Spent a lot of time these days bemoaning what seems like fairly dramatic memory loss. I used to pride myself on my memory - i was the best of my age - but for the last five years or so I have been unable to retain much at all. I partly attribute this to my 18-month exposure to Lithium, which wraps your mind up like a warm, dark blanket, protecting it, I suppose, from all sorts of harmful stimuli and impulses. Of course, that particular experience was not for me. As I found myself unable to remember conversations I had had mere days previously, I felt more helpless and vulnerable than ever. My emergence from that awful salt was such a revelation, let so much obscured light into my soul, that I simply never stopped to tally the effects, which seem to be a profound dulling of all of my previously daunted retention skills.
With that in mind, I was surprised today to discover that I could remember the names of my entire childhood local news crew. This came up after reading an essay on the Cleveland New Wave movement, written by Dave Thomas of Pere Ubu, in which he speaks of the power of local media. His thesis is that all of those great Cleveland bands from the mid-70s were psychologically pre-formed much earlier, in the sixties, by a shared exposure to Ghoulardi, a madcap beatnik Cleveland horror-show host (who oddly went on to become the voice of The Love Baot and the father of director, P.T. Anderson). All of those bands, Thomas claims, were children of Ghoulardi.
It made me think of my childhood, winter afternoon darkness waiting for my father to get home while the last whistling sounds of The Andy Griffith Show merged into Action Five News on WRAL-Raleigh. Though I always fought to change channels in order to watch reruns of Hogan's Heroes on Channel 40, we usually watched the news and shockingly, I can still recall the whole cast. There was local legend Charlie Gaddy as anchor. His pretty female co-anchor was Bobbie Batista, who eventually left for a fledgling cable channel known as CNN and who I recently saw hosting a retirement forum show on some obscure cable channel. Sports was anchored by Rich Brenner, who later appeared on some Greensboro channel when I was in college. His replacement, Tom Suiter, is still on the air. I once was in line with him at one of those roadside seafood markets, buying local shrimp. He was very outgoing and friendly. Weather, whose importance was never underestimated at my house, was done by Bob Debardelaben, who we felt bad for because his kids had cystic fibrosis, which meant that if you licked their foreheads they would taste salty and that they were going to die. Every year, he hosted a telethon locally and so we all knew about poor Bob Debardelaben's kids. In fourth grade, I wrote a paper about cystic fibrosis, inspired a great deal by our local weatherman. He was eventually replaced by young upstart Greg Fischel, who I understand is a grand old figure in local broadcasting today.
So, I'm mostly proud that I remember all of my local newspeople from the Carter administration. Also, I am curiously disturbed by the soundtrack that accompanied my involuntry long-term memory regression. All afternoon I found myself humming "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)" by Jim Croce, which was on an 8-track of Photographs and Memories that we had lying around the house those days. In fact, if pressed, I am sure I could go home a nd find that 8-track.
Strange that I could go online to read an essay about Pere Ubu and come away wistfully humming Jim Croce, that's all I'm saying. Memory is funny little game.
