The image accompanying
this post comes from the 1980 film adaptation of Ms. Guest’s Ordinary People. Judd Hirsch plays a compassionate psychiatrist and Timothy Hutton is his
patient, a teenager who exemplifies the courage that the novelist pays tribute
to: finding a way to come to terms with the tragedy that threatens to consume
his family.
Relieved that the heat and humidity from earlier in
the week had dissipated with the thunderstorm from the night before, I was
among the residents who roamed around this stretch. I took this photo not long
before twilight.
The image accompanying
this post, showing Sheryl Lee Ralph at the pre-Oscar party held by Black
Enterprise, was taken Feb. 23, 2008, by eternalconceptspr.
Dr. Robert “Bob” Hartley [played
by Bob Newhart]: “You want me to beat him up?”— The
Bob Newhart Show, Season 2, Episode 17, “The Modernization of Emily,” original air date Jan 12, 1974, teleplay by Charlotte
Brown, directed by Peter Baldwin
In the Seventies, my two favorite sitcoms were All
in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Whenever I happened to
watch their later mainstay in CBS’ Saturday night lineup, The Bob Newhart
Show, I would chuckle but not guffaw, as I did with its two powerhouse lead-ins.
Since then, I have gone back and watched episodes of
this six-season series, and its gentle, understated tone has worn well with
time, reflecting the sure comic instincts of its star.
After six nominations, Bob Newhart finally won
an Emmy Award, at age 84, with his hilarious guest appearance as “Professor Proton,”
a former science TV show host turned children's party entertainer, on The
Big Bang Theory.
The entertainment industry lost one of its greats
yesterday with the passing of Newhart. His comic style— deadpan, mild-mannered,
without an ounce of meanness—reflected, by all accounts, the personality of
this beloved star.
I took the image accompanying this post at a night game at Yankee Stadium in late August 2014. That season, the Bronx Bombers finished second in the American League East, with their worst record since 1992.
But fans like me came out that night because we knew this would be one of our final opportunities to see “The Captain,” Derek Jeter, in the last of his 20 seasons as a Hall of Famer with the Yankees.
Professional sports have grown even more “commercially exploitative” in the half-century since Roger Angell wrote the above. The miracle is that they still retain such a powerful hold on their fan base.
It just goes to show that, in its imperviousness to reason, rooting for one’s favorite team is a form of faith. With baseball resuming following the All-Star break, teams still in the hunt for the postseason hope to reward those fans in their staunch belief.
For delegates at conventions, I imagine that Wilfrid
Sheed’s description here still captures the giddy feeling of getting together
with others of your tribe cheering for a candidate. But so much else has
changed, for both attendees and television viewers.
Sheed didn’t know it back in 1973, but the central notion of
conventions for the 140 years to that point—a quadrennial gathering in which a
party would truly decide on its nominee and running mate—was already coming to
an end.
Dismayed by the outcome of their Chicago convention in
1968, when party grandees chose a nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who had not entered
a single primary, the Democrats had instituted by 1972 new rules that made primaries the principal means of selecting nominees, and limited
delegates’ ability to back off pre-convention declarations of loyalty.
With party leaders’ role in choosing nominees vastly diminished, it would be all over but the shouting when delegates got to the convention and the TV cameras—which had aired for all the world to see the Democrats' disorder inside and outside the confab in '68—whirred once again.
That same year, the Republicans amplified their 1968
model for how conventions would be run—" a picture of a
buttoned-down organization,” headed by "law-and-order" nominee Richard Nixon, as recalled in Don Gonyea’s August 2018 NPR retrospective.
Not only would films of the candidate now be aired in
prime time, but TV networks would receive advance copies of minute-by-minute
convention-night scripts already approved by party leaders.
Conventions were now becoming extended, prime-time political commercials rather than events where party
futures were decided—marketing opportunities that reflected the experiences of
Nixon advisers H.R. Haldeman (a longtime J. Walter Thompson executive) and
Roger Ailes (whose work as the candidate’s executive producer for television was
chronicled in Joe McGinniss’ The Selling of the President 1968).
This year’s GOP convention already looks like it will follow this recent model. As for the Democrats—well, we’ll see if they remain bound by the rules they instituted a half century ago, or if they will remind viewers, after so much time, of the Will Rogers wisecrack, “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat.”
The image accompanying this post, showing the
Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, on Aug. 22, 1972, is
from the Nixon White House Photographs, 1/20/1969 - 8/9/1974 series, in
the White House Photo Office Collection (Nixon Administration), 1/20/1969 -
8/9/1974.
