Brokaw to Host ‘Meet the Press’ Until After Election
By David Inman
Question: With the recent death of Tim Russert, I was wondering who the other hosts of “Meet the Press” have been.
Answer: In order of appearance, we have Martha Rountree (1947- 53), Ned Brooks (1953-65), Lawrence E. Spivak (1966-75), Bill Monroe (1975-84), Roger Mudd and Marvin Kalb (1984-85), Marvin Kalb (1985- 87), Chris Wallace (1987-88), Garrick Utley (1989-91) and Tim Russert (1991-2008). Tom Brokaw will be moderating the show until after the November presidential election.
Q: I am a physician with many patients over 80. When I tell them there used to be a show called “Life Begins at 80,” no one remembers it. And then I realized that although I remember the title, I don’t remember what the show was about. Can you help?
A: “Life Begins at 80″ ran from 1950 until 1956, but for most of its run it was on the little-seen TV networks DuMont and (at least in those days) ABC. Many cities had CBS and NBC affiliates, but DuMont was common only on the East Coast, and ABC didn’t really begin adding affiliates until the late 1950s.
Anyway, the format was that of a panel show, where younger people (which was, let’s be honest, pretty much everybody) would write in to the panelists for advice. The host was Jack Barry, later of “The Joker’s Wild.” The panelists included two regulars, both over 80 – raconteur Fred Stein and actress Georgiana Carhart – and two guests. The general idea was that the older you get, the wiser you get. And the older I get, the more I tend to believe that’s exactly right!
Q: I remember seeing a movie in the late 1970s or early ’80s about a college fraternity prank gone wrong. An initiation goes bad and the student dies. There were no major stars in the movie from what I remember. Can you help tell me what the movie was?
A: That was the 1977 film “Fraternity Row,” which starred Gregory Harrison, Cliff Robertson and Paul Newman’s son, Scott, who would die at age 28 in 1978 of a drug overdose. The movie isn’t on video or DVD.
Q: When I was a kid I saw a movie about a doctor who had a daughter with a disease that made her face keep peeling off. So he would get young women, cut their faces off and transplant them onto his daughter’s face. This wouldn’t last long, and so he would do it over and over.
In the meantime, his daughter would wear this white mask. I remember her wandering around in a nightgown wearing the mask. Any idea of the title and if it’s on video or DVD?
A: Hmm – it probably isn’t “The Adventures of the Doctor with the Peeling-Face Daughter in a Nightgown.” I know! It’s the 1962 Spanish film “Gritos en la noche,” released in this country as “The Awful Dr. Orloff.” The cast includes many Spanish people and Howard Vernon as the doctor, who went around kidnapping attractive women in nightclubs. The things you do for your kids!
“The Awful Dr. Orloff” is on DVD.
Q: I watched the first episode of “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” on ABC Family, and I had a question about the songs they played during the dance. One of them had the lyric “never really mean those things I said, should’ve kept these things inside my head,” and the other had the line “like a breeze, you look amazing, suddenly you came around and caught my eye.” Can you help?
A: Both of those songs are by Sophia J. The first is “Nevermind,” and the second is “A Taste (The La La Song).”
Q: We are having a disagreement about the name of Ricky Ricardo’s nightclub on “I Love Lucy.” Help!
A: Originally it was the Tropicana, but later in the series it became Club Babalu.
Q: Quite a few years ago, I saw a movie in which Vincent Price was an undertaker and Peter Lorre was his assistant. I believe Vincent Price had no clients, so they would both go out in their horse-driven coach and would obtain customers illegally (for want of a better phrase). Can you tell me the name of this movie and whether it is on DVD?
A: That’s 1964′s “The Comedy of Terrors,” with Price, Lorre, Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone and Joyce Jameson. It’s on DVD.
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