In my History of Television class, we’re spending a day on 1970s local television using Beyond Our Control as our primary case study, and I’ve assigned the students this post to read about the series. It’s an adaptation of a presentation I delivered last year at the Locating Media Industries conference in London. A primary goal of the conference was to consider how a “focus on locality can help ground our understanding of how media industries are actually inhabited and lived,” so my presentation covered the local conditions that made BOC possible starting in the 1960s and how those conditions changed to bring about its end in 1986. I’ve just tinkered with the text a bit and added a list of suggested clips at the start.
I delivered a presentation this week for my department’s monthly Visual Cultures Workshop. This work emerged from my research into the origins of BOC, because in exploring the founding and evolution of WNDU, I stumbled across a parallel history of the origins of my own department, Film, Television, and Theatre. This was personally fascinating to me from the jump, and as I dug deeper, I found intriguing throughlines that connected BOC and FTT, particularly when it came to their respective relationships with WNDU and the vision for television that Father Hesburgh expressed upon the station’s dedication. Most of the FTT stuff likely won’t make it into the book, but I’ll probably pitch it to ND Magazine, since it’s a revealing slice of university and Arts & Letters history.
If you’d like to watch the narrated PowerPoint presentation, it’s embedded below. If you prefer an audio-only version, you can find it here (and from there you can download it via the down-arrow button on the top right). And if I talk too fast for you to keep up or you just favor text, you can read it here.
Because of some Zoom recording glitchiness, I cut out the clips from the video, except for at the end. If you want to see what I showed, I opened with three clips to help those not familiar with BOC understand the nature of its humor and production methods: one film-themed, one TV-themed, and one theatre-themed, in honor of FTT. The clip from the middle of the talk is an excerpt from “Donawho.” And I left in the ending clips, but the audio is faint; if you want to see them intact, you can see the original Hesburgh wraparounds here, and the final clip at the start of this (with all due apologies to those offended).
Just realized I haven’t posted in a while. A few holiday weeks off plus being buried in reading and taking notes from hundreds of documents will do that to a blog.
The documents I’m currently poring over were weekly single-page memos given the name “poop sheets” by BOC creator (and Army vet) Dave Williams, distributed to all company members across the 30ish weeks of the seasonal term. As to their function, Williams wrote at the start of the 1973-74 set: “Oftenstance, when an Achiever misses a meeting or goes into a 2-hour nod Thursday night at 7, he loses track of what the devil is going on. These weekly bulletins will help steer you in the paths of righteousness should you stray. Herein you will find announcements of meetings, special reminders, Success Hints!, typing errors, and oddments.”
Reading through these is a constant reminder of what a joy this project is for me, as both a historian and a human who is averse to boredom. In terms of the former, the poop sheets offer a treasure trove of information about each season, because Williams (and those who took over writing them after he died) meticulously detailed how things were progressing, from ad sales to production to publicity, such that you can trace out a distinctive narrative arc of progress across each season — well, usually more of a zig-zag than a neat arc. Williams describes at the end of the 1975-76 season that he used them to “congratulate, remind, philosophize, scold, amuse, announce and probably offend” as he tracked the company’s activities.
The sheets are also a tremendous testament to Williams’ ability to engage an audience stretching across the years from a 1970s teenager to a semi-senior academic fifty years later. His writing style is clever but never obtuse, and his humor is delightfully refined and silly in almost equal measure, with every sheet generating at least a few wry smiles and more than a few outright laughs. Just picking one example mostly at random from the first year’s set or I’ll never stop reading long enough to get this posted, Williams told the kids what to expect from their first attempt at selling commercial time: “Tempering somewhat that heady exhilaration which comes from walking into an Advertising Manager’s office and saying: ‘I represent WJA-TV…’ will be that magic moment when you are hurled bodily from that office with no contract” (December 11, 1967). He also skillfully highlighted well-known quotes, repeatedly using ones that seemed most germane, such as this passage written by Tom Wolfe presumably meant to point toward BOC’s love/hate relationship with the TV it ridiculed: “At the heart of every parody there is a gold ball of tribute. Even hostile parodies admit the target has a distinct voice.”
Most evidently, how much the show, the company, and the kids meant to Williams leaps off of every page, not least in the time he put into writing each sheet but most substantially in the stern yet forgiving ways in which he points out student failures. No matter how critical he was in describing how the season would be lost if the kids didn’t shape up, he was still always seeking to encourage, never to disparage. And because he was so witty, and so clearly on their side, he could call the kids out for unruly behavior without it coming across as mean-spirited, like when he wrote in March 1973 after an unproductive Saturday session: “Too much time spent on set-ups, and your little practical jokes … the cleverness of which would make you an absolute wow at any fifth grade party. (Have you tried the one where you pull the chair out from someone sitting down?).”
Williams concluded each season with a final parting thought, “much like the thoughtful mortician who checks to be sure the smile is firmly set on the corpse before he closes the lid,” he wrote in May 1976. Two years prior, he bid farewell to that season’s company with this: “It has been nearly a year since some of you walked into the interview room to face us, a recorder, a Polaroid camera and a bowl of cookies. And now, we’ve given you all that we have to give. We warned you that it would be fun, and we promised you that there would be tears, and we predicted the unpredictable. We scarred most of you psychologically … and some of you physically. We sweated, cursed, giggled, bled, threatened, apologized, sighed, cried and very nearly collapsed at times. And no one on the outside will ever understand what it’s like being on the inside.” Thanks to his prolific, expressive writing (and all the BOCers who preserved these sheets so we could read them today*), Dave Williams has at least helped me understand it a little bit.
If you’ve managed to read this far, you deserve a clip as a reward, so here’s one wherein its poop sheet apperance helped me better understand how Beyond Our Control was evolving aesthetically in the mid-1970s. In a February 1976 entry, Williams assesses a Saturday production session and laments a few sketches that were “good ideas perhaps dragged out beyond any reasonable length.” He then praises “Walsh’s Vegetables” in contrast, “with its terse, every-line-a-joke style and the visually-interesting mix of studio and film.” He continues that the lesson going forward for the show would be to produce “more short studio bits” and “more studio-film mixes and fewer long-winded pure studio bits.” I’ll have to look for how that worked in practice when I’m done with the documents and poring over video instead. In the meantime, please enjoy David Simkins as John Walsh, true vegetable lover, warning us about the sad state of endangered vegetable species. The sketch was directed by the teen David Sutton, and if you enjoy it, you have a way to reward the adult David Sutton, who became a pioneering pet photographer, author, songwriter, and builder of cigar box guitars and today could use some help.
*If you’d like to see a bunch of poop sheets, head to the BOC website and click on a season. If you want just one to see what they look like, check out the first one from the 1975-76 season. I’ll close this post out the way Williams did at the very end of that season’s poop sheets:
The title for Beyond Our Control stemmed from the routine announcement when a logistical or technical difficulty arose, i.e. “Due to circumstances beyond our control,” something wasn’t going as planned. CBS News producer Fred Friendly titled his 1967 book about the failings of profit-driven broadcast journalism Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control. . ., so the saying was surely top of mind when Dave Williams and his creative team of teenagers were devising in the fall of that year what BOC would be when it started airing in January 1968.
Before they settled on Beyond Our Control, though, and even apparently before they had settled on the creative mission to parody television, Williams wrote up a memo proposing guidelines for possible titles:
I wish I could have been in the room (or in Dave Williams’ head) to learn how Beyond Our Control was chosen, but this memo gets us pretty close to the answer. A clever but not coy title that is easy to convey in publicity and raises connotations of a program offering the perspective of a spectator seeking to probe the motley sight of TV’s diversions, with an accent on the light and humorous? Beyond Our Control nailed it.
That title is also a generous gift to anyone (me) trying to analyze the meaning of everything behind the production. BOC was fundamentally about control — bestowing it upon teenagers, trusting them with it, contending with the consequences when they lost it. The “our” also signified creative ownership and empowerment while implicitly drawing lines that designated who stood beyond its boundaries. The fact that it could get beyond their control also signalled to viewers that they couldn’t predict what would appear on their TV screens next, and if they didn’t like that, well, they should take command of channel switching themselves.
Or maybe Dave Williams just thought it sounded cool? Who knows.
The YouTube caption written by David Simkins about this 1975 sketch reads, “This is a parody of a hellaciously cheesy locally produced late-night monster movie show that aired briefly in South Bend. The original was called “Klara Kackle’s Kreepy Kauldron” and it was produced by a small time religious station. What you’ll see here is as close to the real thing as we could manage. We managed very well.” Simkins portrayed the titular host, Hanna Hag, and what he was parodying is described by Paul Gerard Kennedy on IMDb as “John Michaels as ‘Klara Kackel’ present[ing] movies on [WMSH]-TV Channel 46, South Bend, Indiana between 1974-1976. Klara was a man dressed up as a witch with a high-pitched gruff voice. She welcomed her ‘little dearies’ to the show tending a smoking, bubbling cauldron with rubber chickens sticking out of it. She stirred it with her broomstick while occasional rubber bats flew by.” As the thumbnail image here indicates in catching Simkins in the process of transforming into a werewolf (triggered by a particularly bright street lamp), the segment includes a few parodies of classic horror movies. See the Invisible Man eat dinner! (Only you won’t see him, of course.)
For more info about Klara Kackle’s Kreepy Kauldron, check out this post from the Classic Film and TV Café blog. You can also read about one boy’s brief in-person interaction with Klara Kackle here: “I must have been 4 or 5, and she was greeting fans at the local Goldblatt’s department store. When it was my turn in line, she looked me in the eye and laughed diabolically. I jumped back several feet and ran, never to come back.”
One of BOC’s most locally notable sketches was the “Golden Dome Heist,” which aired in 1980. Company members report that some South Benders actually believed it was a real news report, and they called into the station and even contacted the police for more information. “It sounds almost too incredible to be true,” indeed.
BOC’s own War of the Worlds scenario also reportedly got the attention of the FCC, which reminded the station that it was a regulatory violation to purport to break into regular programming with breaking news when it was in fact “fake news.” As ever, BOC was ahead of its time.
For the rest of time, I’ll think of Notre Dame as “a place where education is synonymous with learning.” Also, maybe when my book is out, the university will replace Mary at the top of the Dome with a giant-sized bust of Rita Moreno for just a few days to help me publicize it.
According to Tim Daugherty, who portrayed commenter Ralph R. Glunk, his character was based on WGN’s elder statesmen commenter Len O’Connor. News anchor Wendell Baker was played by Circus Szalewski (née Dennis Mooney), while the pawn shop scene featured Heidi Moser as Barbara Brambell, reporting live from Big Ben’s Big Barter Pawn Shop in Bremen and interviewing Ben Buchanan (alliteration fans, rejoice!), who was played by Daniel Waters.
I’ve got a draft of the first chapter, and I’ll share the introduction to it here. The key word there is “draft.” It’s early days and everything could change significantly, but I wanted to start the book out with the institutional entities that were in place before Beyond Our Control even started and identify how they helped support and shape what BOC became. So here’s the opening tease for it.
“There’s a rumor going around that during the ‘80s and ‘90s a frequently asked question in Hollywood film circles was ‘Where’s South Bend, Indiana, and why are so many young filmmakers coming out of that place?’ If the answer to the first part of the question was easy to figure out, the second part wasn’t. There were no great film schools in South Bend — no renowned theater groups or actor’s workshops and no plausible explanation for the plethora of talent pouring out of the little town in middle-America. There was only the implausible, the impossible, the absurd explanation that a group of kids had somehow captured the keys to a local television station and clung to them for the next 18 years.” — Lou Pierce, South Bend Tribune, 2001[1]
A pro-business non-profit organization’s support of a commercial television program on a station owned by Catholic university in which teenagers mocked corporations, advertising, and authority figures seems nearly as implausible as kids holding station keys hostage for nearly two decades. Yet that formula is essentially the answer to the second part of Lou Pierce’s question. What made these unprecedented circumstances possible in South Bend? This chapter focuses on the institutional conditions that enabled Beyond Our Control to flourish, from the city itself to the national educational association that sponsored it and the local television station that housed it.
A starting point is the apparent vacuity of South Bend that Pierce describes. A region that offered more for young people to do likely wouldn’t have been able to funnel so many creative kids into a television project. But also, South Bend wasn’t just any old struggling Rust Best town. The unique components that defined the city’s collapsing environment actually helped to fuel the satire that drove BOC forward. The show’s young participants were able to see on their very streets the material conditions of their deteriorating town and draw connections between that and how television typically glossed over economic deficiencies.
Beyond Our Control’s sponsoring organization, Junior Achievement, would also be inclined to gloss over any struggles under capitalism because it was founded to teach children that free enterprise and industrialism were the bedrocks of the United States and its democratic ideals. The lure of socialism had to be combatted by teaching the future voters of America about its wrongheaded ways, and the most productive route to that would be to give young people real-world experiences in entrepreneurship so they could see first-hand how individualism trumped collectivism. While JA’s support was crucial for providing a stable structure for a successful, long-running television production, it also laid bare the ways in which BOC itself and the wider South Bend community benefited from a collective effort over any individualistic motivations, including in how it earned money for its young participants at a time and place in which jobs for teens could be hard to come by. That plus BOC’s fundamental mockery of one of America’s most thriving postwar businesses produced occasional strains within the JA and BOC relationship, but that in turn taught the company members how to navigate multifaceted professional structures.
Such lessons were more than the founders of BOC’s television station may have originally intended, but WNDU-TV and its owner, the University of Notre Dame, provided the space for Beyond Our Control’s production because of their commitment to an educational mission. WNDU also had a financial imperative, which the commercial ad sales that JA’s structure enabled helped to contribute to, but BOC never could have afforded the cost of studio time they used without some station altruism. As with JA, that relationship could have been endangered due to the occasional disharmony between the young producers and the station’s staffers, but navigating those professional relationships to ensure that the show could go on taught BOCers more than any textbook could.
Overall, the unique character of each of these institutional spaces was fundamental not just to Beyond Our Control’s mere existence but just as much to its ability to thrive for nearly two decades. Yet the relationships BOC forged with them were never simple nor without challenge. Within and between each of these entities, there were tensions and cracks. But from that variegated foundation grew knowledge, insight, and critical thinking – as well as humor — that would not have existed otherwise.
The cover of a 1922 booklet produced by the city of South Bend in anticipation of the city’s centennial1976-77 company’s annual cast photo atop the rubble of a demolished South Bend building that had been a home for Junior Achievement meetings.1977 JA Banquet program from a BOC collection featuring arrows doodled through JA executives’ heads but a squiggly frame around WNDU GM William Thomas Hamilton
[1] Lou Pierce, South Bend Tribune, August 22, 2001, http://www.beyondourcontrol.org/boc2/pages/bitsandpiecespages/bitsandpieces2001/loupiercearticle.html
I’ve begun writing the first chapter of the book, which will focus on the institutional contexts that fostered Beyond Our Control, specifically the city of South Bend, Junior Achievement, and WNDU. About South Bend in the 1970s, as you might already know, things weren’t great! But contrary to the conventional wisdom, it wasn’t solely the Studebaker car company’s fault. Please go read all of Joseph Molnar’s fascinating “More People” series to better understand how population declines and White Flight were at the heart of South Bend’s problems during BOC’s lifespan. But regardless of the confirmable fallout from Studebaker’s collapse on the city’s civic health, and despite wider deindustrialization affecting not just South Bend but the entire industrial Midwest, Studebaker would carry almost singular blame for the city’s struggles within South Bend’s collective psyche for decades to come. Such lingering resentment of Studebaker is clear in BOC’s “1959 Studefaker!” sketch, which aired in 1970, seven years after the company’s closure.
The disparity between the car’s decrepit state and the voiceover’s bright focus on the future comes across as a combined rebuke to Studebaker’s 1950s arrogance and an elegy for any hopes that an actual young couple would be able to enjoy the surviving tokens of South Bend’s famed past.
Incidentally, this sketch was reportedly the only one in the show’s history that stirred up the threat of legal action toward WNDU. The owners of the Dew Drop Inn objected to the editing’s juxataposition of their restaurant with the Pink Pussycat, which locals would have recognized as a strip club, claiming that the sketch defamed their legitimate establishment. Sales advisor Joe Dundon described being called to the station manager’s office, genuinely nervous about what WNDU’s lawyer would report about the potential legal consequences of the kids’ mockery. He and Dave Williams cued up the tape; 15 seconds in, the lawyer started to snicker, then emitted a full belly laugh as the car hit the streets. At the end of the sketch, he exclaimed, “Let them sue!” Joe and Dave were prepared to issue an apology on next week’s show if the Dew Drop Inn demanded it, but they never heard back from the owners again.
More importantly, this sketch indicates that Beyond Our Control offered a lifeline for the area’s most creative youth, not simply in offering something to do on a regular basis but more broadly providing a place for them to convey their frustrations through an originative outlet. 1974-75 company member Charles Mueller described the BOC comedy ethos as “the release of tension of kids knowing bullshit when they see it and not having any outlet. Because you know, South Bend, Indiana, was pretty straight-laced in the 70s. And I think Beyond Our Control gave us the latitude to release that tension.” The BOCers recognized that the city was being torn down around them seemingly without concern for the impact on their futures, but they tried to build something of value upon its rubble.
Photo source: Elizabeth Loring. Foegley Plaza at the South Bend Civic Theatre
The primary adult advisors for BOC were Dave Williams, whose day job at WNDU was promotions director, and in terms of BOC, today we would call him a showrunner or head writer; Denny Laughlin, who was an art director for WNDU and served in that capacity for BOC; and Joe Dundon, an account executive for the station who advised the students on ad sales. Dave died in 1977, Denny died in 2000, and Joe died last week.
Because his biggest impact was behind the scenes in equipping kids with the skills needed to sell ad time, you wouldn’t necessarily see the fruits of Joe Dundon’s BOC labor on screen (outside of random bits like the clip below). Yet Beyond Our Control itself would not be on that screen without him. After all, in commercial television, the product for sale is advertising time, not the program itself, and if you don’t have advertisers on board, your show doesn’t air. However, while Joe assisted students by providing contact info and conversation templates, he left the most important stage of sales — closing — to them. As BOCer Diane Werts described it to me: “You’d call and you’d say, you know, Joe Dundon at WNDU gave me your number. I’m working on the WNDU TV show, blah blah blah, I’d like to come in and talk to you about what our show can do for you. So, yes, it gave you that level of entrée in various ways, I think. Because there was a professional organization behind all these crazy kids.”
For a show overflowing with unique aspects, its commercial foundation might be the most striking to me. There were many teen-produced media projects driven by an educational mission throughout the 20th Century in the U.S., but they were typically on non-profit and public media platforms, not a commercial network affiliate. Within the epic tussle between art and commerce that is American entertainment history, BOC is thus a lesson that the goal to earn a profit doesn’t have to override the achievement of a public good, but it does take altrustic people in positions of power to tip the balance toward the public good. Joe Dundon was one of those people.
Working with Joe, the kids learned the practical skill of selling ads, but the deeper underlying lessons were about professionalism, how to graciously represent yourself and those invested in you, how to communicate with adults, including active listening, and the value of aspiring for something beyond yourself. Joe Dundon supplied the necessary wisdom, encouragement, trust, generosity, empathy, and savvy to hundreds of teenagers to make all of that possible and thereby funneled each of those qualities back out into the public sphere through them.
It’s also fair to say that this book project wouldn’t be happening without Joe. Many BOCers have conveyed that in their post-2000 reunion era, he was the connective tissue, providing space for them to gather together during migrations back to South Bend and helping to foster a sense of community that united company members from years apart as if they had worked closely together. Joe knew everyone’s name no matter what year they were in BOC, and while that’s the mark of a good salesman, it’s also the sign of a great teacher in showing each and every student you care enough about them to remember that simple but essential detail about you. Without the now-interconnected matrix of BOCers that he helped to foster, I’d struggle to put all the necessary pieces together to tell the story of the show’s entire run, so I’ll be forever grateful to Joe for providing that glue.
Last year, I had the privilege of interviewing Joe for the project, and he told me “The only reason I did BOC was because I felt like one of them. […] I really enjoyed it. It was a creative outlet that I really enjoyed being a part of.” For my Sketch of the Moment (new name to cover for my sporadic posting, ha), here he is in an introductory opening for the 1971 season, wherein BOCers climb out of the TV set and swarm Joe and his beloved wife Viki.
