I also mentioned Larry King. He jumped on to the national stage with an all night radio show on the Mutual network. It ran from midnight to 5:30. The first half of the show would feature a guest and call-ins. The second half was open phones. The last half hour, which very few stations carried, was just Larry talking with the morning Mutual news person and a meteorologist. Very informal, and a lot of fun.
For a while, King did both radio and CNN. Eventually, the radio show was cut to 11 pm to 2 am, and it was repeated at 2 am. It was awful. Stale, canned, boring, and tired.
Even so, Larry was the guy who kept the lights on at Mutual for a long time. If you wanted King's show, the network forced stations to take a lot of its other programming and it wasn't very good. Mutual went away shortly after King left the stage.
Late March marked the 45th anniversary of the $10,000 Pyramid on CBS. Very few of those early shows remain. The Game Show Network runs the $25,000 Pyramid weekday mornings. It's amazing how well those old shows hold up. Dick Clark was a great host. He moved the game along without getting in the way.
Walmart is renovating several of its Pennsylvania stores. It's something KMart and Sears didn't do. Who is on the verge of closing, and who dominates American retailing? Bon Ton is done. I'll have more on that soon.
Even though this next entry doesn't belong here... I was very sorry Barbara Bush passed away. She supported and championed literacy programs for decades. Bravo! I read where the Bush family spent millions of its own money helping libraries wrecked by Hurricane Harvey.
A great person and a great cause.
