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’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.
