Published: September 20, 2008 11:29 pm            

ANDY LASKY | Feeling let down by my hero and my first love

In 1889, I had the great fortune to meet a man in the broadcast business whom I had admired for many years: Ted Turner, president of Turner Broadcasting and founder of CNN, who reshaped the world of television through cable TV.

Personally, broadcast TV has been a prominent influence in shaping my world as far back as I can remember. I’ve always had a love affair with television. So much so that I chose to earn my degree in communications as a student at Pitt-Johnstown.

When I met Turner, I was 32 years old and serving as the chairman of The Video Software Dealers Association’s national convention in Las Vegas.

Turner was chosen as the keynote speaker to follow my “state of the industry” opening remarks on day one of the convention. This meant that I would have the honor of introducing this mentorlike figure in my life to the audience of more than 5,000 attendees. It was meant to be – and in fact was – a very big day in my professional life.

Knowing a few months in advance that I would meet Turner, I labored about what I would say to him. What do you say to the man who was changing the world through television? I wanted desperately to make an impression on him. I needed to be clever in a way that would be memorable. Rewind to 1957, my birth year and the peak of the baby boom. TV sets, as they were called then, were rapidly growing in popularity. My older brother, Stan, told me he could remember when Mom and Dad got their first TV. Not me, though my earliest recollections of growing up include the TV set in the family room.

I’ve always felt like a guinea pig in this great experimental technology. Does growing up with television make you different? And if so, how so? I’ve always considered this to be one of the quintessential questions for my generations, and I’ve spent my life exploring it.

For me personally, I grew up in a household where the TV was both hated and revered. My dad would not allow his kids to waste their time or their life on that “idiot box.”

After school and before Dad got home, though, was my time.

I’d run off the bus to be home in time for “Lassie” and “The Andy Griffith Show,” two of my favorites. I couldn’t get enough of “Leave It To Beaver.” I loved “Hazel” and, as my sense of what was funny became more sophisticated, I fell under the influence of “McHale’s Navy” and “Hogan’s Heroes.”

But when my Dad’s truck, which we had to listen for, pulled into the driveway, we would “quick turn off the TV” and run to anyplace where we would look busy with work. My Dad had disdain for us watching TV, but slowly fell selectively under its spell himself. What he liked to watch, we could too.

“The Piney Doctrine on TV” turned out to have a profound effect on my life. You see, Dad liked only a few things. “The Nightly News” was one of them.

So I too fell under the spell of David Brinkley and Chet Huntley. I grew up loving the news and the men who would broadcast it. I loved the content and greatly admired the art form. It’s safe to say I became addicted to it at an early age and have failed to kick the habit still.

By the way, my Dad’s ideas of what was important, in many ways, became mine as well. So too did my idea of what was funny. My Dad’s two favorite shows besides “The Nightly News” were “The Jackie Gleason Show” and “The Red Skelton Show.” To this day, I can still do a decent imitation of Gertrude and Eclipse.

Most unfortunately, though, as this experiment in television’s influence on my life has evolved, the medium itself has devolved. I find myself fearing for my children’s well being in much the same way as my own father feared for mine. What television has become scares me.

Some of it is the fuel it provides for more rapidly changing social mores. It seems like nothing is sacred anymore. Some of it is concern for the desensitization that constantly repeated images of violence and sex has on us as a culture. But probably nothing worries me more than that what my old “would be” mentor Ted Turner did.

It turns out what I said to him in 1989 seems eerily prophetic to me in the years since.

It went something like this.

“Mr. Turner, I’d like to introduce you to our convention chair, Andy Lasky.”

“Well, hello Andy. How are you doing?”

“I’m doing well, thank you, Mr. Turner. But I have to tell you that you’re single-handedly ruining my marriage!”

With a look of surprise and, I like to think, some amusement, this then-bigger-than-life figure said, “How’s that, Andy?”

“Well, Mr. Turner,” I said, “with 24-hour news, I don’t have time for my wife anymore.”

I said it to be clever, but I fear that the new normal of 24-hour news is putting a strain on our lives and, in turn, our relationships with one another. I didn’t think that in 1989. But in the 19 years of 24-hour-news since, I have come to deeply believe it.

I believe Huntley and Brinkley’s half-hour broadcast at 6:30 each evening was just the right amount of time to inform the masses of what was worth knowing, considering, and, if necessary, worrying about.

In an effort to justify its existence, the 24-hour news cycle has to make news worthy of that which may not be. Is Senator Obama’s use of the age-old pig and lipstick line and Senator McCain’s indignant response to it really news?

Is the sad story of a young, misguided mother’s loss of her child in Florida truly news for me in Pennsylvania? Does knowing about Britney Spears’ latest appearance on the VMA’s or her disappearance from rehab have any real bearing on anyone else’s life?

Everyone of us could cite examples of things that we hear and see on the news and wonder why we need to know. My fear is my children’s generation as well as my own won’t know what’s important enough to really care about or have the emotional energy left to do so when we should.

I hope my children will know what to invest in emotionally. I hope they’ll know it’s the world around you that you can change.

I hope it will start at home with friends and neighbors in whom they’ll emotionally invest first. Read the local newspaper and listen to the local news, help the family whose home is lost to fire or donate to the Women’s Help Center to aid a family in distress.

The day my dad was buried was ironically the same day the nation was supposedly transfixed by O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco madness.

Maybe Dad was right about the “idiot box” all along.



Andy Lasky and his wife, Katie, own and operate City View Bar & Grill and Westmont Plaza Theatre, both in Westmont.

        

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