Celebrity Bowling
Television in the 1970s made some people almost famous
Dear Readers:
A friend, recently recuperating from surgery, sent me a video link via Instagram and commented: “I don’t know if it’s the pain killers, but I am enjoying this show.” The show he was enjoying was Celebrity Bowling. He was working his way through the first few seasons on the Tubi TV streaming app. Well, one #celebritybowling video leads to another, and before long I found myself watching a nine-minute montage that included all 187 celebrities who appeared over the show’s run from 1971 through 1977.
One thing you learn from this cultural artifact is how loosely the word “celebrity” is used. There are a lot of Hollywood “stars” from that era who are entirely forgotten, outside their own families and hometown boosters. There are some whose face is vaguely familiar but whose name is not. That tall guy who played Jerry the dentist on the Bob Newhart Show, for example: Peter Bonerz. The original Riddler on the 1966 Batman movie: Frank Gorshin. The show featured a lot of B-Listers, but also some who found lasting fame: Ed Asner, Bob Newhart, Angie Dickinson, Leslie Nielsen, William Shatner, Alex Trebek . . . Some of them triggered memories from my TV childhood: Don Adams, Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie, Ruth Buzzi, Scatman Crothers, Arte Johnson, Gabe Kaplan, Gavin McLeod, Nipsey Russell, various members of the Brady Bunch, and the four Lennon Sisters.
If you are the kind of person who likes to watch almost-famous people in bad clothes struggle to roll a ball down a sixty-foot lane, set to electronic music you might hear at a hotel nightclub, you can watch that video on Instagram with this link:
There was a particular reason I kept watching all the way through the nine minutes: I just knew that in this coterie of 1970s TV stars there was likely to be a JoAnne Worley sighting. And sure enough, there she was at the end of the video (which I realized later had the stars in alphabetical order). There are probably not more than a half dozen readers on this list who remember JoAnne Worley. She became known for a role on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which as far as I can recall mainly involved her putting her index finger to a dimpled cheek and making a face. And yet. Word spread in my hometown when I was a kid that this comedienne who was on TV—and therefore extremely famous!—had grown up in our town. I had to take it on faith at that time. How would I have researched that? But people said it was true and I believed it. And now we can confirm it with one simple google search. JoAnne Worley, born 1937, Lowell, Indiana.
For years I assumed she was a one- or two-hit wonder. She was on Laugh-In, then Hollywood Squares, and that’s about it. Not true. She had a pretty good career as an actress. Lots of bit parts in films and TV shows and legitimate acting on stage. In 2011, she had a small role in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. She becomes Larry David’s temporary personal assistant. I’ve just reviewed this episode (Season 8, episode 4, in which Larry shows up at a funeral with a smiley face on his bald head) and can report that JoAnne does a fine job. She’s now 86, living in California, and has served as president of Actors and Others for Animals.
Did our town produce anyone else who became famous? As far as I can tell, no. JoAnne Worley is the most famous talent ever to emerge from Lowell, Indiana. I have no idea how well she bowled when she went on Celebrity Bowling. I’ve read that two of the Lennon Sisters set the record for lowest score, with 67, until Charles Nelson Reilly and Robert Clary notched a 66.
ANOTHER BLAST FROM THE SIXTIES: Tom Smothers died this week at 86. He brought a young Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Pat Paulsen, and Elaine May, among others, to write for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. From the NYT obit:
“Television is old and tired,” Mr. Smothers told McCall’s magazine in 1968. “Television is a lie. The people who censor our shows are all conditioned to a very scared way of thinking, which is reflected in the kind of programs the networks put on. Television should be as free as the movies, as the newspapers, as music to reflect what’s happening.”
Tom Smothers invited Pete Seeger onto the show for his first TV appearance since he was blacklisted in the 1950s, but CBS insisted that Seeger’s song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” be cut. Smothers got Seeger to come back for a second appearance later in the second season to sing the song, which was seen as a commentary on the doomed war in Vietnam.
CBS cancelled the show in 1969 and replaced it with Hee-Haw.
MORE BOWLING NEWS: I bowled for the first time in November at the very popular Bayside Bowl in Portland, Maine. I was struggling to find the strike zone. Third game, my whippersnapper nephew (depicted above) gets the hot hand. He strings together five strikes, hits his spares. He records a 225 to my 150. It was the talk of the family chat. A day that will live in infamy.
I was asked a few days later how I was holding up. You know what? This is what bowling is always like. Someone finds a groove, stays with it, and runs off a bunch of strikes. Someone else is stuck on a shot that worked just fine last week and now isn’t getting to the pocket, or is going onto the headpin and leaving nasty splits. What’s the adjustment? If you’re good, you find it quickly. If you’re lucky, you find it eventually. If you’re having one of those nights, you say “well, that’s bowling for ya.” That kind of struggle always makes me look forward to getting out for more practice. I have a dear bowling friend who insists that if he practices too much it only makes things worse. I think I’d bowl every day if I had lanes in my residence, as has been the case at the White House since Harry Truman’s days. I doubt recent presidents have made use of the lanes, and you might say that’s one more sign the country has gone off track—except that the most famous presidential bowling photo ever features a necktied, toe-over-the-foul-line Richard Nixon. The 1970s really were not America’s glory days, is what I’m saying here.
THE YEAR IN REVIEW: This was the year that Henry Kissinger finally died. I had the most abhorrent celebrity sighting of my life a few years ago when I was in a Cambridge restaurant and the old man himself shuffled in with a small entourage. It caused me to look back at his gruesome record of international carnage. I delved into some of it in a Baffler column we called “Dinner with a War Criminal.” Still relevant today, I think, especially as we witness the U.S.-supported brutality and crimes of Netanyahu against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
And while we’re looking at the dark side here, I’ve surveyed a couple of this year’s strangest episodes in political corruption for my year-end Baffler column: the mind-blowing George Santos story and the even more revealing Ken Paxton impeachment saga in Texas, in which the Republican-dominated Senate cleared him of twenty charges brought by the House. I was at a loss to come up with a term for the particular kind of corruption Paxton represents.
There are specific terms for most varieties of political corruption: bribery, extortion, fraud, racketeering, influence-peddling. We don’t yet have a word for the kind of mission-driven corruption that the Texas Senate ratified in September.
He brings a combination of typical grifting and service to cronies, in combination with the support of extremely ideological billionaires, wrapped up in phony Christian posturing, sanctioned by a Republican Party that puts an extremist agenda over the rule of law. That’s a potent combination! What should it be called? Any ideas?
The Baffler’s list of some of our best stories of 2023 is here. I know there’s at least one person who has read every single one of them: our web editor, the talented Mr. Webb.
Ace journalist Barry Yeoman puts together a list every year of some of his favorite magazine stories. You can check that out here.
For those who might have missed it, I spoke to Wisconsin Public Radio last month about that cookie story. The interview link is here.
WE DISCUSSED in last month’s newsletter an incident in Texas, probably illegal, in which a dead armadillo was transported and photographed for a certain Texas magazine. That provoked a comment from one of my most astute readers (OK, another multi-talented nephew!) that is worth sharing in full:
The photo you took was perfect, and you suffered nobly to get it, but we might also see something else in it. For most of the Eocene armadillos (xenarthra) lived in Antarctica, before crossing a land bridge (with yellow stripes?) into South America. Then around 6 million years ago the panamanian isthmus formed and they crossed into Central America, before arriving to that highway in Texas. They look helpless and disoriented, but they've been on the highway for so long, and covered so much more distance than our species has, the photo could be diorama in the natural history museum, showing them on the road, as always.
However, I would add that one of the disadvantages that armadillos have on Texas highways is that their fright reaction causes them to jump up in the air. That’s an unfortunate reflex when a car or truck is coming at you at 70 mph. I’ve also found my way to a CDC page on leprosy, which is now called Hansen’s disease, named for the Norwegian doctor who first identified, in 1873, the bacterium that causes leprosy. The CDC assures me that, even though some armadillos in the Southern United States carry the leprosy bacterium, “most people who come into contact with armadillos are unlikely to get Hansen’s disease.”
HAPPY NEW YEAR! Wishing all my readers a healthy 2024, with ardent hopes the election year does not end in another humiliation of American democracy. And, to borrow the catchphrase from fellow newsletter writer Caitlin Dewey, if you like this newsletter, forward it to a friend. If you don’t like this newsletter, send it to an enemy.
Wow, some of those celebrity bowlers make me look pretty good. Of course, I do have an excellent coach for a brother.