On three occasions, I was in the same room with him. We breathed the same air.
I have expanded an earlier post of mine from back in January 2009 that will explain:
Shall We Dance?
Some of you will recognize these couples instantly. Some of you won’t have a clue who they are. I am in the former group. On the right are Bob and Justine, and the couple below are Kenny and Arlene.
Ring any bells yet?
So now you know Who. But what about Where? And When? And perhaps most importantly, Why???
I will tell you.
Where is a television studio in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
When is 1957, 1958, 1959.
Why is two words -- American Bandstand!
I was there in the summer of 1958 all the way from Texas, visiting relatives in suburban Philadelphia. I was seventeen years old and had just graduated from high school. I was young and impressionable. Few things were more important than going to American Bandstand. It was a pilgrimage more to be desired than the one that resulted in Chaucer’s writing The Canterbury Tales.
So I left my aunt and cousin and boarded an early southbound commuter train in Jenkintown and made my way past Elkins Park, Melrose Park, Cheltenham, past City Line where Old York Road becomes Broad Street, past Allegheny, Lehigh, Girard, and Spring, all the way down Broad Street to City Center where William Penn’s statue stands atop City Hall. There I switched to the east-west line and, still searching for the Holy Grail, headed out West Market Street. At 46th Street I got off the train and there it was: On one side of the street were brick tenements with people’s laundry drying on the fire escapes, but on the other side of the street was the Holy of Holies: WFIL-TV, Channel 6, home of the one and only American Bandstand, the Magna Carta of teenage dance programs.
I stood in line for at least six hours, hoping to be admitted with the other pilgrims when the doors opened. Men with pushcarts came by selling pretzels with mustard, a Philadelphia staple, and hot dogs to fend off our hunger pangs. No one was about to leave the line to do an unimportant thing like eating. And because I had made sure to arrive early, I was near enough to the front of the line that I saw the regulars arrive and when the doors finally opened to the rest of us I made it in.
All the regulars were there. Bob and Justine, and Kenny and Arlene, and Pat, and Fran, and others whose faces I recognized but whose names I didn’t know. Dick Clark was there, of course, looking all of 18 even though he was 28 years old at the time. We all were there, dancing to Bobby Day’s hit, “Rockin’ Robin (Tweet, Tweet, Tweedly-Deet)” and Bobby Darin’s hit, “Splish, Splash, I Was Takin’ A Bath” and “Heavenly shades of night are falling; it’s twilight time” by The Platters and “All I Have To Do Is Dream” by The Everly Brothers, Phil and Don, and saying such profound things as “It has a good beat; you can dance to it. I give it a 92” to Dick Clark on national television!
I went for three days in a row.
Back in Texas, everybody had been watching American Bandstand five afternoons a week after school for more than a year. It had taken the teenaged portion of the country by storm. Two months later, when I dropped in at my old high school before I went away to college, I was treated like a celebrity (there wasn’t that much to do in small towns in Texas in the fifties, as you would know if you ever saw The Last Picture Show or Places In The Heart). It wasn’t that I myself was great, you understand, but clearly I had been in the presence of greatness.
Any other acclaim I might have received since then has been pure gravy. My fifteen minutes of fame happened early, when it could be properly appreciated by the only people who could pay me homage properly, the new crop of high school seniors at my old high school.
Photo by Dick Clark Productions, Inc.Later on, American Bandstand was televised in color and moved to California and became a once-a-week show, broadcast only on Saturday afternoon. It was slicker, and over-produced, and lasted until 1989, but it was never as good as the original, more innocent, five-days-a-week, black-and-white version from Philadelphia. It may have still had Dick Clark, but it didn’t have Pat. It didn’t have Fran. It certainly didn’t have Bob and Justine, or Kenny and Arlene.
We had American idols before there were any American idols. Ours didn’t even have to sing.
And now the guy who was there at the beginning, the guy who was part of our growing up years, Dick Clark, “America’s Oldest Teenager,” is gone. He was not a father figure exactly (he was too young for that). He was more of an older brother, already out in the world, making his way, but remembering us younger kids back home, affirming our existence, validating our musical tastes. For an hour every afternoon, he was up there presiding over the proceedings, paving the way for us into the wider world, talking to us as though our music mattered, as though what we thought actually mattered.
The more cynical might say he had just found a way to make an easy buck. But when you’re a teenager and ignored or shunted aside most of the time, being treated as though you mattered was a rare thing indeed.
In recent years he had become almost a caricature of himself. Having a stroke that resulted in the permanent slurring of his speech didn’t help his image with the current crop of the hip and the cool. But those of us who were there when his star was first rising are sad today.
Here is a fitting eulogy by one of the groups from back in the day.
