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bPART ONE: CLEVELAND, 1963
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #1:
In 1963, think of the remarkable things that were
going on in the United States…you had urban flight,
you had space flight, you had the race to put
somebody into orbit or somebody had just gone
into orbit from the United States, you had civil
rights you had all these remarkable things that had
been happening. Cleveland was the eighth biggest
city in the world, but all of a sudden this character
comes on TV on Friday nights and just by word of
mouth becomes the biggest thing to hit Cleveland
TOM FERAN #13:
Kids today would have no understanding of what
television was like, comparatively speaking because
there were three channels…3, 5, & 8. There wasn’t
even public TV at that point, there certainly wasn’t
Fox or any independents, there was more local
programming than there is today because
networks, like ABC for example, ABC didn’t really
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have a day time schedule of soaps or game shows,
and that had forced channel 5 to do a lot more
local programming channel 3 was Westinghouse,
and Westinghouse was a really ambitious,
creatively ambitious, company. And so they put on
the Mike Douglas show that went into national
syndication and competed with the One O’Clock
Club, with Dorothy Fuldheim and Bill Gordon that
was on channel five, I think for 90 minutes every
day this was pre-Morning Exchange at the same
time, that has some and gone since then.
RICH HELDENFELS #7:
This is a point in television where to large extend if
you’ve got a license you’re going to be able to
make money. There are fairly few stations on the
air, everyone is going to carve out a niche of some
sort, and so it’s possible to be profitable so you
don’t have to, as we see in the business today, be
kind of popping on your competitors, again
something that Stern loves to do, but Ernie did
that. Dorothy Fuldheim the Grand Dame of local
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television, aged at that point, regarded with great
affection but the viewership, was an Ernie target.
Mike Douglas who at that point was a Cleveland
personality and on the verge of becoming a major
national talk show host, syndicated, Ernie poked
fun at him. And very specifically, again getting back
to the idea of things people think but don’t say,
poking at sacred cows in the northeastern Ohio
area, in the Cleveland market.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #4:
Keep in mind when Ghoulardi hit the air in 1963,
TV had only been around for 16 years. We went on
the air with the National Anthem, we went off the
air after the Milkman’s Matinee with the National
Anthem and the screens would go dark for a
number of hours.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #8
In 1957, Universal released all their library of old
horror films as a package called Shock Theater.
And they released them to, syndicated them so
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that in individuals markets people could buy this
package. So they sent out these movies…and it
was Dracula, and Frankenstein, all the old Lugosi
and Karloff films. And this re-introduced…very
important to the pop culture history by the way… it
re-introduced a whole generation to these
wonderful movies. But it also presented the
problems to the stations that bought them how do
we present them? And that’s when the horror
hosts came along…John Zacherle got his start in
Philadelphia, each town seemed to have a horror
host.
Robert Thompson2:
“One of the things that worked across the country
was that you would get cheap old horror movies,
stud that was often cheaply made in the first place,
drive in kind of stuff, and you would somehow kind
of try to make this stuff look attractive, these old
low budget horror movies so you would package
them with a host, and it was generally some local
personage or actor or something who would either
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get into a Senegal costume or a Dracula costume,
or some kind of horror looking thing and then they
would do little bits in between these really awful
TV shows,
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #7
There was one that sorta pre-dates, that’s the pre-
history of this, and that’s Vampira. Vampira was in
Los Angeles, and was a phenomenon, really before
the whole thing, phenomenon of horror hosts hit.
And she was kind of an anomaly, people kind of
lump her in with all the others like Zacherle, and all
the others that came later, but she was really out
there before anybody else. And really showed that
it could be done.
ROBERT THOMPSON 3:
“A miracle of chemistry, or maybe alchemy, would
happen…. you’d have these really bad horror films
and these even worse kind of hosts, and somehow
when they came together it was something
perfect, it was something beautiful
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ROBERT THOMPSON 1:
“The 50s 60s was this golden age of any market of
any size if you were big enough to have at station it
was likely you did at least one children’s show,
children’s shows were local phenomena.”
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PART TWO: WHO IS THIS ERNIE?
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #13:
Back in the late 1950s, when Ernie came to
Cleveland, he was working at WHK at one point.
Now the guy who was on before him was a guy
named Pete Meyers. Loveable, laughable Pete
Meyers. He had a wonderful voice, Pete would do
part of his shift, and then Ernie would come on
while Pete went to dinner, and then Pete would
come back as “bang! The Mad Daddy!” He was
Pete Mad Daddy Meyers, and a lot of that shtick
and the rhythm and the rhyming was later
borrowed, to a point, by Ernie for Ghoulardi. Let
me also just point out…Ernie Anderson WAS
Ghoulardi. It was his character. Period.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #14
Right from the start Cleveland comedy was always
sort of, it was much less aggressive, it wasn’t
passive, but you look at Tim Conway, Drew Carey, if
you look at all these guys, what do these guys have
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in common? Well, one of the things they have in
common is that the comedy is not aggressive; it’s
not Don Reckless. It’s not this kind of pushing at
you…the comedy tends to be much more the joke
can be on us and we can appreciate the joke.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #15
I think too if you were to compare Ernie with the
other horror hosts of the time, you would see that,
you would see that difference of approach and
pace, and that came out of Ernie and that came out
of Cleveland, but again, there’s that chemistry
thing. Ernie was the right horror host, for the right
town at the right time. Take any one of those
things out, then maybe we’re not sitting here,
we’re not talking about this.
RICH HELDENFELS #23:
At least the way we remember him is as a guy with
whom anything could happen at any time.
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MIKE OLSZEWSKI #23:
First of all he creates this character that’s a Gothic
Beatnik…and there’s two words that come to
mind…What rules? When people said don’t, that
meant he would. In fact, he would go to the
ultimate level to show them “I’ll do what I want,
you don’t tell me what to do.” And he kept that
going until the very end. I mean if you listen to
some of the outtakes that are on You Tube or even
on Napster they were running them you’d hear
Ernie in the studio and somebody asks him for a
third take and you’d hear this vulgarity and he’d
walk out of the room. You’re not getting another
take; it was perfect the first two times. You don’t
like it, tough.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #12
It also affected his comedic rhythms…there was
sort of an improv, almost like a jazz blues improve
to what he was doing, that I don’t think that was by
mistake. I think that probably was in his DNA.
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SOT BOB WELLS #1
The station named him Ghoulardi (spells it), at
personal appearances he always signed it
Ghoulardi (spells it) so if the same thing had
happened to him he could have gone to the other
station as Ghoulardi, and they wouldn’t have a
legal leg to stand on, as it was, nobody else wanted
him (laughs) Just kidding!
TOM FERAN #26:
Ernie ended up having this group around him that
he liked, he like having a lot of, apparently, a lot of
commotion a lot of the time. So he’d have animals
in house going through all the time, and if you talk
to other people in channel 8 in that era, Ralph
Tarsitano and his wife would talk about how just
nutty it would be going to Ernie’s house, but it was
like a clubhouse, and he wanted to have people
around, people around him, a lot of laughs.
RALPH TARSITANO #16:
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And the first time my father goes there (Ernie’s
house) with my mom, he comes home and calls me
on the phone and says “Oh my God, he’s got
chickens running around in the front yard, and we
were sitting at the dining room table and a goat
came by, the kids were chasing a goat and he says
“Oh my God, Man, Ernie’s really a free spirit. And
that was Ernie you know, he really was a free spirit
kind of guy.
SOT BOB WELLS #3
He would go over to a bar next door, between
breaks and snarf down another one and come back
and then “hey group,” ya know that whole bit?
(Laughs) I just can’t imagine doing that. I mean all
of our stuff was scripted, I mean a few ad labs here
and there but as we would look at the camera,
there was that teleprompter in front and we just
read it off and we got pretty good at looking like
we knew what we were doing.
SOT BIG CHUCK #24
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In fact, if you were to tell him “you’d better not do
this..” You can bet your life those were not the
words to use. Cause when I told him you better
not light that firecracker that he almost blew the
station up with, as soon as I said it I said “oh, that
was the wrong thing to say.” And sure as hell he lit
it, so…(laughs)
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #15:
He had some pull. Because he pulled in big ratings,
and he also made a lot of money for that station.
But things were gonna be done his way. Period.
ROBERT THOMPSON 7:
“In his own kind of kookie way, Ghoulardi was WAY
ahead of that wave, in the way he portrayed his
own particular character.”
SOT BIG CHUCK #26
He’d been fired from every job he’d ever had…so
it’d be nothing new.
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TOM FERAN #27:
Ernie as Ghoulardi in particular, has been
compared to Howard Stern, a number of times.
And I think that there’s something to that..there
are obvious differences, but I think that most of the
differences would come form the fact that it was
1963, 1964, it was a very different time. You
couldn’t say on the air the sorts of things that Ernie
did. At that time it was really unusual to even
mention somebody from another station to say
anything irreverent about somebody from another
station or somebody from your own station, or to
poke fun at authority figures, somebody such as a
mayor or governor or you know public officials was
unheard of, you know? You were really coming out
of that era of “Howdy Neighbor” uh, good feeling,
not that he didn’t have good feelings but there was
that, uh, there were certain proprieties I guess that
it would have been observed, and things started to
fall away and Ernie was really modern I would say
in that attitude.
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RICH HELDENFELS #6:
I think you can look at what Lenny Bruce was doing
and see some of what Ernie was doing…not in
terms of the content necessarily or in terms of the
language, but but the irreverence and looking at
things to poke holes in
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #14:
In a lot of ways, he was just Mad Magazine come
to life, that’s what he was. He was just wonderful.
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PART THREE: THE MADNESS BEGINS
TOM FERAN #5:
January 1963 was a record cold snowy month, and
period in Cleveland and TV viewership was
especially high because the city was in a long
newspaper strike that continued until spring so
there wasn’t any kind of coverage, you know,
initially of Ghoulardi becoming a sensation it was
really a word of mouth phenomenon.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #9
Cleveland was a little bit behind the curve with
Ghoulardi, because really ’57 was the first big
boom of the horror hosts, uh, but what it got, Ernie
made up for lost ground awfully fast. He became
one of the best known of the horror hosts even
though he was a good four years behind the curve.
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SOT BIG CHUCK #7
Ernie was still under contract, and so the station
had to pay him anyway, and this is in ’63, they said
we want you to be a horror host, and he said well
what will I do? And they said well, just have an
accent and talk about the movie, so that’s how
Ghoulardi was born.
RICH HELDENFELS #4:
Where I grew up, in Virginia, they had similar
things, they had famous names like Zacherle who
had something of a reputation outside of their
area, but was still something people essentially saw
on their local station. Here’s this package of horror
movies, you need to have a host, and then what
kind of host are you going to have? Now a lot of
times they were vampire knockoffs or just
something monster related, Ernie’s was a
departure from that. It was more of this beatnik
character as he was commonly described. A little
bit of a mad scientist look to him, but clearly
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something not designed to be a part of the movies,
but to be a kind of commentator on those.
TOM FERAN #4:
The show started in 1963 as Shock Theater with
Ernie hosting as Ghoulardi, and it took a little while
as Chuck tells it for him to find his stride, as
Ghoulardi as his own host, not the traditional
movie host with the light under the face doing the
“booga booga” trying to scare and instead of trying
to scare kids he’s just goofing on things.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #6:
He said the reason he put that beard and
moustache on was because he had this voice over
gig going, he had a good gig going. He just didn’t
want anybody to know who it was; he thought it
would ruin it. But hey, for an extra $75 a week,
he’ll do Ghoulardi.
RICH HELDENFELS #5:
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There was this guy Ralph Gulko who came up with
makeup and other elements of it, so there were a
lot of different factors that came into creating this
host, but I think the key things was first of all it’s on
late at night, and no one was really paying a lot of
attention to who was watching or what was being
said at least at first, And you had Ernie himself, and
he brought this very distinctive sort of jazz-hipster
quality to it.
SOT BIG CHUCK #14
I wanted nothing to with being on the air, I enjoyed
writing and doing the special effects because Ernie
Kovacs was hero of mine, and he did all kind of
stuff. I used to try to, I came up with that circle
and later I modulated the circle, and I came up with
putting him in the film, and I was just enjoying the
heck out of picking the music for stuff…
TOM FERAN #25:
Tim and Ernie found each other at channel 3, and
went to channel 8, and um, Tim had an offbeat
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sense of humor, and Ernie did as well, and that
really meshed on the Ernie’s Place movie show,
and Ernie would interview Tim, who was then Tom,
would assume a variety of character roles in really
deadpan fashion.
SOT BIG CHUCK #1
At that time I lived entirely on Manner’s Big Boys,
and so I used to, I was parked at a light waiting to
go to a Manners for my lunch from the Foundry, so
I took, sitting there, it was right b y the transmitter
of Channel 8 on State Road, so I’m sitting there
looking, it was an evening, nice lights on the tower
and I was thinking “man, I just come out of the
stinky smelly smoky foundry, and I said it’s gotta be
nice to work in television.” This was in the 50s, 57
or 58, and I said man, it’s clean, TV cameras, try it
out, you know?
SOT BIG CHUCK #2
I walked into channel 3, and I said how do you get a
job here? I asked the receptionist; do you have
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something I could fill out? And she pointed and
said there’s the chief engineer right there, and I
asked him and it was obvious he was going to put
me off, he said no, all of our engineers have first
class FCC licenses. So I said I had no idea what that
is, so he said well, there’s a school in town that you
can study and get an FCC license.
SOT BIG CHUCK #3
I went to the school, one night a week for three
years, and got the FCC license. Came back, asked
for the chief engineer, and I said here’s my license.
He was so impressed that I didn’t bug him and say
I’m going, that three years later I come back and
said here it is, that he said, “I don’t have room for
you, but I gotta hire ya. So he hired me and he did
his best when it came time to lay me off in the fall,
to keep me in the business, so he called a friend at
channel 8, the chief engineer, and channel 8 has
just got their first tape machine and had just signed
a contract to do Cleveland Browns and Cleveland
Indians remotes.
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SOT BIG CHUCK #4
I only worked at channel 3 for three months, but
while I was at channel three, the booth announcer
was Ernie Anderson, and he had one of his buddies
there named Tom Conway, and I got know Ernie
better than Tom, who became Tim, and after a
year and a half or something like that they both
came over to Channel 8.
SOT BIG CHUCK #5
Tom supposedly was a director, which he never
did, Ernie lied about that. Ernie wanted him there
to help write the funny stuff for a show called
Ernie’s place, which aired in the afternoon.
TOM FERAN #2:
If you weren’t familiar with the show, somebody
would say call somebody a “knif”, and it was
stupid, ya know? And then you discovered it was a
Ghoulardi catch phrase, “turn blue” and “stay sick”
and all that and people would say those things.
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TOM FERAN #1:
I used to watch Ghoulardi, once in a great while on
Friday nights, cause I was young enough that that
was a little, Friday night was a little different, so, I
watched the Saturday afternoon show a lot,
Masterpiece Theater. I had Ghoulardi book covers,
I had the bumper sticker, I had the sort of stuff that
kids would have at that time, and I was very
conscious of the whole phenomenon.
RON GARSTECK #6
A lot of people, they come in an they tell me, oh,
they says, oh, I used to sneak downstairs and watch
Ghoulardi, and my mom says “Get to bed!” You
know, they would never let the, even the girls, you
know, a lot of the girls say boy you know I sued to
sneak down and their mom would yell at them you
know, I don’t know if it was just his character or
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what you know, but he was really popular for three
years being on TV.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #12:
I always described Ghoulardi as a gothic beatnik.
Robert Thompson 6:
“He (Ernie) seemed almost like across between a
beatnik and a monster, kind of a cool, maybe semi-
kind of dangerous guy, but dangerous in an
affectionate sort of way he reminded me of Fonzie
more than he did of somebody that would suck
your blood kind of thing.”
ROBERT THOMPSON 8:
“You know, it’s funny how programming aimed at
children has gone the exact opposite route of how
culture has progressed over the past 50 years….
everything else on TV has gone toward complete
fragmentation…I mean when TV started we were
all pretty much watching the same thing at the
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same time…whether it was Lucy having her baby or
who shot JR, all of that stuff. There was three
networks and not that many choices…cable comes
along and of course now Dad’s off watching ESPN
in the den, there’s three different women’s
networks for mom, the teenage is watching MTV or
Comedy Central, everybody’s got their own
channel. With children’s TV it was the exact
opposite…you had a situation back in the old days
where you had these after school or before school
movie hosts kinds of things in every city of any
size…. had their own local children’s programming.
And people of a certain age you can actually
identify, it’s like a secret code…it’s like a special
handshake…. if they know who Garfield Goose is,
you know they grew up in Chicago. If they know
who Ghoulardi is, you know they grew up in
Cleveland. Every bit as much as a cheesesteak
identifies Philadelphia, these kids programs really
did mean something to the definition of what it
meant to be from Kansas City or from New York or
any of these places. In the case of the smaller
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markets, that was kind of a big deal. This was,
you’re in touch with show biz. All the big shows
were made in New York or LA, but when it came to
your local stuff, this was the one place where TV
was actually happening. That has been, for the
most part, annihilated. The last of the local shows
pretty much died out in the 90s. I don’t know of
any real local kids programming going on anymore.
And the opposite happened as to what happened
with the fragmentation of cable, that every kid now
watches Dora and SpongeBob, and Blues Clues
these Nickelodeon and Disney universes. So when
you’re reminiscing 20 years from now about what
you watched as a kid, everybody in the room is
gonna be able to mention the same Hannah
Montana, Blues Clues whatever kinds of things.
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PART FOUR: METEORIC RISE
RICH HELDENFELS #8:
This was a way to get people to stay and watch the
movie, when they might just, again, a sort of a pre-
channel flipping era in a lot of ways, but it was a
reason to pay at least some attention to the movie
to see what Ernie or Chuck was going to do to it.
So there is that element.
TOM FERAN #7:
’64 it continued, 64 was just a great time of
cultural, pop cultural ferment too, in retrospect
people talk about the Kennedy assassination and
what came after that, people looking for a break.
So you had Beatle mania then on top of Ghoulardi
mania, and Ghoulardi milkshakes at Manners and
the bumper stickers and the other promotional
things that came out the book covers and cups
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #19:
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When we were growing up, Ghoulardi was
everything. Anything with Ghoulardi on it, the
Manners Big Ghoulardi, anything like that, buttons,
anything with Ghoulardi on it, was cherished.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #9:
What did people talk about in 1964? Two things:
Ghoulardi and the Beatles. Anything else, who
cares?
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #1
EVERYBODY WHO SHOWED POPEYE cartoons, The
Little Rascals or the Three Stooges had a host who
did that. And they were local celebrities.
TOM FERAN #14:
You had Captain Penny doing his Clubhouse for
Kids on channel 5, you had Barnaby on channel
three for kids, and Woodrow the Woodsman as his
sidekick, you didn’t have as much news.
TOM FERAN #15:
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A TV personality could become iconic and would
make an appearance at a restaurant or similar
place, usually it was a restaurant, a Kenny Kings or
a Manners, and signed pictures of themselves and
autographed, and really could draw a crowd.
TOM FERAN #16:
You could have Barnaby doing an invisible pet
parade and draw 8,000
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #10:
And we had Ghoulardi, so we already had a star in
town.
RICH HELDENFELS #10:
It was really fast, and it hit really fast. The word of
mouth on this things must have been
gigantic…because the numbers just leaped, and
again we’re talking about a time period where
people, in a lot of ways this was an early to bed
kind of town in a lot of ways and even though it’s
on the weekend it’s still you’ve gotta get up and do
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everything you put off during the week, and there
was an audience for this. A bigger audience than
there was for Johnny Carson…so it was a sudden
phenomenon and fed on itself because one of the
great things about having a show like this in a local
market was Ernie could be out doing public
appearances, he could be out doing g the sports
teams, you know, the Ghoulardi all stars, he could
be at your local market openings…this was
someone that you’re not only seeing on TV, but
you’re able to go see him in your town in a way
that you couldn’t with a Johnny Carson, for
instance.
SOT BIG CHUCK #12
Sometimes, I would be rolling the opening of the
show, his music, and we would take a shot of an
empty stool, he still wasn’t there. He would sit in
the bar and when he would see the news go off
and the commercials come on, sometimes he
would see that and sometimes he wouldn’t, so he
looks up and he sees the empty stool, and I hear
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him running down the hallway (stomps feet)
“boom boom boom boom” , he’s putting his
moustache on, (laughs), he would do that every so
often.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #7:
He brought these films out, and he didn’t even care
about the show. He’d come out, do his little bit,
and then he would walk down a couple of doors to
a place called either Pierre’s or Seagram’s, a bar on
Euclid Avenue, he’d sit there and watch TV and
when they’d go to the break (gestures) “ok, I’ll be
right back” He’d put his martini down, come back
do a little shtick on the air, and then go back to his
gamer of dominoes. So he really didn’t care that
much about the character.
SOT BIG CHUCK #13
The bar was right next-door; you didn’t have to go
very far.
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TOM FERAN #6:
Through ’63, he just got bigger and bigger, and the
station knew that it had a Golden Goose. And they
put him on in the afternoon on a weekday show;
against Captain Penny and Barnaby who were the
big kids hosts. And it didn’t really work…it lost
something for that audience and the show was
changed a little bit, but very clever, they also
started the Saturday afternoon show that DID work
because it caught another audience, it caught
people who would watch Friday and Saturday.
TOM FERAN #20:
Ernie apparently did not like to do a lot of show
prep, he was not a workaholic. He would play off
things that were presented to him when he came
in to do the show. And so it was very important to
have the people who were around him having fun
with the show and contributing to it, and it really
seems that it became a vehicle for other people at
the station to exercise their creativity.
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MIKE OLSZEWSKI #2:
It’s not a joke…when Ghoulardi went on the air, the
crime rate in Cleveland dropped 50%, not only
because the criminals were home watching, but so
were their victims.
SOT BOB WELLS #2
During the time that Ernie was on the air in the
early 60s, his rating, or share OF THE AUDIENCE
was 75% of the audience on Friday nights from
11:30 to 1 o’clock. Now you didn’t have the
fractionalization of the audience, you know, cable
and all the rest of it at that time, but just an
amazing record. Time magazine was doing an
article on him and other horror shock hosts around
the country, of which there were many at the time,
and he was on the cover that week, so, he was a
tremendous talent, there never has been anybody
before him or since him
SOT BIG CHUCK #8
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Ernie did that accent and talked about the movie
for two weeks, and got tired of it. He had nothing
to lose, they had to pay him, and so he said “Don’t
watch this movie, it’s the worst movie you’ve ever
seen it’s a waste of your time, you might as well go
to bed.” And no one had ever said anything like
that on television, and it caught on, and he just ran
with it from there.
RALPH TARSITANO #2:
On television, I saw that show, and I couldn’t
believe what I saw.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #21:
My cousins and I used to watch him…we’d stay
over somebody’s house and watch him, and he’d
show these things that he’d blow up on TV, and
we’d be like “let’s send him a hat,” so right away
we’d run to try to create something for Ghoulardi,
see, that was the great thing about Ghoulardi, it
wasn’t just that he was creative, he spurred your
creativity. Kids would send in models and “Boom!”
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RALPH TARSITANO #3:
Then I started watching it myself, and I took a
Zippo lighter, and we had some material that was
photographic aluminum…and you can enlarge on
it..and so I took a picture of him and I put it on and
I mailed it to him. And we talked about that later
when I got a job there.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #13
Sop there was never any “pushing” with Ernie on
the air…If you think about a lot of other horror
hosts at the time, they were very aggressive, they
were very pushing forward (turns to camera and
jumps at it) “Good eeeevening, leeetle kids….” You
know, that kind of Count Floyd type of thing. Well
Ernie was so kinda laid back (sits back in chair) it
was almost kinda like “hey come on in and see
what …” and that also by the way fits
Cleveland…let’s bring this home a little bit.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #11
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You could be an intellectual and watch Ghoulardi
and come away and say there’s something going on
there, and you could just be a bunch of kids having
fun in the basement, and watch it and enjoy it.
You know, in comedic terms that’s like crack
cocaine…that’s you know, you’re gonna get every
addict in the room with that.
SOT BIG CHUCK #27
So I would say if you can make it for a year in
Cleveland television, you got it made because they
don’t want to see you go. If you’re there for a year,
they don’t want you to do anything else but that.
RON GARSTECK #1:
You know, you just liked to watch him because he
was like, you know, kinda cool and nutty and that.
He was only on for three years, and I can’t believe,
you know, with the stuff that I, the t-shirts and
stuff that I do, people all over the United States
you know, order it.
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TOM FERAN #30:
Cool it with the boom booms…you’d always have
to cool it with the boom booms.
TOM FERAN #29:
Stay sick…turn blue..ovaday…which uh, it’s OVA
DAY… you wanna get it right, uh, knif, Oxnard.
TOM FERAN #22 & 23:
OvaDay was an Ernie-ism, a Ghoulardi-ism and that
and that came from one of the engineers at the
station who was from Pennsylvania and talked like
that.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #5:
It was still incredibly creative television, it was
wonderful stuff that would reach out and grab you
and say “look this is your window on Cleveland, this
is what’s happening, we have this crazy sense of
humor, this is Mad Magazine, this is everything
you’ve ever wanted, and we’re all gonna have a big
laugh about this. He was wonderful.
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ROBERT THOMPSON 10:
“Let’s face it: most of this local production was
atrocious, was terrible, was like a textbook of bad
production. The writing was bad, the acting was
over the top, the mistakes that were made, stuff
would fall over and all the rest of it, it was almost a
parody oftentimes.”
ROBERT THOMPSON 11:
“I go back and look at some of the stuff that I have
the fondest memory of, from my Chicago
upbringing, and it’s terrible…Ray with this goose
and this duck, it’s carrying lettuce around? I mean
it’s Kafka-esque. I mean the only way that you
could say anything good about it is that it’s just so
trippy that it’s kind of, uh, funny. But of all the
programming, and I study TV for a living, I have
watched a lost of TV in my 50 years, of all of the
programming I have ever seen, I have a stronger
affection for that stuff than for anything else out
there. It’s terrible, I didn’t really ever learn
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anything, it’s a bunch of cartoons and puppets and
goofy people, but something was going on there.”
ROBERT THOMPSON 13:
“The next big thing would be: did we lose anything
when these productions shut down in our sense of
community, civic pride? And I really thing we did. I
mean I wouldn’t say, if I was the mayor of a city I
probably wouldn’t put on the top list of things that
was hurting my city the fact that we didn’t do any
local children’s TV production. But there was sense
back then, every had their kinds of, you were the
city of Bozo the Clown, Garfield Goose and Ray
Rainer, or you were the city of Ghoulardi, or you
were the city of the Magic Miner or Buddy the
Pirate or whatever…
ROBERT THOMPSON 14:
“And it was possible that you’d actually run into
those people in the physical space that you
encountered. I’ll never forget as a kid, we were out
on a weekend vacation somewhere and I actually
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ran into the Ringmaster of our local franchise of
Bozo the Clown. And that was one of the most
spectacular experiences of my childhood. but it
was like in the old days when sports teams were
really kind of based in a city, and the people who
played on those teams actually perhaps lived in
that city, it gave a sense, that you know, a city has
a culture based on do they have a great symphony
orchestra, do they have an opera, is there a good
museum, I mean all the things that kind of make a
community a cultural place…the thing that puts the
“there” there.” And one of the things was this local
programming. And especially since a lot of this
stuff would play daily, so these characters really
became a part of the fabric of the existences, and
when you take that away, you know, it’s kind of the
equivalent of what’s happened with a lot of
cuisine, so many of us now eat from a menu that’s
prepared in the lab, or general headquarters. The
Applebees, the McDonalds, the whatever. I can
stay in a Red Roof inn in New Orleans or a Red Roof
Inn in the town I grew up in, and until I walk out
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the door I don’t know where I am. And I think the
same is true for what’s happened to the
disappearance of local programming, children’s
programming is better than it was when I was a kid,
it is more careful about what it teaches kids, it’s
more educational, it’s certainly better
produced…it’s certainly better written…. but it’s so
homogenous. Dora is all over the world…and all of
these other types of programs and I do think that
while they may not know it, a kid growing up today
is slightly more impoverished in that regard
because they don’t have those kinds of crazy local
things being made in their backyard.”
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PART FIVE: ZANY IS AS ZANY
DOES
SOT BIG CHUCK #20
The Cleveland police department told us that crime
on Friday nights was lower than any other night of
the week because of Ernie, even criminals were
watching him. (laughs) Everybody watched
Ghoulardi.
SOT BIG CHUCK #25
It bowed in the control room window, glass that
thick, went “boom” (gestures), and it was bright
you couldn’t see and then the smoke and then I
heard the cameramen yelling, I see them running
out of the studio, and when the smoke would clear
I would see flames. We got every fire extinguisher
in the building, every one; we emptied it because
we were trying to put it out ourselves. We didn’t
want to call the fire department.
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SOT BIG CHUCK #9
TV8, after that, we were live, they lived in mortal
fear of what he might do. His ratings were so high,
they were afraid to can him, and that’s how it
began.
RALPH TARSITANO #4:
He actually announced in a booth with his voice,
different things, commercials or upcoming
programs, and here’s a fella sitting on a motorcycle
on a Saturday, it was a Honda, and he’s flying
through the studio going all over the place….up and
down the hallways and I think what happened was
an immediate attraction, we got along very well
together.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #16:
Now keep in mind this was a man who took a
motorcycle into the lobby of a TV station, and rode
it into the TV station. And they had actually issued
a memo, that was hanging in his house, saying
there will be no motorcycle in our lobby.
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TOM FERAN #5:
January 1963 was a record cold snowy month, and
period in Cleveland and TV viewership was
especially high because the city was in a long
newspaper strike that continued until spring so
there wasn’t any kind of coverage, you know,
initially of Ghoulardi becoming a sensation it was
really a word of mouth phenomenon.
RALPH TARSITANO:
The closer you got, the more fun you had, and the
more you liked Ernie. And then what you found
was on Friday nights, if you had nothing to do, Bob
Kasarda, Michael Wagner, and myself, we would
show up at the TV station at 11:30 at night, and
we’d sit down next to him, egging him on, you
know, throwing footballs at him and throwing
baseballs at him, and pretty soon something
started clicking, and you have Big Chuck inside and
he’s working from the inside on him through the
back of the studio, and away it went…
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SOT BOB WELLS #4
So, now Chuck was an engineer during the
Ghoulardi days, and he was the one that instituted
things like sticking Ernie into the film, you know,
like fighting the spiders that’s coming at him and all
of that so he knew all that stuff.
TOM FERAN #21:
So you would have Bob Soinski, who was a film
editor at channel 8, and he came up with the idea
of doing film drop ins in the movies. So if threw
would be a car chase scene, they would drop in a
scene of old time cars ramming into each other
head on, or a train wreck, or he found the famous
Papa Oo Mow Mow, the Gurning Man from a facial
contortion contests in Whales, that I guess is still
held every year.
RALPH TARSITANO #23:
He (Ernie) gets in the studio and they set him up
and he walking, like if Flash Gordon is in a cave, and
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he’s looking around, Ernie would be next to him
saying “cmon follow me, I think we go around the
next corner”. And you know, Flash Gordon’s
walking around the corner.
RICH HELDENFELS #3:
He would be hosting movies and they would be
fooling around so much they couldn’t finish the
movie that was scheduled that day, and they
ended up using Friday to show the ends of all the
movies they had failed to finish during the week.
SOT BIG CHUCK #16
“What size pants do you wear?” And I tell him, and
I said why? So he goes (holds hand up toward
camera like “never mind”) “What size shirt do you
wear?” And I said, “Ernie, I’m not doing anything
on television.” Se he sent away for, he called for
an Indians uniform, cause he wanted me to do the
batting coach. And I said, “I’m not going to do it. “ I
was terrified, I really was, I’m not joking…. I
was…so got three big guys form the studio crew
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and he said “look, we have tape time right now and
we’re gonna do this, and you’re gonna do it
willingly or we’re gonna put the suit on you, and I
thought “what the hell?” So they grabbed me, and
they were gonna, you know, try to get my pants
off, so I said “oh,” It was easier to try to do that
(laughs). I was sure I was going to flop but Ernie
just said you know, just be natural and go with it.
SOT BIG CHUCK #17
And when I was doing it, I would just swing hard,
and every camera, we had three cameras, and
every time I’d swing hard they’d all duck (cringes)
behind the camera like this, (laughs) cause if I ever
hit it…(laughs). So that’s how I started, things got
easier to do after that but it was always Ernie
setting it up so I didn’t have to produce or anything
so it was fairly easy and I really enjoyed that.
RICH HELDENFELS #22:
That led to the notorious Stranger sketch on
Ghoulardi, where they decided to make fun of how
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slow Gunsmoke seemed to have gotten when it
had gone from 30 minutes to an hour, so they did
basically an 18 minute sketch that Chuck says is
incredibly boring, which it is, but that was the
point.
RALPH TARSITANO #20:
I remember when the Three Stooges were on his
show, and they walked out and said Man, he’s
crazy…(laughs) I mean they couldn’t take him
(laughs)…
RALPH TARSITANO #24:
I get pulled over, so I’m thinking oh boy, license
and registration, so I pop open the glove
compartment, and its loaded with traffic tickets. I
would bet that somewhere between 50 and 75
traffic tickets are balled up and stuffed right in
there. I’m shaking in my boots, but luckily in news
you know most of the police officers and they said
“say hi to Ernie, we knew it was his car,” and I’
going “yeah, I’m a cameraman with him, I take the
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pictures,” So back to the studio and I chew Ernie
out, I go “you have all these tickets!” and he goes
“hey, I’m the king, what are they going to do to
me? I’m the king!”
TOM FERAN #8:
I think really through ’64 it was a supernova in
town…’65 it continued but at that point it has been
around for a while, Everything has a shelf life, even
Ghoulardi I think if he had continued doing it, if
Ernie Anderson had continued doing it, the
popularity would have continued indefinitely, but
not at the same level, and as Chuck tells it he
(Ernie) was starting to tire of it some, it became a
nuisance.
SOT BIG CHUCK #6
One time Rose Marie from the Dick Van Dyke show
came around doing promos, and Ernie said “quick,
rack up some of the stuff that they were doing, and
she liked what she saw and she said, “Can I make a
dub of it?” I made a dub of it and she took it to
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Steve Allen, and Steve Allen said, “I like these guys,
but I want the short fat bald guy, I can do the other
guy’s job.” So Tim went out there and he because
one of the man-in-the street characters, and when
Tim left the show folded.
RALPH TARSITANO #18:
Chuck, Chuck is a Cleveland guy like myself, and we
love Cleveland. And I didn’t ever think that Chuck
was going to leave. You know, he’s a local boy, and
that’s what we were, a bunch of local boys.
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PART SIX: THE ALL STARS
SOT BIG CHUCK #15
One day, when we played the Ghoulardi All Stars
and we played baseball, I used to hit batting
practice for the team, and some of the people
would know, see me in other games, that I usually
hit home runs, so they’d say “watch this guy, he
can really hit. “ So I’d purposely miss the ball…you
know, you’d throw it up and miss it, and then miss
it again and they’d get mad, and Ernie loved that,
so he wanted me to do that and I said “no, I’m not
going to do anything like that.”
RALPH TARSITANO #1:
I took a pay cut, started at channel 8, loved it, and
then along comes Ernie, he decides, he had this
Ghoulardi show going so we were taking pictures
for news and playing baseball.
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RALPH TARSITANO #6:
We got into everything, baseball, football,
basketball…We played the Cleveland Browns in
Basketball, it was unreal. It was great times.
RALPH TARSITANO #13:
When we played, Ernie wanted to win. He’d say
“Pops, we’re gonna win today.”
SOT BOB WELLS #8
We’d play almost at least a game a
week…depending on the season. Football,
baseball, basketball, and we had a lot of fun with
that.
RALPH TARSITANO #14:
69 days….71 baseball games. That bus was in front
of the station every night. And we had double
headers sometimes to make the 72.
SOT DICK GODDARD #1
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My channel 3 team played the channel 8 team in
softball, and I evidently had a good game, because
Ernie Anderson told Tarsitano “get Goddard on a
scholarship, we want him to play on our sports
teams. And it probably didn’t work but as it
turned out I did sign at 8 and I scheduled basketball
games for the team we did football, basketball.
Our football team was undefeated.
RALPH TARSITANO #12:
You realize “There’s 20,000 people here.” And you
wonder, man, I can’t believe this. But we saw it as
a team, we saw it as having fun, but Ernie saw it as
“we’re gonna raise money for people who need an
operation, people in need.” And he just had this
desire that he wanted to help people, by raising
money. And that’s what we did, my dad made sure
any game had to be for charity or we wouldn’t play
it.
SOT DICK GODDARD #4
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It was incredible, the amount of people that came
out to see Ernie Anderson and the Ghoulardi all
stars, with Big Chuck and Hoolihan. Yeah, it was..I
remember Vern Fuller was playing second base for
the Indians, he came out to play with us at one
game, I said now Vern, they weren’t doing that
well, I said Vern, we’re gonna have a heckuva
crowd here. I hope you don’t get nervous. (laughs)
RALPH TARSITANO #10:
Big Chuck would hit a home run, I mean, everybody
was happy. Third game, he was smacking balls out
of the park. No one could figure out, how is this
guy hitting this ball so far, I mean even Ernie would
go crazy, ok? And so pretty soon we’re calling him
Big Chuck ,and so that’s how he got his name, Big
Chuck.
RALPH TARSITANO #9:
It was my dad making sure everyone was together,
there was fun there was laughter, there were no
fights, no misunderstandings, that was number1.
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Number two, the bus idea, keeping people
together, families coming out and I think what
happened was we became a family.
RALPH TARSITANO #7:
Ernie starts calling him “Pops”, and it got so big,
Ernie didn’t have the time to schedule things, and
so the relationship that worked out was my dad
had told him “look it, I think we should make this a
family affair, everybody has kids and they have a
wife, and girlfriends, so ,dad instituted having a
chartered bus with the same driver and they were
in front of the television station, and when you
were done with work, onto the bus you went. And
off we went to a game
SOT BOB WELLS #7
Unfortunately I was at SECOND BASE, and I kept
dropping the ball and he was the pitcher at the
time, he was not too happy with me. (laughs- looks
into camera) The PRESSURE, the PRESSURE!
(laughs)
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RALPH TARSITANO #11:
My dad took giant grapefruits and he painted them
white. And he put the little stripes on it, and he
snuck, and Ernie wanted to be pitcher at that
game, and so he sued to go from pitching to first
base…back and forth. And Ernie was up at bat, and
my father snuck this out to one of the Browns, and
told him you know to throw it, that thing he hit and
splattered everywhere, the crowd goes crazy.
Ernie, he had a ball, he says man pops, the was
great I’m gonna use that a lot. And so everyone
got involved, and everyone wanted to be part of a
have a joke going on.
RALPH TARSITANO #15:
We played a football game and it was a tough one,
and I think we were leading at half time, and we
went into one of the little rooms they set aside for
us, and Pops comes in with the wine, and we find
out the next day, one guy was playing with a
broken leg, and another one was playing with a
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broken arm and didn’t know it. And we won the
game, of course (laughs).
RALPH TARSITANO #8:
So what happened was, Ernie liked Ballentine Ale,
and two stores over was a kind of a bar
nightclub…and once in a while my job was to get
this giant garbage can, and they would fill it with
Ballentine Ale…with ice and that would be on the
back of the bus. And away we’d go…and come
back.
SOT DICK GODDARD #9
His dad (Tarts) had a vineyard up there and he
would bring jugs of wine so by the end of the
softball game, and I’m not big on wine, I might
have a beer now and then, but by the end of the
game nobody really cared what the score was who
won (laughs) those were wonderful days
though,..yeah….(pauses)
SOT DICK GODDARD #10
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We were tough…as long as we were playing the
faculty (laughs) they were older than we were at
the time (LAUGHS) we ran into a couple of All-
Ohio’s though and that settled our hash in a hurry.
RALPH TARSITANO #25:
Blepp Combs found out that a new professional
baseball team, the New York Mets, the players
didn’t like their uniforms. They rejected the
uniform, they wanted a different uniform. Bleep
Combs picks up the uniforms, and these are the
actual uniforms right here…and we were wearing
the original turned down uniforms of the Mets.
And they put Ernie's picture on here, you know, the
Ghoulardi, and here’s the Blepp Coombes…of
course this uniform is my das, Ernie had “coach”
put on here for him.
RALPH TARSITANO #22:
He took it one step further, ok? And he became
involved in the community…where these other
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hosts of horror shows, they just taped something
or they were live, and it was a fill in between a gap,
SOT DICK GODDARD #5
I’ll never forget, Ernie said, we’d been winning
basketball games, we were playing the local
faculty, and he said “Goddard…’m tied of playing,
Ernie thought he was this great athlete, he was
average LIKE most of us were, so he said “Give us
some competition!” I remember it was
Mansfield…so I called the guy down there and I
said, “we’re coming down this Saturday and I said
you know Ernie said, “We don’t want to play any
rum dums….” They had an All –Ohio Guy from
and they had Larry Huston who played for Ohio
state…these were the guys. We showed up down
there and after about five minutes I said “Ernie, are
these guys good enough?” I mean we could barely
get the ball up the floor.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #26:
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He was making an appearance after a game, it was
the Ghoulardi All Stars, and he would stand there
and sign autographs…and there was a big long line.
So the Mayor comes up with his daughter and he
says “Hi Ernie, I’m mayor so and so, …” and Ernie
says “well mayor so and so, that’s the end of the
line.” And he made them stand at the end of the
line. That took a lot of guts.
SOT BOB WELLS #9
I figure we raised…golly,..at least a quarter of a
million dollars over the time that we were playing.
RALPH TARSITANO #17:
And he says (Chuck) “Tarts, do you know who this
is? “ And I said no, I don’t know who it is. And he
said this is Marty. And I said Marty? And he said
yeah, you remember that game we played way
back when? And we were raising money for him to
have an operation? And I said yeah, yeah, I kinda
remember that, I said I took that picture, he was
this big with a nice cute little hat on, and he said
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Yeah. And the guy just stood there with tears in his
eyes, and he says I came into thank you, I came in
to thank everybody, I cam in today, I have a great
life today, and thank you. And that’s when you
start realizing what you were doing.
SOT DICK GODDARD #6
Those were wonderful days.
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PART SEVEN: PARMA PLACE
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #27:
And then when he’d hear these polkas, he’d listen
to Chuck’s polkas, and say, “what is this? You gotta
be kidding me!” And it became this joke between
he and Chuck that they let everybody else share on
the air,. And it was the greatest thing whenever
you’d hear that “Parma..?” And you’d hear barump
barump…The greatest thing about Ernie was that
he would play this stuff in the back ground, and I
never would have heard Duane Eddy’s Desert Rat
or so many other great songs, Abu Day, and things
like that without him playing it in the background.
TOM FERAN #3:
And then when Parma Place came on, it was
another nuclear, because the grown ups, or some
of the grown ups, didn’t like Parma Place, because
it was mocking out Parma they thought. And
others, including people from Parma, just thought
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that this was the greatest thing eve because you
wouldn’t see this kind of thing on TV, and the kind
of little touches that Chuck brought to it and that
Ernie had that were just, I thought, very well
observed. As a kid watching it I thought “wow, this
is really life well-observed and goofed on in a
terrific way.”
RICH HELDENFELS #14:
If much of the time he’s mocking the established,
the famous, the people who can sort of brush
aside his darts, now he’s attacking a portion of his
audience. And the things that’s working to his
advantage is that there were more people who
were contemptuous of Parma in his audience than
there were people in Parma, but it’s an interesting
change and it sets up, I think, the sort of
disenchantment that Ernie was starting to feel with
being in Cleveland.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #25:
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It took a lot of guts to put Ghoulardi on the air. A
lot of guts. I mean when you consider things like
how he was taking on an entire city, I mean the
entire city of Parma was angry with him at one
point. Well, the city fathers. He had a lot of fans in
Parma.
RICH HELDENFELS #13:
And here’s a completely inside Cleveland
joke…everything from the white socks to the look
of it, the references to the pink flamingoes, it’s
purely northeast Ohio in a way.
TOM FERAN #9:
It was Parma place that really re-upped him, it
refreshed him, it reinvigorated the whole franchise.
SOT DICK GODDARD #2
His show was so successful, of course you know
about the Parma stuff, and how it got so bad that
the superintendent of Parma schools people were
throwing white socks out on the basketball court,
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he said our kids are being humiliated, you gotta
knock it off. Uh, Jerry Kreigle, the handsome next
door neighbor, or whatever he was, but he really
established a following here that is still with us.
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PART EIGHT: OVEREXPOSED &
UNHAPPY
RICH HELDENFELS #12 & 11:
They tried to expand it to Toledo, so Ernie was
trying to do a Toledo version of the show and a
Cleveland version of the show…and the Toledo one
did not work. And he was very blunt that one of
the reasons why it didn’t work was that he just did
not know Toledo the way he knew Cleveland. He
could not put in the local references, he could not
make the local kinds of jokes that he was able to
make here. And I thin kit was also it’s just a
different town and there may be just a different
mindset sort of the irreverence or combative
quality in Cleveland that maybe the same thing
wasn’t in Toledo. So there are points where you
could see that it’s a real specific, I think he referred
to it as a very regional concept. And so you had to
keep it kind of focused on that and that was
something that Parma Place then fits that
perfectly.
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RICH HELDENFELS #17:
Outside forces were coming into play, outside
ownership that didn’t know, he would complain
that they didn’t know who the mayor was when he
was making jokes about the mayor, they didn’t
know who Dorothy Fuldheim was when he was
making jokes, of course they knew, but maybe they
didn’t appreciate it in the same way that someone
who had long lived here would. It’s kind of funny
again this coming from Ernie who was also an
outlander, but who at least at this time feels so
thoroughly identified with the community through
the charity events, and the public appearances, and
all that he’s doing, he really has that connection
but he’s got people telling him what to do…saying
Parma Place might offend people, maybe you
oughta dial that down….
RICH HELDENFELS #15:
Ernie did not like anyone else ever telling him what
to do. I think this was major factor, there were a
lot of things that came into play when he finally
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decided to leave but one of them was too many
people were telling him what to do and telling him
how to live his life.
RICH HELDENFELS #16:
He saw it as a much more casual thing in a business
that was getting a lot more somber
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PART NINE: DEATH TO
GHOULARDI!
TOM FERAN #10:
By the end of ’66 it was gone then, and it was
probably a shrewd move, you know, on Ernie’s
part, you know he said he couldn’t see himself
being a 60 year old Ghoulardi.
SOT DICK GODDARD #7
Well, he walked away and he went to Hollywood,
making two million dollars a year. He was the voice
of The Love Boat, if you remember that, The Carol
Burnette Show he did some announcing on there.
Golfing with all these really famous people. He was
showing up for work in tennis shoes blue jeans and
unshaven, making two million a year being the
voice for ABC. What a come down….(laughs)
TOM FERAN #12:
The cliché about death as a career move, you
know? It was sort of the equivalent of that, you
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know you kill off the character, and uh, and it
insured that it would never be tarnished I guess,
and um, and would always be remembered at the
peak you know, there wasn’t a fade out.
SOT BOB WELLS #5
So when they had auditions for his replacement, I
mean, I’m sitting there in the announce booth and
I’m seeing these characters dressed like Ghoulardi
going by the booth and they’re doing their
auditions and it was like you can’t imitate him…I
mean I know they tried like with Ghoul and Son of
Ghoul, and all the rest, but I mean let’s face it, it’s a
pale imitation OF THE MASTER. You know, he was
just a unique one of a kind.
SOT BOB WELLS #6
They looked at it and called us both up into the
office and said hey we liked what we saw…you’ve
got a team. We were like “Team?” Oh yeah,
TEAM! I didn’t insist on it, but since I had been
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there longer it became Hoolihan and Big Chuck.
SO…and that was like 13 years of doing that
SOT BIG CHUCK #18
They told us they wanted us a co-hosts Chuck &
Hoolie after Ernie left) and I says “Oh my God…”
(rubs forehead) it started all over again, I was
nervous…..
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PART TEN: GOING TO
CALIFORNIA
SOT BIG CHUCK #23
Didn’t cash a lot of his checks. After he left, he told
me to look in his desk to see if there’s anything,
and I said “yeah, there’s something here. There’s
about nine checks here.” (laughs) He just didn’t do
it, you know? You coulda asked me at any time in
the 60s how much money I had in my pocket and I
could tell ya to the penny, but Ernie’s leaving
paychecks around…he was great…one of a kind.
RICH HELDENFELS #1:
He was also kind of a restless guy, I think he didn’t,
until he finally settled in California, he seemed to
move around a lot. And also the indication that the
jobs he’d get, might not last as long as they might
have because Ernie was Ernie…so he came here,
there was work here, obviously he prospered not
only as Ghoulardi but as an announcer, as a
commercial pitchman, all those things, and he had
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some really good friends here, the friendship with
Tim Conway, for instance, lasted pretty much until
his death…
SOT BIG CHUCK #22
He was great. He was the original hippie. He was
making that money, and he didn’t know how much
he was making (in LA) and he didn’t want to know
how much he was making. One time I went with
him when I went out to visit him to a recording
session, and he came out and I said how much
money did you just make? And he said, “I have no
idea. It could be as little as $500 or as much as
$50,000, and I don’t want to know. He didn’t want
to know how much he was getting; he just wanted
to do the best he can at everything.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #8:
Toward the end of his life, I got to meet him. And I
presented him with a picture of Ghoulardi to sign,
now, he wanted to sign the back of it, and I said
you can’t sign the back of it, and he said “it’ll bleed
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through.” Yeah, backwards… but at any rate, he
signed it, and I said you forgot the “h”…its spelled
G H O U L A R D I. You forgot the “h”. He said “oh
no, he said I found out they trademarked that they
weren’t gonna make money off of me. So nay
authentic Ghoulardi autograph does not have an
“H”.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #20:
And Rita Vanrri says Ernie, this is Mike
Olszewski…and he says, and he’s got his cigarette
like this and he says “Olszewski? From
Parma!!???” And they said, “he’s ok, you can do
the interview.”
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #11:
You’re talking years later about this idiot wearing a
beard, that you glued on, saying all this crap, and
people still talk about it? And my question is why?
And the thing is, it’s hard to say why. But he was
just that kind of an entertainer, he was that
innovative.
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MIKE OLSZEWSKI #22:
It really strikes you when you’re looking at the list
of academy award nominated films in 2008 and
you see Ghoulardi films…so….what an amazing
character.
Robert Thompson 15:
“You know, we’re constantly arguing that you
should eat things that have been grown in your
own backyard, and try to shop in places where the
stuff hasn’t been shipped over in trucks, think
global but buy local, and all that kind of thing. But I
actually think there are times when that applies to
a local culture as well. It’s fine that we’ve got all
these really well produced Sesame Street things
where serious educators have figured out how to
teach our pre-schoolers how to say their ABCs, and
all that kind of stuff. But I think it’s useful to
balance that mass culture diet with something that
was actually made by your neighbors in the place
where you live. This country is already so confused
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about it’s own location because we move around
so much…I mean by definition we were a kind of
“Go west young man”, if it wouldn’t work here
you’d keep on moving…. the new statistic is that
people have ten jobs by the time they retire or
more…We’re constantly moving all over the place,
the interstate howdy actually gave us a circulation
system to do this, But this is such a huge country
that I think that a sense of place is really a valuable
thing.”
Robert Thompson 16:
But this is such a huge country that I think that a
sense of place is really a valuable thing.”
Robert Thompson 17:
“But this is such a huge country that I think that a
sense of place is really a valuable thing. And these
local TV shows really gave one that sense of place,
and whenever they closed down and went one
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almost got there sense that that place was a little
poorer as a result”
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PART ELEVEN: BENEDICTION
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #2
That was also the time when there was only three
or four channels that people got, so there was a
very good chance that whatever you were
watching, a lot of other people were watching…it
was a shared experience. In a three hundred-
channel universe there’s very little chance that
what you and I were watching last night was the
same thing.
TOM FERAN #17:
I think we’ve lost that sort of local, common
consciousness and ownership that we once had,
does that matter? I don’t know. Other things have
replaced them and not everybody ahs the same
cultural references.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #3
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What we’ve lost is sort of a common language, too.
Because these hosts not only made that
connection, they made the connection with the
same things that our parents watched. I mean you
think about it, what was children’s programming
for us? It WAS the Three Stooges, it WAS the Little
Rascals, it WAS Laurel & Hardy. This was the
entertainment of our parents, and in some cases
our grandparents. So there was a common
language, it was a shared language. And then what
came on after that? Reruns of shows our parents
watched…maybe the Andy Griffith show. Every
generation lived in Mayberry at some point. Every
generation had the Ricardo’s as neighbors at some
point. That’s gone.
RICH HELDENFELS #24:
He was a creature of a time and a place that is very
difficult to duplicate, and as technically crude as
some of the material may look, you can still see
there’s something going on there. Something
kind of remarkable. And the fact is it wasn’t just
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going on here, and it wasn’t just Ernie,..Ernie was
Cleveland’s guy, but you had people whether
through experimentation or what just creating this
kind of bond with audiences, we haven’t even
talked about kid show hosts, for instance, Some of
those were Ernie targets, Ernie would give Captain
Penny a hard time. But one other reason that
Ernie’s works is that Ernie had those other local
people to needle. That if you put the show on now
you don’t have those targets, you’ve got the news
people ,sure, but maybe you’ve got Robin
Swoboda, you’ve got a few others out there, Fred
Griffith, but you don’t have this sort of range of
people that the audience knows all of them too.
RICH HELDENFELS #18:
There’s a sense that this was something that’s
uniquely ours, uniquely Cleveland’s, that you don’t
see those things anymore. Now the fundamental
production done by stations is local news and
that’s a very different kind of setup and a very
different kind of personality. you can’t have a
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Ghoulardi on a local newscast, the closest you can
get to that in local news is the funny weatherman,
and even that, as weather has become an even
more important part, the funny weatherman is not
what it once was.
SOT DICK GODDARD #8
It’s sad…that it’s gone. They were the longest, I
think, of a local show like that ever. So I think if
there’s a category in the Guinness book, they
would fill that. It’s missed…I remember the
audiences coming in here….
RICH HELDENFELS #20:
And with networks asserting control over ever
more hours of the program schedule, and stations
ever more affiliated with networks and other
programmers, there’s a lot less real estate available
for that kind of thing too.
SOT BIG CHUCK #28
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It was something you had in common all those
years with your own family… we were on that TV
set. For them and for you, (long pause) It was a
run.
SOT DICK GODDARD #3
Well, it was so unique, and the kids today who are
not aware of Ghoulardi, they would not understand
the aura that surrounded Ernie Anderson, and that
show.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #4
They were just this wonderful connection that was
made. And a goofy connection too. It hit
everybody on a really goofy level. I grew up in New
York. We had the same thing. And I can remember
them to this day…officer Joe Boton showed the
Three Stooges, Capt Jack McCarthy showed Popeye
cartoons, Chuck McCann showed Laurel & Hardy,
this was my youth…this was what got me here..I
wouldn’t be sitting here now if it wasn’t for those
things, and I can give you the direct line that gets
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me to sitting in this chair. It starts with the fact
that I watched the Three Stooges, Three Stooges
introduced me to Laurel & Hardy, a comedy
team…two guys…hmmm…that introduced me to
Abbot & Costello, Abbot & Costello meet
Frankenstein introduced me to Dracula,
Frankenstein and the Wolfman. And then I was
watching Universal horror films. Gee…who else is
in Universal horror films? Basil Rathbone? What
did he do? He played Sherlock Holmes…that got
me into mystery stuff, the dominoes start to fall
when you have that kind of connection and
curiosity and common language. That’s gone.
Nobody knows about that anymore because the
culture moves very fast.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #10
There’s almost like a kind of a chemical thing with
comedy, that it captures the right thing at the right
time…it’s like Laurel & Hardy, ironically in comedy
two of the greatest figures, but if they were around
today they probably wouldn’t be successful
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because their brand of comedy does not hit. So
there’s a certain amount of Ghoulardi coming along
just at the gift time with just the right humor. It’s a
little bit before it’s time, from what I have seen of
it, because there’s sort of a hip, guerilla quality to
it. And so it somewhat predates, it’s almost perfect
for the generation that was coming up, it’s almost
perfect, I think that one of the reason this
generation that watched Ghoulardi that was in the
formative stage later listened to things like the
Firesign Theater and watched d Monty Python and
watched those sort of things. Ghoulardi was
almost a perfect training ground for that, because
it did have this kind of guerilla, off beat, aspect to
it. And it had an anti-authority to it, that there was
Ernie blowing things up, you tell him “don’t blow
things up,” well you know he’s going to blow
something up when he was told not to. Don’t ride
your motorcycle through the station; well you
know he’s going to ride the motorcycle. And it was
also of a time when television was such a wide-
open business, it had characters and it loved
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characters, you almost had to be a character to be
on television, you had to have that kind of
personality that came through the camera. And
Ernie had that, he was cool and he was hot at the
same time, and that’s a very difficult combination
to pull off.
TOM FERAN #18:
It was more fun in some ways then, when
everybody did have the common references and
they were specifically local things and you knew if
somebody came from Cleveland they’d know who
Ghoulardi was, or they’d know how to sing the Mr.
Jingaling song.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #24:
But I think that the important thing about Ernie
was…be creative. Show that you can be creative,
Show that you’re gonna do something that has
never been done before or that you’re gonna do it
better than anybody else. That was the great thing
about Ernie Anderson. That was the great thing
about Ghoulardi.
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MIKE OLSZEWSKI #3:
This was a guy who took everything and every rule
and just threw it out the window.
RALPH TARSITANO #21:
That show, just being so far off beat, you know, in
an era of beatnik time, ok? He fit in.
RICH HELDENFELS #2:
I think in terms of his success as a personality, even
when he wasn’t Ghoulardi, there was that
irreverence, there was that sense of not taking
things too seriously, in what in a lot of ways was a
fairly seriously minded medium even then.
SOT BIG CHUCK #21
Ernie influenced me more than any man on earth,
in my life. And he liked me very much, and he
didn’t like a lot of people. Ernie was an easy guy to
dislike. He was sorta gruff, but if he liked you…I
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mean he was great and genuine. He was basically a
nice guy, but like I say, he was crabby and he was
gruff.
RICH HELDENFELS #25:
And so it’s a real loss in a lot of ways, and again,
not just because of Ernie but because of how TV
itself has changed.
RALPH TARSITANO #19:
I don’t know. Maybe the salvation for television
today is to go back into local programming. And
that way touching the community. And that part of
it I don’t know what the answer is going to be, but
television today is in trouble. I don’t think
Ghoulardi would have made it today.
SOT MARK DAWIDZIAK #6
You know, it’d be kinda interesting to see it tried
again, because maybe all the things old are new
again. I think it could make a connection, As a
matter of fact, maybe it would be worth trying as
these local stations are having a more and more
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difficult time as the audience gets fragmented, it is
something special that makes the connection.
Maybe that’s something they should be thinking
about doing….(looks into camera) I’m available, by
the way, if anybody wants to hire…..
RICH HELDENFELS #21:
There are forces there that suggest that it’s
possible, that again, if the economics changed in
some way, that if our struggling economy changed
in a way that stations again had a little more
money, that if localism came back into ownership
of broadcasters, this kind of thing if it happened
today would more than likely be an internet
phenomenon, it would be somebody putting up
streaming video. Again, look at how local specific a
lot of things are on You Tube, look how local
specific guys can get on their own websites, and we
might see some of that as a regular broadcast
show., the cards are not for that right now.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #17:
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I think that it was a harmonic convergence of talent
in a lot ways. That’s the best way to put it.
SOT BIG CHUCK #10
It was 47 years. An incredible run, I think you’ll
never see again anywhere.
RICH HELDENFELS #19:
The possibility that local stations would want to put
on even more local programming because it gives
them something unique and something that a
departure from everything else. lathe same way
we’re seeing this in other media, we’re seeing a re-
emphasis on localism to provide something that
people can’t get online or can’t get form one of
those hundred cable stations out there or satellite
stations out there.
SOT BIG CHUCK #11
It was a great era. I was very glad I was a part of it.
MIKE OLSZEWSKI #18:
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And when we get together at these conventions
like Ghoulardifest, we’re not only embracing the
past, we’re embracing each other at the same time
and saying look where we’ve been, look what
we’ve shared, and we’ve shared in some of the
greatest television in the world. And we’re here to
celebrate that. We’re here to celebrate a truly
creative individual and the people who kept his
legacy alive.
TOM FERAN #28:
It was something that was unique to Cleveland, and
people identified with it, they embraced it and I
don’t think they want to let that go. And there’s no
reason really, that they should. So you have a
convention comes along and it’s a chance for
people to, not just watch it on television but hold
something in their hands and maybe take
something away, maybe meet the people in
person.
RON GARSTECK #2
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People remember the good old days, you know,
fun. It’s not like it is today. And like Chuck said at
the very first one, he says he saw everybody
smiling, the whole day, all you saw were people
laughing, and I think it’s the good old days that
people, you know, want to come back.
RON GARSTECK #3:
It’s fun, but it’s a lot of work. It’s fun to see, you
know, everybody happy and get a nice turnout, as
always, you know?
RON GARSTECK #5:
I can’t believe how big it is, you know, like, you
know, like 40 years later, you know? How big it
is…he (Chuck) never thought it would be that
popular again, Ernie, or the Ghoulardi face, you
know?
SOT BIG CHUCK #19
Ernie was only on the air for a little over three and
a half years, and here we are, forty some years
later, at Ghoulardifest (laughs)and there’s pictures
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of him on t-shirts, anything you….Ghoulardi LIVES!
I mean, he’s not dead.
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Robert Thompson 4:
“They know in their heart that is wasn’t (people
who watched this stuff) that it wasn’t very good, it
wasn’t by no means gonna win a Peabody award,
but they have an affection for it that is in many
ways stronger than for anything else they watched
during that period.”
Robert Thompson 5:
“All you have to do is mention the name of one of
their local TV shows and they’ll get a glazed look in
their eyes, and you can tell that they’re almost
feeling the warm Oatmeal in their tummies, and
the footie pajamas on their feet, when they were
watching that as a kid or when they stayed home
from school, or after school or whenever.”
Robert Thompson 9:
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The big question becomes, does this matter? Does
the loss of this maybe 30 years; maybe 40 years of
great local programming, is it something that we
should even mourn? Or is it just one of those
things that has changed and whatever? Well,
anybody that’s over 40 is going to mourn them just
like they’re going to mourn the disappearance of a
records tore…. because it was part of our
childhood, it was part of our culture…and we’re
nostalgic for it.
Robert Thompson 12:
“YOU KNOW, IF YOU TRY TO JUDGE SOMEONE’S
BABY BLANKET BY THE RULES OF GREAT TAPESTRY,
the baby blanket is not going to come out very
well. But it’s YOUR baby blanket…it’s the most
meangiful piece of textile you’ll probably ever
encounter. And I think the same is true with these
kids shows. Part of what made them so charming,
part of what we liked about them I think was their
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abject stupidity, their completely guileless sense of
not seeming to be aware of the fact that they were
making anything on the air that was going to
matter the minute that they went off the air. I
mean there is a sense of a kind of living, breathing
something going on in those shows that you don’t
get in beautiful episode of the Sopranos, or a
perfectly animated episode of SpongeBob, or
whatever, There was something about it that you
were never quite sure what could happen.
Robert Thompson 18:
“So the argument goes that networks are going to
have to cut down on the number of hours that they
produce, and that they’re going to have to some of
that time back to the locals, and the locals are
going to have to find ways to program them. So
the optimists in the world will so what they’re
going to suddenly do is, children’s programming
made right at home…more homegrown news,
public affairs, interviews, the teacher of the month
from the local district will get to do a program or a
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whatever. And I hope that’s true, from the
founding of the regulations of broadcasting in this
country, localism was high on the minds of
protecting…:
Robert Thompson 19:
“I hope these predictions that 10 years from now
that every city is going to have it’s own local kids
show, and it’s own local dance show and academic
game show and all the rest of it. But boy, I sure
wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that to
happen. I think a show like Ernie Anderson’s really
represent a certain chapter in American culture.
And for those of us who lived through it, we feel
really warmly about that chapter. But I don’t think
it’s going to be re-printed again.”
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