Rose Nylund on the NBC sitcom The Golden Girls (1985–1992), and Elka Ostrovsky on the TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland (2010–2015). She gained renewed popularity after her appearance in the 2009 romantic comedy film The Proposal (2009) and was subsequently the subject of a successful Facebook-based campaign to host Saturday Night Live in 2010, garnering her a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series.
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