Girls with big hair were a hint. So were the guys with mullets like Billy Ray Cyrus. But the biggest giveaway that this video wasn’t new was Chuck Leonard’s full head of hair.
It is two segments of a short-lived show from 1987. The Bradley Theater had come back to life as a teen nightclub and WTVM created a local dance show like American Bandstand or Soul Train.
“I was the Dick Clark of the day,” recalls Leonard, whose bald spots are familiar to more modern viewers of Channel 9.
The shows feature scores of dancing teens. Many of those young people now have teenagers themselves. Their children won’t be able to hold back the laughs when they see Mom and Dad on the dance floor.
The videos turned up on YouTube and then on Facebook. Friends forwarded copies to Leonard, who confesses he did not even remember doing the shows.
Anthropologists in the future will marvel at the hair, the music and the dance steps in those videos. You’ll smile, too. Visit YouTube.com and click “rockin uptown.”
Armed with phones that are smart and cameras that are simple, we’re recording the world and storing the images on our computers. Laptops have become our scrapbooks and family albums.
We’re digging through family archives and posting items that will surprise you. Looking for the dance show, I came across copies of “This Is Your Life,” a TV show from my childhood. The host was Ralph Edwards and every week he surprised someone. For 30 minutes, that person’s life passed before him or her.
From 1955, it was “This is your life, Hugh Bentley,” the mild-mannered Columbus businessman that helped run crime and criminals out of Phenix City. It was fascinating to see Bentley, Howard Pennington and Hilda Coulter when they were young. I met them when they were old and eventually wrote about their deaths.
My descriptions brought different feelings to Ray Jenkins, the Ledger reporter who shared the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the story. He’s now retired in Baltimore.
Jenkins wrote a gushy article on Bentley for Guideposts Magazine and was paid $25 -- one-fifth of his salary at the Ledger. Edwards read it and called Jenkins for help.
“I did a huge amount of legwork, and confidently told my wife that we would probably get $100. After all, they seemed to have a lot of money to throw around, paying the plane fare for people, to be on the program. With a brand new baby, and suddenly reduced to one paycheck, we badly needed that money, and were already planning on how we’d spend it,” he recalls.
But it never came.
He eventually got a letter from Edwards, who included an engraved money-clip, sort of an enlarged paper-clip. “I was so indignant that I was tempted to return it with a note saying, ‘You forgot to put the money in it.’”
Fifty-six years later, the show is still out there -- and Ray Jenkins is still waiting on his check.
