(Publicity photo of American Bandstand host Dick Clark. Public Domain.)
I wondered at the link between the three completely unique people who left this world early in this year. They all struck it rich in the America that roared out of World War Two.
Big Mama was one of them, the first to go, though she had more years on the planet than Don or Dick did.
Mom got into the Quiz Show thing in 1948, long before Don enlisted in the Marine Corps and shipped off for Korea, and before Dick broke into the radio game. Big Mama and Raven were jitter-buggers, and late into their lives together could still cut a mean rug.
I remember Raven talking about going in to The City from New Jersey to see the big bands play in venues like the Paramount in the Big Apple, and Big Mama sported the Bobbie Soxer look of the late forties when she blew into New York late in the War.
Bobbie Soxers were the proto-teens of the day: they were zealous fashionistas, with poodle skirts and socks rolled down to their ankles, swooning over Frankie Sinatra. Big Mama was industrious and frugal- she made her own skirts, since the design was simple and the materials easily available. She used to tell me she bought patterns and made Raven a suit, and after the Socotra kids started to come along, she would put a quarter in a jar for the college funds with each shirt she ironed herself and did not take to the dry cleaner.
Big Mama and Raven were fixed up by Raven’s old pal Ray Rappaport. He died last year, but in 1948, everything was just starting to rock and roll after the social deep-freeze of the war years. When they went out in New York, they wore beer jackets and smoked their cigarettes straight. They got married at the Little Church Around the Corner on 34th Street along with thousands of other couples in those years, and started in gentile poverty in an apartment in Brooklyn.
At that point, someone was getting married, everyone was those days, and maybe it was Ray himself. Big Mama had a scheme. They didn’t have the money to fly up to New York State, so she convinced Raven that they should get on a radio quiz show called “Strike It Rich.” The format of the show was that people would come with problems that a little cash could solve, and answer a few simple questions.
Todd Russell was the host, the network was the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Luden’s Cough Drops was his benevolent sponsor.
Raven used to tell the story years later, when he could still talk, that Big Mama had identified the name of the man to went through the audience looking for personable people with problems. Big Mama called out the man’s name as he walked down the aisle, got his attention out of the maelstrom of pleading voices. He stopped to talk to her, and she explained that she and Raven wanted to attend the wedding of the guy who had introduced them.
It was simple homework, getting the man’s attention. She won the prize, which was the price of two round trip airline tickets from New York to Rochester. It did not seem like a lot of money, when she told me how much she had won, but the very idea of climbing into a DC-3 airliner to go some place was pretty heady stuff for a young couple, even if Raven was a Navy flyer.
1948 was a big year for Dick, too. He started in radio that year, just as the music was starting to veer away from Swing and into something else. Music- and television. It burst into the mainstream of go-go American consciousness. When Raven and Big Mama moved to the Motor City, only about ten percent of American households had a television.
By the time Dick took over American Bandstand, nearly half had an idiot box, and by the time JFK was running for President, the television was ubiquitous.
There were a couple things that happened in the meantime that could have destroyed Dick’s career. The “payola” scandal was the first- of course the radio jocks made money direct from the record labels to publicize their songs. Dick was as corrupt as any of them. He even had his own label that he promoted relentlessly. And then there was the game show corruption that was endemic to the medium.
Charles Lincoln Van Doren was a well-born, Ivy-educated cheat and fraud. In that, he shared a lot in common with Golden Boy Alger Hiss, who was on trial for perjury as the decade began. It might be part of the famous “end of innocence” nonsense about America, but it was real enough.
Hiss wouldn’t admit he was a red under the bed. Van Doren confessed to Congress that the fix was in, and the producers of “Twenty-one” had fed him the answers to the questions. There was widespread shock and disbelief that everything was rigged.
Who are you going to believe?
Maybe I have the paradigm all wrong. Maybe rather than the JFK, RFK and MLK killings, maybe it was Charles Van Doren who destroyed the American Dream. And maybe it was eternal teen Dick Clark and Don Cornelius who played out the divisive saga of race in America.
It is the height of irony that the payola scandal forced Dick Clark to divest his music business, and position himself as the producer of the iconic game shows that attempted to win back our trust. He hosted “Pyramid,” and produced a dozen others. He also played the strange tic-tac-do game of creative format theft, colliding with Casey Kasem and his “American Top 40.”
You can say Don Cornelius ripped off the “Bandstand” format, but you can’t say it wasn’t because Dick had enough people of color on his show. It took years to crack the lily-white audience, and when Don made “Soul Train” a hit in 1970. Dick immediately came up with an ersatz Soul Show, which folded almost immediately and the two feuded bitterly. Don privately accused Dick of attempting to take over the African American media market.
Put a happy face on it- The Soul Train-American Bandstand controversy was short-lived. Clark and Cornelius discussed the matter, and Clark dropped his show Soul Unlimited while offering to co-produce some black specials with Cornelius for ABC.
Despite its racial overtones, the conflict seemed less a struggle between black and white and more a contest over the Saturday afternoon audience.
Don committed suicide in February. Dick had a stroke he never came back from- you remember how painful that New Year’s Eve wasy for all of us- and passed yesterday.
Big Mama took her poodle skirt and bobbie socks with her in January. She did not get much comment, except from her many friends and her children. Don got a brief flurry of retrospective interest for the show for which he wrote, hosted and hustled advertising. Don Cornelius was Soul Train, and Dick was American Teen Culture writ large.
Big Mama was- well, she was my Mom. This is a much smaller world- one much less rich- with the three of them gone.
(Don Cornelius in 2006. Credit: Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com