David Gwynn

A great thing about having lots of credit at the local used book emporium is that you sometimes take a chance on a  book you might not have grabbed if you’d had to pay cash for it. This one is a good example that I picked up last night. Apparently, it even comes with its own website (one that really annoyingly tries to resize your browser window when you launch it).

Interestingly enough, I was reading coverage last year about the reopening of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at Idlewild Kennedy and have really been itching to see it, even if the renovation was less than desirable, and also involved the demolition of an important part of the structure.

Guiding Light, the oldest dramatic series on American TV (or maybe any other, for that matter) has been cancelled after seventy-two years on radio and TV. Almost all these shows I watched as an impressionable child are long gone now.

I occasionally find myelf looking for old soap opera video online. It’s some of the ultimate TV ephemera, as most of the early shows were done live and are lst forever. Even after the advent of videotape in the 1960s, most sopar operas and game shows (along with Johnny Carson, etc.) were not deemed worthy of longterm preservation and were just recorded over by shortsighted networks. Miraculously, Dark Shadows is one of the few 1960s soaps that survived more or less in its entirety, paving the way for a successful syndication run and DVD release. Match Game is one of the few 1970s game shows that was similarly preserved, essentially giving GSN most of its start-up programming.