50 Years Ago Tuesday: A Night in American Political and Network News History

https://youtu.be/xTeW-wkin6A

This is another interesting week in the transition of life for baby-boomers.

Jerry Mathers (The Beaver) turns 70 June 3, 2018

Already, we’ve shared that today, June 3, is the 70th birthday of Jerry Mathers, an icon of the TV Generation. In our TV minds, The Beav is still between 8 and 14 years old, depending on the rerun we watch. I commented to a friend today, I wonder if Beaver at 70 would be able to get out of that big bowl of soup on a billboard in the legendary “In the Soup” episode.

Tuesday is the 50th anniversary of a dark day in the spring of ’68 and American history. Within the span of five days in April 1968, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek a second full term as president. That was on a Sunday night. The following Thursday, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. June 5, 1968, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy won the California Primary. Moments after leaving the ballroom where he delivered his victory speech, he was shot and later died at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan.

Robert and Ethel Kennedy moments before his California Primary acceptance speech June 5, 1968

My colleague Stu Shostak shared with us footage from YouTube of ABC News’ live coverage of the California Primary returns, the victory speech and then the awful news of the shooting (Kennedy died approximately 28 hours later).

This was a different era in politics. Most states in the late 1960s still did not hold primaries to select delegates for the national conventions. In 1968, Sen. Eugene McCarthy stunned the country by finishing within two percentage points of President Johnson in the opener, the New Hampshire Primary. That opened Kennedy’s eyes to a vulnerability in the incumbent. Shortly thereafter, he announced his candidacy and entered the remaining primaries.

Two things led to Johnson’s withdrawal in a Sunday night address to the nation that ostensibly was to announce a new strategy in Vietnam. One was the strong performance of McCarthy and Kennedy’s entry into the race. Second was Walter Cronkite’s series of reports from the battlefront on the CBS Evening News. On the final evening, the Friday before Johnson’s address, Cronkite delivered a rare personal commentary. By that point, Cronkite had overtaken Chet Huntley and David Brinkley as the top-rated anchor in network news. In his perspective, Cronkite suggested that the best the United States could hope for in Vietnam was a negotiated truce. A number of books and other published accounts quoted Johnson as saying to his wife Lady Bird and his close associates, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

Two nights later, in a dramatic addendum that was not included in advance copies of the speech to the media, Johnson uttered his famous lines, “I shall not seek, nor will not accept another term as your President.” CBS News correspondent Harry Reasoner, anchor of the late-night CBS Sunday News, reflected first on the stunning news of Johnson’s departure from the campaign instead of the Vietnam strategy.

RFK’s California Primary acceptance speech June 5, 1968

Kennedy, largely on name value, overtook McCarthy in the primaries where both were entered. McCarthy won in Oregon where Kennedy had not campaigned. The X factor was Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

In 1960, Humphrey badly wanted the Presidency but ran out of money after several primary losses to John F. Kennedy. Humphrey accepted the number two slot with Johnson in 1964. With Johnson out of the way, Humphrey opted to enter the race in 1968; however, Johnson’s late decision was past the deadline for Humphrey to enter any remaining primaries.

ABC News covers RFK’s victory speech for the California Primary June 5, 1968.  Note that ABC was still in black-and-white for remote live coverage.

Humphrey was forced to go the traditional route of negotiating with Democratic Party bosses such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. CBS News estimated that even with Kennedy’s victory in the California Primary, Humphrey would enter the Democratic National Convention with approximately 1,200 of the needed 1,340 delegates for the nomination. Kennedy would have slightly more than 1,000. The battle between the two to cross the finish line may have been one of the most epic in American political history. We could have seen a brokered convention or perhaps a delegate vote that went beyond the first ballot (something I have not seen in my lifetime).

Howard K. Smith of ABC News reports on the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy

This historical ABC News coverage takes you back to that fateful night in 1968. I was about to enter my sophomore year of high school. This was the first week of summer vacation from school. As a young political junkie, I sat up after midnight to hear Kennedy’s victory speech for the California Primary, then went to bed. I awoke the next morning to around-the-clock news coverage of the shooting and perpetual analysis of whether Kennedy would survive.

We will never know to the degree this changed political history. Even if you are not a fan of politics, I encourage you to watch this as a snapshot of history.

Glen Broughman: Mr. News

Anyone who enters television news has a few icons who inspired him or her to join the profession.

The first television newscaster I ever remember seeing was the man in the pictures below.

My father was appointed to a church in Columbus GA in 1956 a few months before I turned two. I still have fleeting memories from the age of three when our house was one of thousands in West Georgia and East Alabama tuned to Evening Edition at 7 p.m. on WRBL Channel 4 (more on the station’s switch to Channel 3 in a subsequent post).  Glen Broughman, Doug Wallace with Weather Outlook and Douglas Edwards with the News on CBS at 7:15 were unbeatable.

Glen Broughman was “Mr. News” in the era in Columbus, make no mistake. He was the pioneering news anchor (and later news director) for the station from its inception in 1953. The term “anchor” was yet to be invented.

The ratings for Evening Edition were higher than many of the network or syndicated prime time entertainment programs. With his signature crewcut, often accompanied by a bowtie, Glen was alone in prime time news in Columbus until WTVM, still on Channel 28, launched its Operation Newsbeat in 1959.

Glen served in the Signal Corps during World War II. After the war, he entered college on the G.I. Bill, earning a degree in radio journalism from Ohio State in the late 1940s.

When television came to Columbus in 1953, WRBL had the X factor as a CBS affiliate. WDAK-TV, operating on a weaker UHF signal, was a primary NBC station. Both channels cherrypicked available ABC programs and added a sprinkling of the top syndicated shows of the day.

Glen Broughman was not of the mold of later conversational-turned-humor anchors. With him, the news was the news and it was all serious business. Even when a co-anchor,

 David Lea, was added in 1962, Broughman was the straightforward news presenter.

He covered the gambling-influenced violence that was Phenix City, Ala., in the early 1950s and spawned a movie, “The Phenix City Story.” His reports of martial law in the East Alabama town were award-winning. Broughman also probed the struggles of integration with one-on-one interviews with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Alabama Gov. George Wallace, and Georgia Gov. Marvin Griffin, all symbolic figures of the battle over civil rights.

In those early years, Broughman was also the iron pants of Columbus television.  A look back at the TV logs from 1956 indicate Glen not only did the 7 and 11 o’clock news on WRBL, he presented a five-minute newscast at 1:05 p.m. after five minutes of CBS headlines with Walter Cronkite.  Often, he was on the street shooting newsfilm in the morning.  A long-time viewer, Richard Almon, said to me 59 years ago:  “I wonder when Glen Broughman ever sleeps.”

The late Columbus Council member Philip Batastini once told me, “When Glen Broughman came into a meeting of the old city commission, everything stopped until he put his camera on that tripod and began rolling his film.” When he left Columbus in late 1962, those same commissioners issued a proclamation expressing regret at his departure.

His career took him to a role as a special correspondent for NASA, to WFTV in Orlando and to WNEM in Saginaw, MI, not far from his birthplace of Bridgeport. I caught a promo for his impending move to Orlando in 1969. Supposedly for easier grasp of viewers, he shortened the spelling of his last name to Broman.

The Columbus television news pioneer died in 2014 at the age of 89. More than 50 years passed since he read his last story on Evening Edition and the 11 o’clock Night Edition.   Sadly, only television historians such as I am, along with a few old-timers, remember him. Yet, he was the first person I saw on TV who influenced me to seek to do what he did for a living.

Periodically, I return to Columbus to visit relatives. When possible, I stop in to see my old friend—WRBL’s lead male anchor Phil Scoggins, who has now been in that chair for 20 years—-amazingly more than twice as long as Broughman’s tenure in a profession often known for its revolving door. Phil and I broke in at WRBL News 3 only four months apart in 1976.

In any workplace, someone had to be first so that others could be second, third, and fourth. In Columbus television news, Glen Broughman was the first and set a high bar. Phil and I and everyone who has ever walked through that door on 13th Avenue owe a debt of immense gratitude to the late Mr. Broughman. The job he did in those first nine years of WRBL News on television paved the way for hundreds of us who entered that legendary building in 1976 and in the 40-plus years since.

Monty Hall: Indeed a Big Deal

           Saturday afternoon, I was watching the 41-0 thrashing of Tennessee by Georgia on CBS and waiting for the barrage of callers to talk shows who want to fire the Vol coaches.

            Just before the game ended, I received a message that I knew would be coming at any time.  Monty Hall, the legendary co-creator and original host of Let’s Make a Deal, had died at 96.

            Eighteen months ago, Monty’s agent Fred Wostbrock told me the game show icon’s health was declining.  “He’s on dialysis three times a week and he’s lost about 60 pounds,” Fred said.  Little did we know that Monty would outlive his agent, who died late last year of cancer.

       Like many of you, I grew up watching Monty preside over the world’s biggest daily costume party on the show he co-created with his partner Steve Hatos, Let’s Make a Deal.  I went even further back with him to the living board game he hosted from 1960 to 1962, Video Village on CBS.  To this day, baby boomers my age remember fondly Village but can’t remember the show’s title.

            As a kid from South Georgia who looked on Monty and several of the other classic game show hosts as TV icons, I never dreamed I would meet the man, much less emcee a testimonial event at which he was honored.   More on that later.

            I was privileged to know the man for 17 years.  Another game show legend, Tom Kennedy, put me together with Monty in 2000 at the height of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire craze.

            He was straightforward with me to every question about his career and the game show business.  He was totally candid about why he moved Let’s Make a Deal  from NBC to ABC after five successful years in 1968 (an NBC executive refused to give Deal a nighttime slot; ABC was glad to offer it).

            Before that interview ended, Monty said:  “I could talk to you for two hours.  You know a lot about our business.  This is one of the few interviews I’ve ever given where someone hasn’t used the word ‘mindless’ several times.”  I figured that would probably be my one-and-done session with TV’s Big Dealer.

            Over the next couple of years as game shows came and went in prime time in the wake of the huge success of Millionaire, I would periodically hear the voice of Carol Andrews, Monty’s administrative assistant, on the other end of my phone.  “Monty wants to talk to you about something,” she would say.

            Monty was a daily reader of my TVgameshows.net online page.  The something he would want to discuss was usually either a new game show or what I thought about a new emcee.

            “Other than having a personality that people like, what do you think is the most important characteristic of a game show host?” he asked me one day.  My response was:  “He needs to be a good listener.  If he doesn’t listen to what the contestant says, he’ll never be engaged with the contestant and miss some choice moments.”

            Monty answered right back, “That is exactly right.”  The new emcee he was asking about was one he was considering for a revival of Let’s Make a Deal in 2005.  “I thought he had all the right tools we were looking for,” Monty said, “but I watched him three days in a row.  He doesn’t listen to a thing anybody says.”

            He and Hatos came up with Let’s Make a Deal in 1962 but the networks weren’t interested.  Monty took the concept to civic clubs.  Instead of boxes and doors to hide prizes which couldn’t be brought into a hotel ballroom, Monty used envelopes that either contained a card with a nice prize or a “zonk,” one of the gag prizes.        

“We knew we had the right concept because these businessmen were having a blast playing the game,” he told me.  “It was all based on gambling, taking a risk on a sure thing or going all or nothing.”

            The production partners finally convinced an NBC executive to go along to one of their Rotary extravaganzas.  That was enough to earn them development money to flesh out the concept in a large rehearsal hall.

            “The ratings weren’t terribly good in the first nine months,” Monty said.  “We were on opposite Password, which was the biggest hit game show on daytime TV at the time.  So, NBC moved us to 1:30.  We started gaining audience and eventually became the first show to pass As the World Turns in the ratings.”

             He had to cope with some unexpected occurrences during the first 18 months of the show.  Let’s Make a Deal was television’s first show in which winning female contestants grabbed the host for what, at times, were physically-threatening hugs.  One woman accidentally pushed Monty down the stairs of the NBC Burbank studio.  He suffered torn cartilage from the joy and merriment.

He missed three weeks of the show because of injuries suffered in an auto accident.  Bill Leyden, who hosted Hall’s Your First Impression, subbed.

Monty did not like one insertion NBC placed in the show near the end of the first 39 weeks.  With early ratings stagnant, the network opted to do a week of shows with celebrities playing for studio audience members and home viewers.  The segments fell flat.  “Let’s Make a Deal is not a show about celebrities.  It’s a show about average people from all over the country,” he said.

Until Let’s Make a Deal, NBC had not aired a 1:30 p.m. show since the Chicago-based Club 60 in the mid-1950s.  The ratings gradually climbed and Monty as America’s top trader presided over the linchpin show in the NBC daytime lineup.

 A nighttime version of Let’s Make a Deal in the spring and summer of 1967 rose to number four in the ratings, beating both The FBI and The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights.  Monty thought it was a sure thing to return in January as a midseason replacement at night.

            “You know what I was told?  I was told by an NBC executive, ‘Oh, we don’t schedule a show like yours during the regular season.  You may have done well in the summer but we think a show like that is beneath us to put on in the fall and winter.’  That was the first shot that led to us going to ABC,” Monty said.

            In 1968, the show switched networks.  The time slot was the same.  One of the few changes was a reduction in the number of traders on the floor from 42 to 31.  Otherwise, everything stayed the same.  

NBC clearly miscalculated the power of Deal.  Within six months, the entire ABC daytime lineup—especially afternoons—enjoyed ratings increases while NBC’s schedule declined.  Opposite Deal on ABC, NBC tried everything from soap opera Hidden Faces, Words and Music, Joe Garagiola’s Memory Game, Life with Linkletter, and Leyden’s final game show before his death, You’re Putting Me On.  Nothing worked.

         Let’s Make a Deal received the coveted nighttime slot, which continued for three years.  Its most successful slot was during two years on Saturdays at 7:30, where it formed a one-hour block with The Newlywed Game leading into The Lawrence Welk Show.  When ABC dropped the evening version in 1971, Monty went into nighttime syndication with a twice weekly Deal.

            After 14 years of big deals and boxes of Creamettes, the original Let’s Make a Deal finally came to an end.  The show returned in syndicated versions in 1980-81 and 1984-86.  Remakes in 1990 and 2002 on NBC failed in no small part because Monty felt he was too old to host the show.  Younger emcees bombed.

In the process, the Hatos-Hall company became a game show factory.   As packagers, their most successful entry was one of television’s fastest-moving quiz shows, Split Second, which ran from 1972 to 1975 on ABC and should have lasted much longer.  Cancellation was a huge disappointment for Monty.

“It broke my heart when ABC canceled that show,” Monty said.  “Our lead-in show had been doing poorly for more than a year.  We always picked up audience and stations wanted Split Second for a nighttime version.  ABC wouldn’t give us the right to do it and then they let us go.  I always felt like they threw the baby out with the bath water because they had a new executive who came in and wanted to remake daytime.”

            Monty could erupt over what he felt was unfair reporting.  When Cleveland Amory reviewed the nighttime version of Let’s Make a Deal in TV Guide in 1970, Amory largely lampooned and trashed the show.  Monty saw Amory at a Los Angeles Kings hockey game and went through the review point by point.

The first time I interviewed Monty, he told me the story of his beef with the debut issue of People magazine.  A writer profiled him and the long success of Let’s Make a Deal.  Two words in the story ruined the piece for Monty.

“The writer was detailing how I was picked to substitute for Jack Barry on Twenty-One in 1958, just a few months before the quiz scandals broke,” Monty said.  “He wrote this:  ‘Hall had no knowledge of the rigging of the show, he claims.’  When I saw those words ‘he claims,’ I saw red.  I called my lawyer and I wanted to sue them.  He told me to forget it.  He said, ‘All of your fans know you didn’t have anything to do with it.  Besides, you’d spend more money taking them to court than you’d get out of them.’  So, I let it go….but it still irritated me for months.”

One subject he never wanted to revisit was the 2003 NBC revival of Let’s Make a Deal in prime time.   He licensed the format to the network on which the game originally aired.  A decision was made to periodically bring Monty back to do a classic deal with contestants from the ’60s and ’70s version of the show.  

The first 10 minutes of the show convinced Monty he had made a big mistake.  Billy Bush, who was an up and coming NBC personality, was given the keys to the car as host but appeared to be hopelessly miscast.  The producers from the syndicated show Blind Date were brought in to run the show.  Obviously, they had a mindset to turn Let’s Make a Deal into the same kind of vulgarity they dished out on late night syndication.  The opening deal—which was an outright copy of a segment from a cable game Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush—was as close to an X-rated segment as possible on network television.  People who gathered with their children to watch the show at 7:00 in the Central and Mountain time zones were horrified.  Nielsen bore out that reaction.  Between the first 15 minutes and the final quarter hour, the audience tuned out by more than half.  This was not the Let’s Make a Deal they were expecting, nor the one Monty thought he had licensed.  As one reviewer wrote, “You could hear the sounds all over the country of people saying, ‘There’s another one gone bad.'”

                I called Monty the day after the premiere.  He did not want to talk about it.  Finally, a couple of years later, he told me:  “I hope we can bring back Let’s Make a Deal eventually—-but I’m never going to let anyone else do to my baby what those guys did at NBC.”

After the original Deal ran its course, Monty emceed a few unsuccessful shows:  It’s Anybody’s Guess, The All-New Beat the Clock and a revival of one of the best quizzes ever, Split Second.  Yet, he was one of the best businessmen in television and he knew how to close a deal with a network, not to coin a pun.

One of Monty’s favorite stories came unexpectedly in 1972.  “I’m in the office and the phone rings.  The voice said, ‘Please hold the line for Jack Benny.'” Monty said.  “I nearly fell off my chair.  I’m thinking Jack Benny!  He was one of my idols.  Why would he be calling me?  I’d never met Jack Benny.”

Benny told Monty he was a regular watcher of Let’s Make a Deal and an admirer of the emcee’s work.  “Of course, that made me feel great,” he said.   Jack then told Monty of something he detected during Deal episodes. 

“Monty, I notice you never take a closeup, unless you’re pitching to a commercial,” Benny said.  “The closeups are always on the contestants.  If you’re on camera, it’s a two-shot.  That’s the same way we’ve always done my show.  Except during the monologue, we save the closeups for the guests or the other characters because they’re the ones who need to be spotlighted.”

Said Monty:  “I can’t believe Jack Benny was actually noticing something that technical about our show.  We always put the closeups on the contestants because they’re the stars of the show and it also milks the drama when they’re trying to decide whether to risk everything.”

Jack invited Monty to lunch the following week.  Monty said, as would be the case for any of us, the day was one he would never forget.

               In 2005, I had the joy of emceeing the Game Show Congress Legends Luncheon in Glendale, Cal., at which Monty, Jack Narz and Tom Kennedy were honored.  That remains one of the greatest thrills and most surreal experiences ever for a South Georgia boy.  You never see yourself standing alongside a TV hero.  

            When CBS called in 2009 to seek a replacement for the aging Guiding Light, Stefan Hatos had long since passed away.  Monty told the network the key was finding the right emcee who understood the contestants were the stars of the show.

            After several hopefuls were auditioned and ruled out, Wayne Brady came into the picture.  Monty had seen him on Whose Line Is It Anyway?  Before the debut, Monty called me in my Union University office.

            “I had Wayne come out to my house,” Monty said.  “I told him we have three important questions to answer.  First is:  do you want to do Let’s Make a Deal?  The second is:  do you think you can do Let’s Make a Deal?  The last question is:  do I think you can do Let’s Make a Deal?”

            Brady was hired.  Eight years later, the show is still having a healthy afternoon run.  Until her death, Monty split every royalty check from CBS right down the middle with Stefan Hatos’ widow.

            Monty lost his wife Marilyn in June.  Most people who knew him did not think he would last much longer.

            I talked to him a couple of years ago and he was a bit wistful.  “Steve, the bad thing about getting old is that all my friends are dying,” he said.  I had never pondered that until I began to lose some of my long-time friends.

            He was proud of the success of his children.  Daughter Joanna is a Tony-winner for the play Into the Woods.  His other daughter Sharon was executive producer of The Good Wife on CBS and now has her own production company.  Son Richard is a long-time co-producer of The Amazing Race.

            Monty did two hour-long telephone sessions with my media students at Union.  I will never forget his key words of wisdom to them:  “Whatever you do in television, radio, or any media, always give back to your community.  Whatever success you have will be partially from your talent but also because people watch you.  Always give back.”

            He told them why giving back was important. 

“I couldn’t afford to go to college,” he said.  “One day, one of my father’s customers came into his store.  He told me, ‘Young man, you need to go to college.  I’m going to pay for your education.  I just want you to do three things in return:  one, to pay me back when you can afford to; two, keep up your grades; three, whatever you do, always remember to give back to others in your community.’  I never forgot those words.”

            The son of a Canadian butcher gave back to us over and over again.  He left us with a television classic that has appeared in six consecutive decades.  He gave millions of dollars to charities and raised millions more for children’s hospitals across the world.

            I had a chance to know Monty Hall, the man, and not just the game show host.  He was one of the nicest people I ever met and you would have liked him.  That is the simplest and highest tribute I can pay.  I think I’ll go see what’s behind Door Number 3.