Mike Still Makes Your Day

	Sign In Sign-Up

Mike Makes Your Day The Beginning in Cleveland *Remember when you came home from school in the sixties and saw the gigantic asterisks (or were they daisies or sunflowers?) framing the set of your favorite afternoon talk show? A show free from victims, chair-throwing and hair-pulling confrontations and family dysfunction.

Mike

The Mike Douglas Show hit the landscape of syndicated television on the Group W network of Westinghouse stations in 1961 but didn't really spread across the U.S. until the fall of 1964. I first "met" Mike on WJXT in Jacksonville, Fla., in September 1964 right after Leave It to Beaver finished a rerun where Larry Mondello dumped money from his mother's sewing basket out an upstairs window and Larry and Beaver "found" the cash to go to the Mayfield carnival.

Mike's co-host for the week was the legendary Gloria Swanson (who always looked as if she'd ironed her hair). That week, I came home from a 10-day hospital bout with pneumonia and was treated for the first time to the comedienne Totie Fields, Sen. Everett Dirksen and a singer from Cincinnati named Len Mink.

Something I thought a bit odd but refreshing was Mike had a woman bandleader. The Ellie Frankel Quintet played the same "bump" musical stingers every day in the same breaks but Ellie beat a mean version of Mike's theme "Together, Whereever We Go" on the piano while the combo joined.

The

Another oddity was this was a national show originating from Cleveland, Ohio. Why would any show be syndicated out of Cleveland? For one thing, Westinghouse owned KYW-TV there and with the show being produced with the same mechanics as a local variety program (though with bigger-named guests than Tom Hipps used to feature on his local variety half-hour on WTVM in Columbus), The Mike Douglas Show was much cheaper to headquarter in Cleveland than New York City.

Even for a kid of 10, Mike grew on you in a hurry. If you were a child, he was somewhat of a father figure who could also sing. That first day I saw him, Mike opened with "On a Wonderful Day Like Today," the upbeat tune he used as a show-launcher more than any other. We learned in simple conversation Mike and his wife Gen had three daughters, including twin girls who were about my age.

The Mike Douglas Show was like a late-afternoon house party. You may not have stayed for the whole 90 minutes (we only saw him for an hour for the first 15 months he was on in Jacksonville) but you knew you were welcome to drop in, drop out and drop back in again any time. You were a welcome guest in the house, not a voyeur as is the case in most of today's trash talk television.

Mike

You liked Mike because he was clearly having a good time. You didn't want him to have the polish of a Dick Cavett or Charlie Rose. You didn't need him to do lavish production numbers. You weren't interested in him being adversarial with his guests. You just enjoyed Mike and wished when 6:00 came around, he would walk right off the tube and drop over to your house for supper. He was that kind.

My URL: http://welcome.to/MikeDouglas

I got it for free at http://come.to

Mike's fans have visited this page times