obituary – Antenna http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu Responses to Media and Culture Thu, 30 Mar 2017 23:48:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5 In Memoriam: Peg Lynch and Her Records of Broadcast History http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2015/08/03/peg-lynch-and-her-records-of-broadcast-history/ http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2015/08/03/peg-lynch-and-her-records-of-broadcast-history/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2015 14:00:19 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=27741 Ethel and Albert, recently passed away at the age of 98. Her contributions to radio and early television may not be well known, but materially this forgotten show exists. ]]> Peg Lynch

Post by Lauren Bratslavsky, Illinois State University

“You’re early. There’s an episode… houseguest arrives early and I’m unprepared.” Peg Lynch’s voice trailed off as she opened the door to let me in. At the time, she was 94 and still mentally composing episode plots for the long-ago radio and television program she created, Ethel and Albert. It was a show about nothing really: a miswritten phone message, a broken light bulb, a failed dinner party, and so on. I stumbled across her show when I was poking around my university’s special collections. I read some Ethel and Albert scripts and was amused. I researched what I could about the show, but was disappointed at the overall lack of information. I learned from the archivist that Lynch was still alive. I nervously called her up and asked her some questions about what it was like to work in radio and television, especially as a woman. Lynch didn’t think it was that special, or why anyone would care about her experience in the business, but she invited me to her home to meet her. I later learned this was one of her endearing attributes – that is, inviting people to her home and treating them lovingly as long lost relatives.

I was a bit stunned to see Peg Lynch’s obituary more than a week ago in The New York Times. I knew that her health had taken a turn for the worse and that this may have been the 98-year-old woman’s last leg. What surprised me was the fact of the obituary itself, which led to obituaries in Variety, LA Times, and elsewhere. It was not that Lynch didn’t deserve the lengthy write-ups and accolades of her work in radio and television; she was long over due for such recognition. I was amazed that her little-known career was finally gaining notice. For a few years now, I’ve queried radio fans and television historians whether they’ve heard of Ethel and Albert, which gained a nation-wide audience in 1944 to 1950, then a television audience from 1950 to 1956, and back to radio until the 1970s. For some, the characters rang a bell, but very few clearly recognized the show or Peg Lynch.

NBC Ethel and Albert title card 1To be fair, there are many radio and early television programs that are obscure, and indeed unmemorable. What makes Ethel and Albert, and the later radio incarnation, The Couple Next Door, remarkable is that Peg Lynch created the show and wrote every single episode by herself and starred in both the radio and television versions. The only analog to Lynch’s creator-writer-actor career was Gertrude Berg. Berg’s career is well documented in the history books and broadcasting lore, most likely in part due to the notoriety associated with the blacklist as well as awards, as noted in her obituary. Lynch’s work, never touched by controversy or industry awards, became just one of the thousands of entries in program encyclopedias. Without mechanisms such as television syndication or lasting celebrity status, like that of Lucille Ball or Betty White, Lynch fell further into obscurity. Had it not been for an email sent by Astrid King, Lynch’s daughter, the New York Times most likely would not have picked up on the news of her passing. And then, write-ups of Peg Lynch, “a pioneering woman in broadcast entertainment,” would not have circulated as it did.

A page from Peg Lynch's scrapbook, posted to her Facebook page.

A page from Peg Lynch’s scrapbook, posted to her Facebook page.

Why is Peg Lynch’s career significant for radio and television history? While obituaries frame her as a pioneer, I think a more apt description is that she persevered in an industry that was constantly changing and predominately male. As outlined in her obituary and in far greater detail on her website, Peg started in radio as a copywriter in the early 1930s at a local, small-town radio station in Minnesota. When she asked for a raise that reflected her many responsibilities, which included such tasks as writing ad copy and a daily women’s program, she was denied. She quit and continued to work in different radio stations, making her way out of the Midwest and to New York City. All the while, she held on to her creation, Ethel and Albert, a middle-aged married couple who were known for their gentle and realistic bickering. She first pitched Ethel and Albert to NBC in 1944, who made her an offer but wanted 50/50 ownership over the rights of the show. Lynch walked way. Instead, Lynch secured a network deal around the time NBC-Blue turned into the ABC network. Someone at WJZ (NBC-Blue/ABC’s flagship station) got a hold of Lynch, offered her an evening slot and allowed her to retain full ownership. Ethel and Albert was not sponsored by one company, but rather was part of the co-op model of radio sponsorship. In 1946, Ethel and Albert was a short-lived test case for television at WRGB, GE’s experimental studio. Ethel and Albert remained on the radio until 1950, when Lynch was offered a real television opportunity: a ten-minute recurring segment on NBC’s The Kate Smith Hour. First, in 1953, NBC had Lynch turn her popular ten-minute segment into a half-hour network sitcom, sponsored by Sunbeam. Sunbeam dropped the live sitcom in favor of a different genre, the spectacular (as chronicled in Variety). CBS then picked up Ethel and Albert, sponsored by Maxwell House, as a summer replacement for December Bride in 1955 (an awkward promo for the switch over is on YouTube).

Peg-Lynch-PapersDespite decent ratings, CBS did not continue working with Lynch. I suspect this decision had something to do with I Love Lucy and CBS not wanting to have two programs featuring bickering couples, even if Ethel and Albert were far more subdued and realistic than Lucy and Desi. ABC aired Ethel and Alberts final television run, which was sponsored by Ralston Purina (Chex cereal and dog food). The show ended in 1956, at another transition moment when sitcom production moved from New York to Hollywood and from live to film. As Lynch recounted in her oral history (available through the University of Oregon’s Special Collections), there was talk of moving the show to Hollywood, but she preferred to stay on the East Coast. And really, she was tired of the weekly pressures to write new episodes while rehearsing and performing live. After television, she did some commercial work. Oddly enough, Lynch went back to radio, penning a near-copy of her original creation but under the title, The Couple Next Door for CBS Radio. Lynch had a couple more runs on the radio in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically on NBC’s Monitor and then NPR’s Earplay. With the last radio show in 1976, titled The Little Things in Life, Lynch’s long broadcast career ended.

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The story of Peg Lynch can serve as a sort of public service announcement to those of us who toil in archives and seek out broadcast history’s margins. Two points in particular come to mind: the materiality of broadcast’s forgotten histories and the active role we play in shaping the use and availability of the material record. First, echoing Laura LaPlaca’s recent Antenna post, if we focus on all that is gone (and resign to the fact of this lack), then we overlook “the broadcast archive’s extraordinarily expansive physicality.” Lynch’s creative output is indeed physically available, even if mentions and critiques of her work are largely absent from our histories. The initial radio and television broadcasts were ephemeral in the sense that they were live broadcasts, moments of popular culture that began and ended in their programmed time slots. But there is a whole swath of materiality that exists in various forms and locations. There are the paper materials that Lynch saved throughout her career: scripts, letters, and a few other paper materials. Lynch’s mother compiled news clippings, photos, and various correspondence into scrapbooks. Decades after the height of her career, Lynch received an invitation to establish an archival collection at the University of Oregon in 1969 (how and why that happened is a whole other story), so all those scripts, scrapbooks, and paperwork are open for research (and soon, there will be more).

Throughout the 1970s and well into the 2000s, the physical meetings and tape-swapping of old time radio fans sustained the memory and the audio record of Ethel and Albert and The Couple Next Door. The fan conventions seem especially crucial in the age before the internet, as in, a time before old time radio websites posted shows and interviews. The conventions, and later on, the fan websites, fostered networks of old and new fans (Lynch loved her fans and her fans loved her). Even more material records exist now that we can search databases of digitized trade publications (like this article in Radio and TV Monitor, written by Lynch about the benefits of marital bickering, that is available on Lantern). References to the production side of Ethel and Albert certainly exist in the vast NBC corporate archives. The audio tapes exist in physical form and circulate digitally on the web. And the live television program? Those exists, too. Nearly every episode was filmed on a kinescope, which Lynch owned and now safely reside at the University of Oregon.

Which brings me to my second point: As radio and television scholars, we participate in recirculating the canon as well as seeking out new examples that corroborate or challenge existing histories. Just the very act of taking an interest in a little-known program or writer can help broaden the scope of broadcast histories or refine particular stories, such as the case of a little-known woman who was among the very few people to create, write, and star in her own show. The Peg Lynch Papers at the University of Oregon had been mostly dormant since they arrived decades ago. The archivists had various priorities in their immediate purview – the limited resources in such an institution necessarily limits which donors to follow up with in their twilight years. Thus, active interest from a faculty member or a researcher can help call greater attention to little-used or little-known collections, especially those collections whose creators are still alive. Those kinescopes of every episode? Up until two years ago, those were under Lynch’s couch and in cabinets in her home. After my first visit to Lynch’s home, I told the archivists about my visit, including the films and the fact that Lynch was still relatively lucid and had stories to tell. I’m sure that those kinescopes, as well as more papers, audio tapes, and ephemera would have made it to Oregon, thus joining the rest of Lynch’s collection. But the oral history? The personal relationships? The chance to participate in a collective nudge to ensure the preservation of a so-called ephemeral broadcast history? That probably would not have happened without some active participation and good old phone calls.

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We can celebrate all that has survived, while prodding to discover what else exists. And we can continue to draw from the canon, while interrogating the wealth of materials that exists in the hopes of broadening and refining our histories. So long, Peg.

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Missionary for the Movies: Remembering Roger Ebert http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/04/08/missionary-for-the-movies-remembering-roger-ebert/ http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/04/08/missionary-for-the-movies-remembering-roger-ebert/#comments Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:30:27 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=19468 EbertAntennaDuring the late twentieth century, there were four primary platforms for American film criticism. There was the popular press, all the daily newspapers and weekly mass-circulation magazines. There was the trade press, principally Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. There were the specialized cinephile magazines, from The Velvet Light Trap up to Film Comment and Cineaste. And there were the academic journals, principally Film Quarterly and Cinema Journal.

These were very distinct realms, often harboring mutual hostility. The daily and weekly reviewers gibed at the professors, while academics looked down their noses at nearly all mass-market critics. Andrew Sarris got a pass, chiefly because he had influenced so many film teachers, but I remember being embarrassed at faculty parties when people outside film asked me what I thought of Pauline Kael’s latest review. I never read her, and nobody I respected did either.

The burst of TV review shows in the late 1970s, launched by the success of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s Sneak Previews, only intensified things. Siskel and Ebert realized that audiences had a keen appetite for clips—not the glimpses we get in trailers, but somewhat longer bits that would give us the flavor of a new release. But the film professoriat deplored the three-minute reviews, the shorthand judgments (thumbs up, thumbs down), and the plethora of clips. It seemed to us that the skinny guy and the fat guy, regardless of whether they recommended the movie or not, were functioning as part of the publicity for the film. The rise of movie review programs seemed to be in sync with 1970s strategies of saturation booking, shock-and-awe TV ads, and a general sense that each weekend’s releases were obligatory pop-culture events. Movie criticism was becoming an extension of the industry. The drift toward reviewing as infotainment was even clearer when Premiere emerged in the 1980s and Entertainment Weekly in the 1990s.

Roger Ebert was a regional critic who wrote occasionally for slick magazines; his Esquire profiles of Lee Marvin and Robert Mitchum have become classics of fly-on-the-wall New Journalism. The TV show made him a national figure, but I think it only reaffirmed academic indifference to him and to journalistic criticism generally.

We were too smug. Even if the show did promote Hollywood for 90% or so of its running time, it created an occasion for Siskel and Ebert to point out worthy smaller films. Now that Roger’s death has opened a flood of reminiscence from across the country, it’s obvious that the show helped cultivate a variety of tastes. For thousands of children and teenagers, Siskel and Ebert opened a door to kinds of cinema that was not part of their ordinary life. And as VHS and cable television expanded, viewers in Dayton or Fond du Lac could catch up with what the pair had talked about. Siskel and Ebert made cinephilia of all kinds respectable.

For me, Ebert was the man to watch. He was the designated film geek, while Siskel was a stand-in for the divorced dad looking for a movie to take his kid or his date to. Ebert could praise studio tentpole items and self-consciously serious art movies but he didn’t stint genre films, offbeat items, and independent fare. He practiced what Matt Zoller Seitz has called “silver linings” criticism: If something was good of its kind, give it the benefit of the doubt. He was closer than most mass-market critics to Cahiers du cinema’s “criticism of enthusiasm,” the idea that one should write only about the films one admires. It’s significant that just before his death, his blog posted the news that he’d still be writing, but “I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.”

As I came to know Roger in the early 2000s, I realized that the TV Ebert showed only one side of him. He did have the newspaperman’s love of the punchy lede and the rapid retort, skills on display in his banter with Siskel. But he was also an all-around intellectual in a way that few film critics have ever been.

He read widely in politics and science. An English literature major, he knew Dickens and Shaw intimately. The appreciative essays collected in the Great Movies volumes show a wide and deep knowledge of the arts. In public forums, he defended evolutionary theory and the prospect of living without a god to worship. Ever refusing the demarcation between high culture and low, he loved Simenon as well as Shakespeare, and he was proud of having written the script for Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He had a wicked sense of humor too, as can be confirmed by his submissions to the New Yorker cartoon caption contest.

Roger was a journalist through and through, but he could have been quite comfortable in university teaching. He taught a famous night class at the University of Chicago, while maintaining a breathless schedule of writing and travel. For decades he conducted sessions of close analysis at festivals and conferences, even on cruise ships. “Democracy in the Dark,” he called these encounters. He would screen a film once all the way through, and then replay it on laserdisc, inviting anyone in the audience to call out, “Stop!” and then let everyone discuss what was happening. Sometimes the audience would spend days with a movie. People loved the chance to share a communal experience of coming to know a film intimately.

That sense of communal participation was magnified by his online activities. Ever eager to communicate with anybody, he embraced the Internet faster than any other critic, and his zeal for Facebook and Twitter became legendary. He got thousands of comments, and he replied to an astonishing number of them.

Roger visited Madison twice for our local festival, and I saw his teaching abilities at full stretch. In 2003 we screened A Hard Day’s Night at the Orpheum Theatre. The vast picture palace was packed, and Roger’s introduction was greeted with nearly as many whoops and claps as the movie itself. In 2006 he returned to do Q & A on Laura, another of the nominees in his Great Movies pantheon. During the same visit he sat down with our graduate students and discussed cinema with them. I saw then that Roger was an educator, but one without a theory to peddle. He was a straightforward, kindly person with an unbiased intelligence. He was as interested in people as in ideas.

Contrary to what you might have expected, I’m not going to suggest that Roger bridged the gaps among the different film cultures. Those gaps remain, even in the age of the Web. But without being an academic, or an industry insider, or a specialized cinephile, he made a great many people think seriously about film as an art.

Roger showed that popular film criticism could be an intellectually honorable enterprise—more than that, a calling. We have, I think he would have said, enough missionaries for this or that divinity. We need more missionaries for movies.

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In Memoriam: Joe Simon, Co-Creator of Captain America http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2011/12/16/in-memoriam-joe-simon-co-creator-of-captain-america/ Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:17:02 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=11589 Comic book writer and artist Joe Simon passed away Wednesday after a more-than-respectable 98 years on earth. His death comes only a week after the passing of 89-year-old Jerry Robinson, creator of the Joker and artist on many foundational Batman tales. Like most media industries, the comic book is a 20th century phenomenon, and scholars of the past few decades have counted themselves lucky to interact with many of the founders of the medium, an accessibility modern scholars in other humanities fields would envy. With the passing of Simon and Robinson, however, precious few influential players from the Golden Age of American comic books remain, and scholars and journalists will soon become the sole caretakers of the medium’s history.

Joe Simon may not have the name recognition of his collaborator of more than a decade, Jack Kirby, or his protégée, Stan Lee, but his impact on the comic book medium was profound. His best-known creation, Captain America, came about in late 1940, when he and Kirby published the first story about the star-spangled hero, his fist iconically smashing into the face of Adolf Hitler on the cover. Simon in interviews was always unapologetic about the comic’s political content. As quoted in Bradford W. Wright’s Comic Book Nation, Simon explained that “The opponents of the war were all quite well organized. We wanted to have our say too.” He “felt very good about making a political statement…and taking a stand.” But a year before Pearl Harbor, with isolationists and Nazi sympathizers still very present among the American populace, not everyone was prepared for such an in-your-face anti-Nazi statement from two Jewish-American creators. Noted Simon, “When the first issue came out we got a lot of… threatening letters and hate mail. Some people really opposed what Cap stood for.” (1)

Though Simon and Kirby left Captain America after only ten issues, their work together would continue to have an impact. While Simon served as the first editor of Timely Comics, the company that later became Marvel, he and Kirby also did work for competitor National Comics (later DC), creating characters such as the Sandman and the Newsboy Legion. After serving in World War II, Simon and Kirby would move on to other comic book genres, including horror comics, western comics, and romance comics, a genre they essentially invented with the publication of Young Romance in 1947. Their partnership came to a close in 1955, as the comic book industry began to crumble in the face of slumping sales and the moral panic about the effect of comics on juvenile delinquency incited by Fredric Wertham and his Seduction of the Innocent. Kirby stayed in comics, going on to collaborate famously with writer Stan Lee and create most of the early Marvel Comics heroes, while Simon moved on to commercial art, returning to the medium only periodically.

Yet Simon’s legacy in the comic book industry still resonates. He was one of the first people in the industry to fight for the rights of creators to own their work, at a time when the late Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gave up the rights to Superman for a paltry sum while its corporate owners made millions. It’s a battle that still rages on today, as comic book writers and artists on superhero projects continue to labor, un-unionized, under work-for-hire agreements that give the companies total control of any new characters they might dream up. Simon was also the one to give the first comic book writing opportunities to Stan Lee, by far the most recognizable face of the American comic book industry and one of the few surviving Golden Age greats. Joe Simon’s two biographies, The Comic Makers and the more recent Joe Simon: My Life in Comics, provide fascinating glimpses into the history of the industry and fantastic resources for scholars. He continued to participate in the comic book world well into his twilight years, attending conventions and granting interviews to scholars and journalists (particularly around the “Death of Captain America” storyline of 2007). He even lived to see last summer’s Captain America: The First Avenger, a movie set in the early 1940s of his own youth and modeled on his and Kirby’s original first issue, make millions at the box office.

In the spring of 2008, I attended the New York Comic-Con, still riding high from the completion of my 100-page undergrad senior thesis on “The Cultural Work of Captain America.” Wandering Artists Alley, where creators sit behind tables to chat with fans, sell their work, and sign comics, I spotted Joe Simon sitting quietly, his table somehow lacking a line of fans despite his stature in the industry. I remember shaking with nerves as I approached his table, holding out a recent Captain America comic for him to sign (his own work, sadly, being far too rare and expensive for me to own). As he wrote his name in big, blocky letters on my book, I thanked him for his contributions, and explained the work I’d done on my senior thesis. His handler had to repeat my words at a louder volume to compensate for the elderly man’s poor hearing, but Simon grinned broadly and shook my hand, thanking me for taking the time to analyze his work in that way. As a comic book fan and a budding comic book scholar, that moment remains seared in my memory, the high point of my fandom and my scholarship so far. I am immensely thankful that I had the opportunity to thank the person who inspired my academic work with his texts, and I regret that the next generation of comic book scholars will be deprived of that chance.

(1) Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. p. 36.

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Being Gary Coleman http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2010/05/30/being-gary-coleman/ http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2010/05/30/being-gary-coleman/#comments Sun, 30 May 2010 20:00:00 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=4397 In the past year, we’ve seen a number of “former child star” narratives play out in very different tragic ways.  Last June, of course, we mourned Michael Jackson, who spent his adult life trying to recreate the carefree youth his early stardom and abusive father never allowed him to have.  In March, Corey Haim died of pneumonia (and not the overdose everyone had suspected), after decades of drug abuse that overrode the talent he’d shown at a very early age.  And Friday, Gary Coleman passed away after what appeared to be, by most accounts, an incredibly difficult 42 years, many of which were spent in an unsuccessful attempt to stay out of the spotlight and live as normal a life as humanly possible.

Unlike many of his child-star brethren, including his Diff’rent Strokes TV siblings, Gary Coleman never had substance abuse issues that derailed his career.  This did not mean, though, that he quietly assimilated back into the real world after Diff’rent Strokes went off the air in 1986.  Every few years, it seemed, Coleman re-emerged with a new sad story—whether it was suing his parents and former manager for mishandling his trust fund in 1989, declaring bankruptcy a decade later, his tumultuous marriage to a woman 18 years his junior, or even the series of commercials he did for shady payday loan firm CashCall in 2008, where Coleman claimed that not even his own relatives would lend him money (but CashCall would!).  Every time we saw him, it seemed, we were fundamentally re-reminded of how hard it must be to actually be Gary Coleman—a sentiment encapsulated in the Avenue Q song sung by the (fictional) Coleman, “It Sucks to Be Me.”

It’s impossible for most of us to imagine what life must be like as a 13-year-old with two TV series, a merchandising deal, and a weekly paycheck larger than most adults’ annual salary.  It’s equally difficult to imagine what happens when that 13-year-old becomes a 20-year-old with limited job prospects and parents who have liberally helped themselves to your trust fund.  But imagine navigating this transition while being 4’7, needing daily dialysis, and having one of the most quotable catchphrases of all time.  It’s no wonder that Gary Coleman appeared to be an angry, cynical man in so many of his recent media appearances.  Coleman stormed off the set of The Surreal Life in 2004, for example, when Vanilla Ice held him over a deep fryer after Coleman refused to ask Todd Bridges what he was “talkin’ bout”—a request he probably heard every time he left his house.

Gary Coleman’s biggest problem was that he could never stop being Gary Coleman.  Some child stars can just slip away, re-enter the non-Hollywood world, and grow up quietly.  Apparently, VICI from Small Wonder is now a nurse in Colorado, and Sixteen Candles heartthrob Jake Ryan makes furniture in small-town Pennsylvania.  Both of them can almost certainly buy groceries without anyone talking in a robot voice or asking about Molly Ringwald’s underwear.  But that was a luxury Gary Coleman probably never had, and it’s one that almost certainly wore on him.  Part of the problem is that he was aesthetically distinctive; part of the problem, though, was that, for about a decade, he really entertained people—and he stuck with us, even though his career may not have.

Coleman became a laughingstock through no fault of his own.  He was funny in 1983, he was out of work by 1993, and the “joke” seemed to be that Hollywood didn’t let him continue his career into adulthood.  In my own dissertation, I chronicle the woes of the Diff’rent Strokes kids, and lump Gary Coleman’s string of bad luck and moderately poor choices in with Dana Plato’s overdose and Todd Bridges’s miles-long police record, which is ultimately unfair to him.  Gary Coleman’s real tragedy is that, really, he did was he was supposed to.  For almost a decade, he did his job well—and because of that, it became impossible for him to do anything else.  It’s a shame he didn’t have more time to reinvent himself, and to rediscover the dignity he had, by all means, rightfully earned.

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