1979

I finally figured out what I want to say about Password Plus.

Password Plus is electrifying.™

Comments flow ...

1979

I am excited to announce that I get today 1979's Doonesbury.

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-paducah-sun/195483586/

Article from Apr 13, 1979 The Paducah Sun (Paducah, Kentucky)

I often don't get the joke in Doonesbury, but today I do, and I think it and I are very clever.

Comments flow ...

1979

He was the All-Star leading scorer on the red, white and blue Washington Bullets, which won the NBA championship when I was 9 years old and went to the NBA Finals three times before I turned 11. Plus, his nickname was "The Big E," and there was this commercial. So, yes, Elvin Hayes was absolutely my favorite NBA player when I was a kid.

Is the Internet Amazing?

First, thank you, GoHeath, for keeping the doors open the last several weeks.

Second, I've decided to re-open this question for myself after a friend's now years of answering in the negative after being onboard for years before that.

Third, I doubt the question actually matters because we are here now and I can't imagine we would or maybe even could go back. The relevant question today, shared by millions of people in formal and informal conversations around the world, is how to make the internet better (safer, more beneficial to more people, more profitable, less expensive ... there are a zillion, many contradictory ways to define "better"). But most of the time I spend at the HP is spent on thinking about questions that are no longer especially relevant (e.g., How would my life have been different had I chosen to watch the Dukes of Hazzard pilot instead of the Hello, Larry pilot on the Friday night of Jan. 26, 1979?), so I'm not going to get too suddenly embarrassed about being slow on the uptake now.

My Favorite 10 Songs of the Last Seven Days

I don't believe I'd ever seen the Nick Lowe video. "It's a pretty good little song, you know? ... I really love it. It cheers people up."

1. "Weekend Groove," Jesse “JTJazz” Thompson featuring Althea René
2. “Delicioso," Tom Grant
3. "Independence Day," The Reverend Shawn Amos and Lizzie No
4. "Feel Like Making Love," Bob James
5. "Take Five," George Benson
6. “Pile Up,” Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussein, Aug. 11, 2010, in Salisbury, Mass.
7. "Letter to An Occupant," New Pornographers
8. "My Mistake," Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross
9. "Cruel To Be Kind," Nick Lowe
10. “Gravel," Ani DiFranco

HP Special Report: I Think It's Stansbury!

Breaking ... My wife had a meeting in Bowling Green, Kentucky, today, so I had her drop me off at Western Kentucky University's E.A. Diddle Arena to nose around while she worked. As I entered, three guys with nice suits and haircuts were walking through the corridor. I don't want to start any rumors, but the one trailing at the back, talking on his cell, looked a little like Rick Stansbury.

Also, here are some other great pictures from around Diddle Arena!

In conclusion: GO! BIG! RED!

Football On TV

Fran Tarkenton got an earlier start on Monday Night Football than I realized.

Oh, Kentucky

"Our definition of the seasons is no longer determined by when they actually start, but by when our idea of them starts."

The 1979 and 1980 KHSAA Class 3A football champions are getting ready:

Since moving back to Kentucky six years ago, I have come to learn--it wasn't exactly a surprise, just something I hadn't ever thought about--that local farmers markets are often flash points of competitive tension and arguments about issues such as specific regulations or the broader question of government's role in the marketplace. For example, maybe Bloomfield ...

Good jobs news in Auburn and Mount Sterling.

Rebounding from the bad in Glasgow.

The bad jobs news in Paducah and the rise of #StangNation has the McCracken County housing market in flux. Change is coming for the local hotel game, too.

"Another important step toward completion of I69 in western Kentucky."

Maybe the Graves County school board wants back in the Cuba school to save the 1952 state-championship trophy.

The Christian County Chess Initiative Committee has a big year in the works.

"Came home from Bible school tonight (Wednesday, July 23, 2014); missed getting picture of a mink but caught this owl."

Super Bowl XIII

Thank you, NFL Network, which at this moment is airing the original NBC telecast of Super Bowl XIII, which the defending champion Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers contested Jan. 21, 1979, at Miami's Orange Bowl.

Trapper John, M.D.

I was watching some Battle of the Network Stars reruns on ESPN Classic the other night, and the CBS team featured several members of the Trapper John, M.D. cast. I was 11 when that show debuted Sept. 23, 1979, and it seems like I watched it pretty much every time it was on the air--at least for the first several seasons. Trapper got the One Day at a Time-Alice-Jeffersons lead-in, and I watched all of those CBS shows. Only ABC from 7 to 7:30 Central, with Mork & Mindy vs. CBS's Archie Bunker's Place, got me off of CBS during prime-time Sunday nights in fall 1979.

So, anyway, here's the pilot. I'll put stuff in the comments as I watch. But I'll go ahead and say thank you to all the people who take the time to post stuff on YouTube--I really appreciate your effort and its product.

Rest in Peace, Mitchell Page (1951-2011)

Well, heck. This, by Steven Goldman, is awfully good.

That's a Mitchell Page card that I cut off a box of some type of Hostess snack in 1979. For a few years there, Hostess printed three cards that you could cut off its boxes. It was fantastic. I wonder what kind of Hostess product this Mitchell Page card came from. Dad loved Twinkies, so that's the best bet. But 1979 is right around when my youngest brother, Kurt, was getting married and moving out of the house--it's possible that Mitchell Page was on a box of Suzy Qs, Kurt's favorite. I preferred the CupCakes or the apple pies. I'm uncertain what Mom liked. There's some type of conclusion to be drawn from this paragraph about the plight of many mothers.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. Rest in peace, Mitchell Page (1951-2011) and Dad (1925-1999). Rock on, Kurt.

1979: Password Plus jive

So the three clues thus far were "table," "pockets" and something else ... maybe "game." Anyway, Loretta Swit guesses "billiards." And--ding! ding! ding!--Allen Ludden gives it to her. The secret word or whatever they call it turns out to be "pool."

OK, I get it that "billiards" and "pool" can be synonyms. But the name of the game is "Password" (well, Password Plus), as in you need a secret password to be allowed through some door. Shouldn't you have to guess the actual password--not just another word that means the same thing? The game is not called "Train of Thought."

Here's a clip from what I think must be the same week of episodes, because Jack Klugman was wearing the same hat in the episode I saw.

Incidentally, I just learned that the great Tom Kennedy, who hosted the last episodes of Password Plus, is a Louisvillian!

1975: Turning to sports, ...

The May 12, 1975, Sports Illustrated has the Kentucky Derby on its cover, but my favorite Kentucky item in the issue is this "Faces In The Crowd" entry:

"Scott Beard, 13, an eighth-grader at Westport High in Louisville, became the youngest person to win a major high school golf tournament in Kentucky, with a two-over-par 74 in the Kentucky Invitational at Seneca Golf Course. Scott started playing five years ago."

Scott Beard is not, however, going to win the KHSAA boys' golf championship. The 1975 state title will instead go to Russ Cochran of Paducah Saint Mary's. Scott Beard, the son of UK basketball legend Ralph Beard, will eventually get his KHSAA crown--in 1979, one year after Lone Oak's Kenny Perry gets his. By that point, Scott Beard will no longer be a Louisville Westport Warhawk. He instead will be leading Louisville Trinity to the team championship. Westport, in fact, won't even be a high school after 1981.

Also from this issue:

-- The Washington Bullets lead the Boston Celtics, two games to one, in the NBA Eastern Conference finals. The Chicago Bulls lead the Golden State Warriors, two games to one, in the West.

-- The Kentucky Colonels and Indiana Pacers are headed to the ABA finals.

-- Sonny Jurgensen retired.

-- A Nashville, Tenn., company is advertising some hip new fashions on Page 10.

Robert Penn Warren Remembers Guthrie

The best writer from Kentucky and the best writer from Vanderbilt University are the same person. Robert Penn Warren was born in 1905, and grew up in Guthrie, Kentucky. In 1979, he returned to Todd County for ceremonies honoring Jefferson Davis, whose citizenship had been restored. He wrote an article for The New Yorker about this experience called "Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back," and in that article, he had this to say about his hometown:

{Guthrie} was, except in geography, anything but an old Southern town. The autochthonous little settlements in the region had been gradually absorbed when a Louisville & Nashville Railroad crossing started a small-scale realtor's dream: ground measured out and the map of a hypothetical town flung down on a pretty countryside of woodlots and woods, streams, ponds, pastures, and fields of corn or tobacco, with old farmsteads, some handsome, some with modest charm, and also -- it should be, in candor, noted -- a number of tumbledown shacks of tenantry, black and white.

By and large, Guthrie was a railroad town, without a sense of belonging in any particular place or having any particular history. No, it did have one fleeting brush with history. On September 24, 1904, Felix Grundy Ewing, of Glenraven, Tennessee, called a meeting at the Guthrie fairgrounds and race track to organize the Dark Tobacco Protective Association, later the Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Some five to six thousand growers responded, who with kin and on-lookers numbered, it was said in my childhood, some twenty-five thousand people. (I have an old photograph of the scene: buggies hub to hub, horsemen so packed together that legs were crushed between mounts -- as far as eye, or camera, could see.) The growers were being driven to desperation by a price-fixing conspiracy among the big companies. The association was in the right, but it developed, unofficially, a violent wing, the Night Riders, which, in its most adventurous exploit, in the middle of the night, with military precision, took the neighboring "big" town of Hopkinsville, cut all wires, occupied the railroad-telegraph office and the telephone office, and systematically dynamited all the warehouses of the companies. Before and after this, whippings, barn burnings, and killings were a commonplace, for violence in a "good" cause had led to mere violence. Then came martial law. One of my earliest recollections is of being held up in my father's arms to watch the National Guard set up an encampment in Guthrie, down by the railroad station. Peace was restored. And the courts, after the jog of violence, finally acted to break up the conspiracy to fix prices.
Warren's first novel, published in 1939, was entitled Night Rider.