Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Saturday, February 3, 2024
Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift
Friday, September 16, 2022
Saturday, September 16, 1972. Premier of the Bob Newhart Show.
The Bob Newhart Show premiered on CBS. One of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, it would run only until 1978.
I'm actually fairly surprised, as I well recall the show and would have thought that it premiered a little later than 1972. Having said that it has always, in my memory, seemed very early and mid 1970s, not late 1970s. My family watched it regularly.
The show was set in Chicago at a time just after the television Rural Purge which would feature a lot of television comedies set in mid-sized Midwestern cities. WKRP In Cincinnati, for example, was set, obviously, in Cincinnati. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis.
Earlier that same week, on September 14, the nostalgic The Waltons commenced airing. While fondly remembered, I never liked it. I really dislike Spencer's Mountain, which is based on the same source material.
We didn't watch The Waltons, but even back then I had the feeling I ought to like it. I never did and never have. It always, even in the 1970s, had the feel of a show filmed in the 1970s, with the look of the 1970s, trying to be about the 1930s. It ran until 1981. Additionally, the set and the fact that it was tapped made it impossible to suspend awareness that you were, in fact, watching it in the 1970s.
The show was unusual in that it had a rural setting at a time in which most television shows did not. It was also unusual in that it presented a very clean, romanticized, look at the Great Depression, something that was well within living memory of many of the viewers. In this fashion, it contrasted with the earlier Spencer's Mountain, which was centered on desperation. Both were based on the work of Earl Hamner Jr. who had grown up in Depression era Virginia. Hamner died in 2016 at the age of 92.
FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt reviewed a draft of Bob Woodward's news story on Watergate by telephone and confirmed an anonymous tip that money from Maurice Stans had been used to finance the break in of the Watergate Hotel. Felt did so undercover, using the odd and somewhat perverted cover name Deep Throat.
Monday, October 25, 2021
Monday October 25, 1971. The Recognition of the People's Republic of China, The Electric Company and The Rural Purge
Chiang Kai-Shek was still living at the time and officially the Republic of China sought reunification with the mainland with it as the Chinese government. In reunification, they were aligned in principle with the People's Republic of China, but only on that point. The PRC saw reunification under their banner, not the Nationalist one. As a practical matter, the U.S. Navy had precluded that from occurring following the 1948 retreat of the Nationalist to Taiwan.
The US had been a major factor in the hold out in according the PRC recognition at the UN. While the US, tired of Chiang Kai-Shek following the Second World War, and despairing of his abilities to force a successful conclusion to the Chinese Civil War, had chosen to slowly decrease its involvement with the Nationalist Chinese efforts following the war, was nonetheless shocked by the sudden collapse of the Nationalist Army in 1948. This had caused Congress, which hadn't been taking a huge interest in the Nationalist's plight, to suddenly focus on China with the "who lost China?" query becoming a tag line for conservatives. Moreover, the Chinese Red Army's recovery from eons of civil war and World War Two was evident when it intervened in the Korean War (using some formations that had been Nationalist ones earlier). A widespread assumption that the PRC danced to Moscow's tune ramped up the concern, although PRC government was plenty repressive and scary in its own right without, as it turned out, much influence from the Soviet Union.
Be that as it may, the relucatance of the US to recognize Red China as the Chinese government had reached the fairly absurd level by the mid 1960s. It was clear that the Nationalist were not capable of jumping the Straits of Taiwan and taking on the Chinese Red Army. And as the most populous nation in the world, recognition of it was overdue. This didn't, of course, accord it American recognition, but that would be on the near term horizon.
Taiwan since has developed into a parliamentary democracy and the current ruling party has an official policy of independence. Taiwan functions as a putative state, although it still is not recognized as a sovereign by anyone anymore, and it has not declared independence, that being too risky given its massive aggressive neighbor that still claims Taiwan as its own. It's now likely the longest running unrecognized state in the world, and its odd status is such that it functions as a country in everything but name. Tensions with Red China, of course, have been very much in the news recently.
From the outstanding Uncle Mike's Musings, we also learned that this is the day when PBS's Electronic Company premiered. As he states there:
October 25, 1971, 50 years ago: The Electric Company premieres on PBS. A companion piece to Sesame Street, it is geared toward kids a little older who were, by then, learning to read. As the closing tagline say, it is produced by the same production company: "The Electric Company gets its power from The Children's Television Workshop."
The show had a truly remarkable cast, which I had not realized until I read the entry.
The odd thing about this for me is to realize how little I participated in this sort of television from the era. I was just a kid when this came out, but I don't recall ever watching it. That might be because, like a lot of other television from the early 1970s, it seemed so very urban. I suppose it was all part of the "Rural Purge" of television that took place in the early 1970s.