Good evening, 919 Gang. Chuck Boyd
mentions the “Copper Clapper Caper.” If you are not familiar with that, please
follow the link Steve Casey provided last night. I think you will enjoy it.
https://tinyurl.com/yxtxbwez
CHUCK BOYD writes:
Seeing the Copper Clapper Caper
again, reminded me of 1973 when I was the Promotions Director with the Southern
California Visitors Council and the 1973 Oil crisis hit!
https://tinyurl.com/yxq3c7yn
We advertised
and promoted travel to the 14 counties and continued the work started 50 years
earlier when the ALL-YEAR CLUB had been formed.
There was
plenty of tourism activity during the winter but not so much for the rest of
the year.
Because the bulk of our visitors
drove or flew long distances to come to sunny California, the Oil Crisis of
1973 had a major impact and visitor counts plummeted.
I was then tasked with writing
Public Service Announcements (PSAs) encouraging locals to get out
and enjoy the many attractions available "in their own backyard."
My PSAs
stated that millions of people travel thousands of miles to enjoy what they had
close at hand when gasoline became scarce.
The SCVC had important people on
its board and, through them, I was able to get a variety of celebrities to
record these timely messages that then were sent to the statewide media. They
got a LOT of play!
On one, Ed
McMahon ad-libbed a quip:"If you can't come here, send money!"
One of my favorites was me sitting
in the control booth and producing a 60-second radio tape with Jack Webb.
Impatient, he read my script and
looked up at me in the booth. I spoke into the mic and said "Mr. Webb, one
more please and can you speak a little quicker."
He gave me one more reading, pushed
his chair back, and said "That's it, kid." We sent out the first
take.
A year later, the Council honored
Webb and Johnny Carson for their brilliant ongoing promotion of Southern
California.
Chuck Boyd (left) and Jack Webb
CARL
LARSEN
writes:
”Dragnet was a lie.”
The story you’re about to read is true. The
names have been kept to intimidate the innocent.
I, too, was enthralled as a boy by “Dragnet“
(the TV versions) and by Broderick Crawford in “Highway Patrol” (the only CHP
officer I’ve ever seen wearing a suit on duty.), later to be followed by
“CHiPS.”
And there were inspectors Guthrie and Grebb in
the on-location “San Francisco Beat” to be followed by Karl Malden and Michael
Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco.” And I nearly forgot “Manhunt“
starring Victor Jory, set right here in America’s Finest City.
My view back then of cops in California was one
of incorruptible, valiant good guys (they were all men) fighting to protect
society from evil doers using the latest scientific methods.
For me, this was refreshing, because you have
to understand I was watching this from Chicago where most people always had a
$20 bill folded under their driver’s license in case you were pulled over.
Then came Babbling Burglar Richard
Morrison, who upset the cart when he told investigators after he was caught
that he had pulled off numerous jobs with the help of eight Chicago PD
officers.
“The burglaries were audacious. The corruption
profound, the fallout enormous,“ wrote The Chicago Tribune.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley The First had to do
something, so he removed the police commissioner and brought in mild-mannered
criminologist, O. W. Wilson, a professor from Cal Berkeley.
My California vision of progressive law
enforcement, I thought, was about to unfold in the Windy City.
All I remember about Wilson is that police
cruisers overnight changed from black to blue and white. And then in 1968 came
the Chicago Police Riot at the Democratic Convention.
But there was a bigger problem. Back then,
you’d have to do a lot of channel surfing to find any portrayal of Blacks,
Latinos and Asians as law enforcers in any of these California police
procedural series.
So let’s get to the dark side of
“Dragnet,“ using a story from The Atlantic from a few years back headlined “The
Dragnet Effect: How TV Has Obscured Police Brutality.” It could have been
written yesterday.
“The idealized image of the Los Angeles Police
Department that the series portrayed, of a thoroughly modern agency
dispassionately dispensing justice, is sharply at odds with the historical
reality of an imperfect force beset by racism, brutality and decades of
scandals.”
Make of the critical 2015 story what
you will, but it offers a chilling forecast to our national upheaval playing
out today in cities from San Clemente to Louisville to Rochester.
Hold on to your memories of these shows, which
were so influential, because the days of the police procedurals we’ve grown up
with are numbered.
Already, the popular “Cops” has been sidelined.
And I assure you the formulaic story-telling of ratings leaders “Dateline”, “48
Hours” and “20/20” are all going to change in order to survive.
----------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID
FARMER writes:
I
heard a British man in a radio news story, and he spoke with a strong regional
accent. I was surprised because I assumed that accents in the UK had been
homogenized by movies, TV, radio and popular music. (I noticed long ago that
male singers from the UK often sounded American.)
But
in daily life, British accents are all over the map, so to speak. However,
there's a remedy for those who want to talk like Upstairs, not Downstairs. The
lowborn who are blessed with the time and money can try to acquire Standard
English.
Standard
English, also called Received English or BBC English, is the mode of speaking
that's regarded as the "right way." People who go to Oxford or
Cambridge probably sound like that, with every letter burnished to perfection.
Standard, Received, or BBC English encompasses spelling,
grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.
I've
read that British children sometimes speak Standard English at school and, for
example, scouse* at home. It's almost as if the kids are studying English as a
foreign language. They need the "good" kind so they'll sound educated
after they graduate.
There
must be hundreds of accents in the UK, as they have more than 40 dialects. A
dialect is a variant form of a language, and pronunciations (accents) can vary
within them.
*Scouse
sounds like some exotic fish dish such as Finnan Haddie. Not so. Scouse (rhymes
with house) is the variety of English spoken in the cradle of the Beatles,
Liverpool. (I would have thought it would be called Liverpudlian.) The Beatles,
when they were just getting started, spoke pure scouse. It didn't entirely rub
off during their careers.
And
speaking of the Fab Four, I had long been puzzled why writers transcribed the
word "love" as "luv" when a Beatle said it. I finally
realized that this was an effort to capture how John, Paul, Ringo or George
actually pronounced the word. They didn't make it rhyme with "glove."
More like looove, with a sound midway between "uh" or
"ooo."
I
hope that helps, luv."
---------------------------------------------------------------
CARL
LARSEN
forwards:
Daughter of Papa Doug Manchester, former U-T
publisher, dies suddenly at age 50.
https://tinyurl.com/y25jfbd7
REBER: Her obit ran in the U-T Sunday, and it might the larges the U-T has
ever published. It filled half a page and had a very large photo of the
daughter. I suspect Doug Manchester paid for the obit. Quite possibly the best
thing he ever did for the U-T.
----------------------------------------------------------------
LEE
GRANT writes:
Speaking of editing, it’s Hindenburg not
Hindenberg.
REBER:
I could have eluded the problem if I had clipped the Hindenburg reference from
the post. The headline in question had nothing to do with the Hindenburg
disaster. It was about hydrogen as a fuel, and that is an industry that may
very well explode. Hydrogen is a totally clean fuel and can be used in internal
combustion engines. When it is consumed, it produces water, not exhaust smoke. The
hydrogen is pulled from natural gas and various petroleum products. So hang on
to any stock you own in a traditional petroleum company, but put your big bucks
into companies which will market hydrogen.
--------------------------------------------------------------
REBER: Tonight
we send warm Happy Birthday wishes to Logan McKechnie for Sept. 29.
Jack J. Reber
P.O.
Box 2239
Ramona,
CA 92065-0938
United
States
