Lawrence Welk Is Still On: I Don't Get It

[michael hagerty]

Supposedly, Putnam along with Jerry Dunphy, were the models for Ted Baxter. Baxter looked sort of like Dunphy but the way he talked with pure Putnam.

Before he moved to California, Putnam did a national radio news broadcast on NBC from New York. It's sort of interesting that he gave up a chance to get into network TV news for local news in LA. I wonder what the nightly news would look like today if NBC had gone with Putnam instead of John Cameron Swayze. Putnam might have beaten Doug Edwards in the ratings and there would not have been a Huntley-Brinkley. Or a Cronkite.

He was like a traffic accident. It was impossible not to look.

True. When he bolted back to KTTV, KTLA initially replaced Putnam with Stan Chambers, but after a couple of months hired conservative former LA Police Chief Tom Reddin as anchor. Reddin didn't last long - he was wooden on camera and had a high thin voice - hardly competition for the bombastic George. After Reddin's first night, the LA Times printed a political cartoon showing Reddin and Putnam tugging from both ends on the American flag. Reddin reportedly thought it was funny, and asked the Times to send him a framed original. When I saw the cartoon in the morning paper, I made sure to tune in Putnam on KTTV that night, because I figured he'd go ballistic. Predictably, he did - on his "One Reporters' Opinion" editorial segment, blasting the Times' liberal Republican publisher as a "com-symp pinko loser." Then he talked about respecting the flag, and his his voice got all thick, choked with emotion. I had an audio recording of it for years, then sadly, lost it.

The producers of the MTM show were always coy, saying Ted Baxter was an amalgam of different anchors. But the only comparison to Dunphy was the white-gray hair, which was Ted Knight's hair color. And around that time, KABC-TV had an anchor named Baxter Ward. But Ted's personality was all Putnam, and MTM herself admitted one night on Johnny Carson that Baxter was built almost entirely around Putnam's delivery and personality.

The only element of Dunphy that made it into the Ted Baxter character was the prompter-dependency. Jerry was an excellent reader as long as there were words to read. He was not an ad-libber, nor did he have a huge interest in the stories themselves. Jerry was a reader and not a reporter.

 

[The King Bee]

I've had the pleasant opportunity to teach TV and radio production as an adjunct faculty member at a local university. I always show excerpts of the Welk show through its years of production to show the evolving state of the art and science.

From the 1955 days of black-and-white kinescope and later videotape shot with 200-pound GE or Norelco camera units with fixed-focal turret lenses, through early 1980's CCD (no-tube) mini-cameras with wide-focal zoom lenses, the Welk library reflects it all. One of the things you can see in the earliest color videotapes (1965-66 season), is cast members sweating through their makeup because of the intense lighting the earliest color cameras required in the ABC Studios. You can see and hear the improvements in audio and video as the years pass to the end in the spring of 1982.

Teleklew Productions, the Welk production entity, wanted and got the best from ABC-that's one reason why the 1955-1961 kinescope shows that occasionally air, were extremely clean recordings and made better copies for the many time-delayed and secondary ABC affiliates then existing. Beginning with the 1961-62 season, the show was archived on videotape only.

There's a historical perspective on the show...

 

[LKellerIII]

Supposedly, Putnam along with Jerry Dunphy, were the models for Ted Baxter. Baxter looked sort of like Dunphy but the way he talked with pure Putnam.

Before he moved to California, Putnam did a national radio news broadcast on NBC from New York. It's sort of interesting that he gave up a chance to get into network TV news for local news in LA. I wonder what the nightly news would look like today if NBC had gone with Putnam instead of John Cameron Swayze. Putnam might have beaten Doug Edwards in the ratings and there would not have been a Huntley-Brinkley. Or a Cronkite.

He was like a traffic accident. It was impossible not to look.

True. When he bolted back to KTTV, KTLA initially replaced Putnam with Stan Chambers, but after a couple of months hired conservative former LA Police Chief Tom Reddin as anchor. Reddin didn't last long - he was wooden on camera and had a high thin voice - hardly competition for the bombastic George. After Reddin's first night, the LA Times printed a political cartoon showing Reddin and Putnam tugging from both ends on the American flag. Reddin reportedly thought it was funny, and asked the Times to send him a framed original. When I saw the cartoon in the morning paper, I made sure to tune in Putnam on KTTV that night, because I figured he'd go ballistic. Predictably, he did - on his "One Reporters' Opinion" editorial segment, blasting the Times' liberal Republican publisher as a "com-symp pinko loser." Then he talked about respecting the flag, and his his voice got all thick, choked with emotion. I had an audio recording of it for years, then sadly, lost it.

The producers of the MTM show were always coy, saying Ted Baxter was an amalgam of different anchors. But the only comparison to Dunphy was the white-gray hair, which was Ted Knight's hair color. And around that time, KABC-TV had an anchor named Baxter Ward. But Ted's personality was all Putnam, and MTM herself admitted one night on Johnny Carson that Baxter was built almost entirely around Putnam's delivery and personality.

The only element of Dunphy that made it into the Ted Baxter character was the prompter-dependency. Jerry was an excellent reader as long as there were words to read. He was not an ad-libber, nor did he have a huge interest in the stories themselves. Jerry was a reader and not a reporter.

It was long rumored in those days that Jerry Dunphy was not very bright - and that would certainly match the intellect-challenged Ted Baxter. But I never particularly bought that. Dunphy did commentaries for KNX radio, and he always came off as reasonably inteligent and well informed. Of course, I guess it's possible that somebody else wrote his commentaries, and he was merely reading...

 

[FredLeonard]

It was long rumored in those days that Jerry Dunphy was not very bright - and that would certainly match the intellect-challenged Ted Baxter. But I never particularly bought that. Dunphy did commentaries for KNX radio, and he always came off as reasonably inteligent and well informed. Of course, I guess it's possible that somebody else wrote his commentaries, and he was merely reading...

I guess it's overwhelmingly likely. Heck, even Cronkite had a writer for his radio commentaries. Of course, Uncle Walter talked with writer about which subjects interested him and how he felt about them, and Uncle Walter did have other things which kept him busy. Likely, that wasn't true for Jerry.

 

[michael hagerty]

Supposedly, Putnam along with Jerry Dunphy, were the models for Ted Baxter. Baxter looked sort of like Dunphy but the way he talked with pure Putnam.

Before he moved to California, Putnam did a national radio news broadcast on NBC from New York. It's sort of interesting that he gave up a chance to get into network TV news for local news in LA. I wonder what the nightly news would look like today if NBC had gone with Putnam instead of John Cameron Swayze. Putnam might have beaten Doug Edwards in the ratings and there would not have been a Huntley-Brinkley. Or a Cronkite.

He was like a traffic accident. It was impossible not to look.

True. When he bolted back to KTTV, KTLA initially replaced Putnam with Stan Chambers, but after a couple of months hired conservative former LA Police Chief Tom Reddin as anchor. Reddin didn't last long - he was wooden on camera and had a high thin voice - hardly competition for the bombastic George. After Reddin's first night, the LA Times printed a political cartoon showing Reddin and Putnam tugging from both ends on the American flag. Reddin reportedly thought it was funny, and asked the Times to send him a framed original. When I saw the cartoon in the morning paper, I made sure to tune in Putnam on KTTV that night, because I figured he'd go ballistic. Predictably, he did - on his "One Reporters' Opinion" editorial segment, blasting the Times' liberal Republican publisher as a "com-symp pinko loser." Then he talked about respecting the flag, and his his voice got all thick, choked with emotion. I had an audio recording of it for years, then sadly, lost it.

The producers of the MTM show were always coy, saying Ted Baxter was an amalgam of different anchors. But the only comparison to Dunphy was the white-gray hair, which was Ted Knight's hair color. And around that time, KABC-TV had an anchor named Baxter Ward. But Ted's personality was all Putnam, and MTM herself admitted one night on Johnny Carson that Baxter was built almost entirely around Putnam's delivery and personality.

The only element of Dunphy that made it into the Ted Baxter character was the prompter-dependency. Jerry was an excellent reader as long as there were words to read. He was not an ad-libber, nor did he have a huge interest in the stories themselves. Jerry was a reader and not a reporter.

It was long rumored in those days that Jerry Dunphy was not very bright - and that would certainly match the intellect-challenged Ted Baxter. But I never particularly bought that. Dunphy did commentaries for KNX radio, and he always came off as reasonably inteligent and well informed. Of course, I guess it's possible that somebody else wrote his commentaries, and he was merely reading...

I met Jerry a couple of times and worked in the same newsroom when in Los Angeles to cover stories.

A very nice man, not by any means dumb or socially inappropriate like Ted Baxter, but there are anchors who are very into the news... You see it in the newsroom off-air. Jerry was there to read.

My hunch (and I never met him) was that Putnam could hold his own in detailed conversations about the news. Ted Baxter's pomposity was Putnam. His prompter-dependency and lack of serious news chops was Dunphy. The really stupid stuff was the writers making the character funny.

 

[MikeyBos]

I was born in 1976, but grew up watching Lawrence Welk with my grandmother, and learned an appreciation of the music. We used to watch every Saturday evening together when i was a little boy.

 

[visaman]

Since we are now talking about George Putnam, I feel obligated to post this video of one of his rants, but be warned it does contain nudity (not his thank heavens ) BTW, this video is featured occasional on TCM.

Perversion for profit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgxEh-F_Cf8

 

[michael hagerty]

Since we are now talking about George Putnam, I feel obligated to post this video of one of his rants, but be warned it does contain nudity (not his thank heavens ) BTW, this video is featured occasional on TCM.

Perversion for profit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgxEh-F_Cf8

While Putnam no doubt agreed with every word of "Perversion for Profit", it was most likely written by Charles Keating, who founded and ran CDL, which produced the film. The KTTV obit will give you a better feel for what Putnam was like:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zRoF2WsFuTE

 

[FredLeonard]

Since we are now talking about George Putnam, I feel obligated to post this video of one of his rants, but be warned it does contain nudity (not his thank heavens ) BTW, this video is featured occasional on TCM.

Perversion for profit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgxEh-F_Cf8

While Putnam no doubt agreed with every word of "Perversion for Profit", it was most likely written by Charles Keating, who founded and ran CDL, which produced the film. The KTTV obit will give you a better feel for what Putnam was like:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zRoF2WsFuTE

Interesting clip. It's the mobile version of You Tube and I could not get it to play in my desktop browser. (Just take out everything before youtube in the URL and it works.)

I used to catch Putnam's radio show when I was in town and made it a point to listen when KIEV started streaming online. I even called in a few times and I really enjoyed talking with him. It was like two people having an actual phone conversation, which is rare in talk show hosts.

I usually did not agree with him but - unlike today's right-wing hosts - he was always fun to watch or listen to. And that's the hallmark of a real broadcaster.

 

[bpatrick]

Sort of my opinion of Joe Pyne, who, IIRC, also originated at KTTV.
For some reason I could never quite take him seriously, and I refuse
to believe Morton Downey Jr.'s claim that he never heard of Pyne, when
he was doing practically the same thing in the '80s.

 

[michael hagerty]

Sort of my opinion of Joe Pyne, who, IIRC, also originated at KTTV.
For some reason I could never quite take him seriously, and I refuse
to believe Morton Downey Jr.'s claim that he never heard of Pyne, when
he was doing practically the same thing in the '80s.

Mort worked for us in weekends at KOLO, Reno in the late 1970s as "Sean Downey". He was a nice, soft-spoken guy (we also had a teenager who grew up to be Hollywood Hamilton and future Premiere Radio Networks founder and KIIS-FM jock Steve Lehman on our parttime staff at the time).

On-air, Mort was a chameleon, looking for what would work. There's an aircheck on Reelradio of him at KDEO in San Diego in the 60s, puking, telling bad jokes and using way too many wild tracks and sound effects. With us, he was laid back and read bits of poetry (some his own) as record intros. And less than a decade later, he was the abrasive bordering on violent TV talk show host.

Which one was the real Mort? No clue. Maybe none of them.

He absolutely had heard of and knew who Joe Pyne was and what he did, though.

 

[bpatrick]

I've had the pleasant opportunity to teach TV and radio production as an adjunct faculty member at a local university. I always show excerpts of the Welk show through its years of production to show the evolving state of the art and science.

From the 1955 days of black-and-white kinescope and later videotape shot with 200-pound GE or Norelco camera units with fixed-focal turret lenses, through early 1980's CCD (no-tube) mini-cameras with wide-focal zoom lenses, the Welk library reflects it all. One of the things you can see in the earliest color videotapes (1965-66 season), is cast members sweating through their makeup because of the intense lighting the earliest color cameras required in the ABC Studios. You can see and hear the improvements in audio and video as the years pass to the end in the spring of 1982.

Teleklew Productions, the Welk production entity, wanted and got the best from ABC-that's one reason why the 1955-1961 kinescope shows that occasionally air, were extremely clean recordings and made better copies for the many time-delayed and secondary ABC affiliates then existing. Beginning with the 1961-62 season, the show was archived on videotape only.

There's a historical perspective on the show...

I would have guessed that those Welk shows from the '50s were filmed for the stations that aired him on delay, since they don't have the grainy, murky look usually associated with kinescope. I wonder if the Goodson-Todman shows from that era were also high-quality kinescopes; they, too, look filmed. Most interesting information.

 

[FredLeonard]

I've had the pleasant opportunity to teach TV and radio production as an adjunct faculty member at a local university. I always show excerpts of the Welk show through its years of production to show the evolving state of the art and science.

From the 1955 days of black-and-white kinescope and later videotape shot with 200-pound GE or Norelco camera units with fixed-focal turret lenses, through early 1980's CCD (no-tube) mini-cameras with wide-focal zoom lenses, the Welk library reflects it all. One of the things you can see in the earliest color videotapes (1965-66 season), is cast members sweating through their makeup because of the intense lighting the earliest color cameras required in the ABC Studios. You can see and hear the improvements in audio and video as the years pass to the end in the spring of 1982.

Teleklew Productions, the Welk production entity, wanted and got the best from ABC-that's one reason why the 1955-1961 kinescope shows that occasionally air, were extremely clean recordings and made better copies for the many time-delayed and secondary ABC affiliates then existing. Beginning with the 1961-62 season, the show was archived on videotape only.

There's a historical perspective on the show...

I would have guessed that those Welk shows from the '50s were filmed for the stations that aired him on delay, since they don't have the grainy, murky look usually associated with kinescope. I wonder if the Goodson-Todman shows from that era were also high-quality kinescopes; they, too, look filmed. Most interesting information.

It was possible to get better (or worse) quality on kinescope recordings but better quality took extra work and attention to detail from the engineers. Kinescope was the only recording method available in Welk's early seasons on network television and video tape was probably not used for sending shows to delay markets until the mid to late 60s. Markets with network access which did not take the show live would probably tape the show themselves. Not sure when the Welk show stopped being aired live.

 

[michael hagerty]

I've had the pleasant opportunity to teach TV and radio production as an adjunct faculty member at a local university. I always show excerpts of the Welk show through its years of production to show the evolving state of the art and science.

From the 1955 days of black-and-white kinescope and later videotape shot with 200-pound GE or Norelco camera units with fixed-focal turret lenses, through early 1980's CCD (no-tube) mini-cameras with wide-focal zoom lenses, the Welk library reflects it all. One of the things you can see in the earliest color videotapes (1965-66 season), is cast members sweating through their makeup because of the intense lighting the earliest color cameras required in the ABC Studios. You can see and hear the improvements in audio and video as the years pass to the end in the spring of 1982.

Teleklew Productions, the Welk production entity, wanted and got the best from ABC-that's one reason why the 1955-1961 kinescope shows that occasionally air, were extremely clean recordings and made better copies for the many time-delayed and secondary ABC affiliates then existing. Beginning with the 1961-62 season, the show was archived on videotape only.

There's a historical perspective on the show...

I would have guessed that those Welk shows from the '50s were filmed for the stations that aired him on delay, since they don't have the grainy, murky look usually associated with kinescope. I wonder if the Goodson-Todman shows from that era were also high-quality kinescopes; they, too, look filmed. Most interesting information.

It was possible to get better (or worse) quality on kinescope recordings but better quality took extra work and attention to detail from the engineers. Kinescope was the only recording method available in Welk's early seasons on network television and video tape was probably not used for sending shows to delay markets until the mid to late 60s. Markets with network access which did not take the show live would probably tape the show themselves. Not sure when the Welk show stopped being aired live.

Nope. Welk was produced on videotape beginning in 1957. Black and white until 1965, color after.

Ampex debuted videotape in April of 1956. By year's end, CBS had invested in the technology. NBC aired its first videotape production in January of 1957 and ABC shortly thereafter. Higher quality, greater convenience and lower cost than kinescopes made it an easy and rapid transition.

Welk was shot largely live-to-tape (minimal if any editing), but was not live on ABC. The first two seasons were shot on film.

Network feeds by time zone made time-shifting by stations largely irrelevant except for stations in the Mountain time zone. Central zone stations aired the Eastern feed (which is how we got "9, 8 Central"). Mountain stations that didn't invest in VTRs could either air the Eastern feed 2 hours early (a lot of towns spent the 70s watching "60 Minutes" at 5PM Sundays) or the Pacific feed an hour late.

Until satellite downlinks, Alaska and Hawaii affiliates had tapes flown to them from Los Angeles. They were aired 1-2 days late. Network entertainment shows were often simply aired a week late so network promos "Thursdays on NBC" could be used.

 

[retrothoughts]

...Network feeds by time zone made time-shifting by stations largely irrelevant except for stations in the Mountain time zone. Central zone stations aired the Eastern feed (which is how we got "9, 8 Central"). Mountain stations that didn't invest in VTRs could either air the Eastern feed 2 hours early (a lot of towns spent the 70s watching "60 Minutes" at 5PM Sundays) or the Pacific feed an hour late.

Until satellite downlinks, Alaska and Hawaii affiliates had tapes flown to them from Los Angeles. They were aired 1-2 days late. Network entertainment shows were often simply aired a week late so network promos "Thursdays on NBC" could be used.

And then, as has been noted elsewhere, there were those times back in the pre-satellite 1970s when the network-owned Los Angeles facilities would record the live feed of their evening newscasts at 3:30 pm Pacific, then fly those tapes out to Honolulu in time for the affiliates there to show them at around midnight or so Hawaii time.

 

[FredLeonard]

Until satellite downlinks, Alaska and Hawaii affiliates had tapes flown to them from Los Angeles. They were aired 1-2 days late. Network entertainment shows were often simply aired a week late so network promos "Thursdays on NBC" could be used.

Not quite. I don't know about Hawaii but shows for Alaska were taped in and flown from Seattle, then bicycled around the state. Anchorage saw them a week late. Then other towns would see them two, three or four weeks late. Ironically enough, by the late 70s and into the early 80s, Alaskans could see cable channels live but the terrestrial networks were slower to move to satellite distribution and for several years, Alaska still got network shows on delay. They did get same-day service on the evening news, as noted, but CNN could be seen live.

 

[FredLeonard]

After participating in this thread and thinking about issues raised here, I actually went and watched Lawrence Welk on public television last night. I had caught brief snippets of it channel surfing but the last time I had watched it was when it was "must see" - everybody must see - for my grandparents. At the point, I had to sit there and tried to ignore it.

Last night's show was from 1968. Mouseketeer-dancer Bobby was the wrap-around host and was heavily featured in the show. Bobby has gotten quite beefy. I guess he's not dancing much these days. The mousekegrin is unchanged.

In addition to Bobby's Mouse Club connection, the show heavily promoted the release of a then-new (and pretty bad) Disney movie, "The One and Only Original Family Band." Welk garbled the name off the cue cards a couple of times. They did several songs from the movie, which were instantly forgettable and never heard again.

The "theme" was a tributes to Welk's home states of North Dakota and South Dakota, in which the Disney film was set. They really had to stretch in the introductions to tie some of the songs into the themes.

Welk, and whoever wrote the scripts, do seem to have been really clueless about some of the songs and their lyrics. One of the songs was Woody Guthrie's "This Land." Woody was the political opposite of Welk and wrote "This Land" as his rebuttal to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America."

I had assumed even after live production ceased, that the show was produced "live on tape." It was not. The audio for the production numbers as clearly pre-recorded in studio and then lip-synced. Production numbers were done separately from the band segments (there were a couple of instant costume changes and instant re-locations of cast members). Two production number sets were used (possibly shooting numbers in each at different times).

The production sets were surprising cramped, which they tried to disguise with zoom lenses set at short focal length.

In addition to the one Black tap dancer, there was only one female musician and she was kept back and off to the side in the string section.

Cast members all wore color-coordinated and color-coded costumes using every available pastel shade. It was like the original Star Trek with color coded uniforms (command-gold, science-blue, red-dead security guard). Musicians wore orange. Women wore yellow. Welk wore blue.

During production numbers, the cast of singers and dancers really over-acted (this also seemed Shatner-esque). Male cast was generally geeky looking; female cast was presentable but not sexy.

It was amazing how the show was able to combine slick with hokey.

I can see why old people liked it back in the day. I don't see why so many kids who hated it then seem to like it now.

 

[ixnay]

Woody was the political opposite of Welk

You'd never know it from the lyrics of "This Land". But I guess a broken clock that keeps military time really is correct one second (or one minute if it lacks a second hand) once a day. Same applies to Arlo when one hears "City of New Orleans". I've gotta do some homework on Guthrie and son.

I watched a few eps of Memories with Lawrence Welk on WFMZ-69 Allentown, PA in the '82-83 season when I was attending what is now Kutztown University 20 miles from Allentown. One the eps was from 1968 (maybe the one Fred described), with announcer's intro ("The Lawrence... Welk... Showwww!" against a background of bubbles). Who was the announcer in that era?

ixnay

 

[michael hagerty]

Imdb says after 1960 and until the end, it was Bob Warren...an announcer/actor before and after his time with Welk, but who seems to have worked exclusively for Welk in his 22 years on the show.

 

[Mike Sheridan]

I've had the pleasant opportunity to teach TV and radio production as an adjunct faculty member at a local university. I always show excerpts of the Welk show through its years of production to show the evolving state of the art and science.

There's a historical perspective on the show...

This is the best post on the subject in my opinion. I have watched old TV shows and listened to old radio shows for the historical value. You really get a feel of the attitude of the times. Even in times when I was alive but much younger there are often things said or shown that really surprise me and remind me how times have changed!

I'm not a Welk fan nor am I a hater. My parents and I watched it occasionally when I was a kid. It's harmless and not violent so I wouldn't be afraid to watch it with my 5 year old granddaughter. Geeze it's only on for an hour, if you don't like it turn it off.