Turning into Dad – Part 1

Last night I woke up in the chair, in the middle of watching All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC.  Somewhere between the “Trump International Doral” and the “Monmouth Poll” I drifted away.  It reminded me of my father.  I wrote so much that I broke it into parts – so here’s the first installment of two, of “Turning into Dad.”

Part One

Jilly and Jampot

When my sisters and I were small, he used to tell us bedtime stories.  Dad was creative, he told us about  Jilly the kangaroo and Jampot the turtle.  (Hey siblings:  did Jilly wear a red bellhop cap and Jampot kind of a floppy black hat, or did I conflate that from somewhere else?)  Jilly and Jampot had great adventures, but their stories always seemed to have one problem:  they never ended, or at least, never concluded.  Sometime during the story, as Jilly and Jampot were invariably travelling down a road, the story would dissolve into snores.  It worked; Dad fell asleep, laying beside us.  

I usedto make fun of Dad, he had the “Dahlman gene.”  He could fall asleep anywhere, anytime, anyplace; but he particularly could fall asleep in front of the TV.

Live on Television

Funny how a man who made his reputation and livelihood in television would snooze so easily in front of it.  Dad started in television at the beginning in the early 1950’s, when much of television was “live” because there weren’t good ways to store shows.  Videotape wasn’t around yet, and film required time for processing.  Mom and Dad would often be part of the “audience” in those early days in Cincinnati, the whole station staff of WLW-T, including an announcer named Rod Serling (he was already writing scripts that would lead to The Twilight Zone) would come to fill the studio.  

Dad sold television advertising then, better known as commercials.  After several years at WLW-T, he switched to selling actual television shows to individual stations throughout the country for  Ziv Productions.  You have to be older than me to remember most of them, but a few, like The Cisco Kid, Sea Hunt,and Highway Patrol (that show popularized the “10-4” signoff) became national hits.

Traveling Man

Sea Hunt was a story about a scuba diver, played by actor Lloyd Bridges.  It was the number one rated show in 1958.  Dad travelled all over the country selling it, and we had the little “scuba guys” to play with that he used as trinkets to remind the local station managers about the show.  He told a story about signing one big station; they decided to celebrate their agreement by signing the contact underwater. Dad didn’t know a thing about scuba gear, but gamely went down to make sure the contract was signed.  He said he damn near drowned, but he closed the deal.

Dad was a travelling salesman.  Through my early life in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, he was on the road Monday through Friday.  Sometimes he would fly, but quite often Dad was driving the car with the license plate “DD 19.”  DD was Don Dahlman, and was his plate for at least fifty years (it’s on my Jeep now.)  He’d call from Des Moines or Chicago, and we’d see him on the weekends.  He had lots of stories from his travels.  

One was about a quick flight.  New York was the center for television broadcasting, and Dad was late.  He rushed to the airport, jumped out of his car, and barely made it onboard.  It was two days later, on his way home, that he couldn’t quite remember where he parked the car.  He arrived at Cincinnati Airport, then realized he left it right in front of the terminal.  Luckily they hadn’t towed it too far.

The travelling became so embedded, that thirty years later, the night after heart surgery, the nurses found Dad wandering the halls, dragging wires and tubes behind him.  He had a meeting in Indianapolis, he thought. 

Dayton, Ohio

By 1962, Dad tired of being on the road.  Ziv sold the company to United Artists, and Dad went back to work for Avco, the company that owned WLW-T.  He became the sales manager of WLW-D in Dayton, Ohio, and soon rose to station manager. 

Dayton was a booming town in the late 1960’s.  Wright Patterson Air Force Base was the major employer (still is) with several Air Force Commands headquartered there.  National Cash Register (NCR) was a founding industry in Dayton, as well as Delco (the electric car starter was invented by a Dayton native, Charles Kettering.) Frigidaire had an assembly plant in town, and the University of Dayton was there, so there were plenty of jobs around. Sadly, all but the University and the Air Force Base have now left the town.

Dad had “grown up” with live television, and the “WLW” stations (it really didn’t mean world’s lowest wages, did it?) all produced their own variety shows.  WLW-D had the Johnny Gilbert Show, featuring the host’s singing talents.  Johnny went to find his fortune in Hollywood (you know him today, “…Johnny, tell them what they won,” on The Price is Right) and Dad put Phil Donahue in the time slot for a 60-minute news/talk show.

Is the Caller There?

Donahue changed television. The mid-1960’s was still the time when most women were “homemakers.”  They had TV’s on during the day, and the Donahue show aired from 10 to 11 am.  Instead of presenting songs, dances, and how to best get the dishes clean, Phil talked about the real issues of the time.  It was the sixties:  civil rights, Vietnam, women’s rights, the draft, hippies; there was a lot to talk about. The “hook” of the show was a phone. Viewers could call in and ask questions of the guest, or Phil.

Phil did a show about “Little Baby Brother,” a male doll that had all of the appropriate anatomical parts.  The idea was that it would educate girls about the differences in anatomy. People wanted to talk about that, so much so that the phone lines jammed.  Dayton Bell, the local phone company, couldn’t handle the load and phone service for the south part of Dayton crashed.  

Phil also interviewed Jerry Rubin, one of the Chicago Seven charged with causing riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention.  Rubin was known for his “colorful” language, he dropped the “F-Bomb” a lot.  It was the 1960’s, a TV station that aired such language could lose their broadcast license.

The station had to have some way of “bleeping” language, but there wasn’t the technology for what we now call tape delay.  So the engineers set up two videotape machines, one to record, and the other, literally across the room, to playback the show onto the air.  There was a stretch of videotape going across between the two machines, and Dad was on the “bleep” button on the broadcast side:  he made sure he kept WLW-D’s license.

Tomorrow – The Second Installment of Turning into Dad