Word: peacocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just thinking about the summer of 1980 used to make NBC proud as a peacock. For 17 days beginning July 18, millions of Americans would be glued to their television sets, watching NBC'S coverage of the Moscow Olympics. The figures were dazzling: 1,210 commercial minutes spread over 152% hours of programming, advertising revenues of $170 million. What is more, a promotional blitz during the Games could give the network's fall lineup a rousing sendoff. Surveying his prospects a year ago, NBC President Fred Silverman predicted that the network would be in a "leadership position...
...last week NBC was more sparrow than peacock. Edgar H. Griffiths, chairman of parent company RCA, told stockholders at then-annual meeting that NBC would not be televising the Games "because the U.S. team is not scheduled to participate and because the President of the United States has so desired this to be the stance we take." The decision was expected, but it was sobering nonetheless. All told, the cancellation could cost NBC up to $70 million in lost profits and out-of-pocket expenses...
Misha, the Moscow mascot of the Summer Olympics, has been shaken by Jimmy Carter's Olympic boycott, and so has the NBC peacock. Now the shock waves have reached Postmaster General William F. Bolger, who last week withdrew all U.S. Olympic commemorative stamps, postcards and envelopes from the market "in support of national policy." Will the Olympic issues become hot collector's items like the 1918 upside-down airmail stamp, or even the less exotic 5? 1967 American Space Twins issue, which still commands $10 for a block of four? Not likely. Some 300 million Olympic stamps were...
Suddenly the merriment was gone, the cosmopolitan chatter, the exultations of triumph. In the postlude, longtime Mayor Robert Peacock confessed that the biggest event he could now look forward to was "a good night's sleep." Editor Ronald Landfried of the weekly Lake Placid News wrote of a "nagging feeling of melancholy." Librarian Therese Dixon admitted to a "tinge of sadness." She missed the foreigners who dropped in off Main Street to snatch a look at such papers as Le Monde, Corriere della Sera and the Neues Deutschland-publications ordered for the convenience of the Olympic crowd...
...evolution; yet the process of changing Homo erectus into Homo sedentarius is well under way. We sit; we watch; we listen. We sit, talk and read about what we have seen and heard. As a drama critic and former literary director of England's National Theater, Kenneth Peacock Tynan knows what keeps readers and audiences in their seats. He did, after all, conceive and produce Oh! Calcutta! Tynan can be glib, self-serving, tricky and loosely digressionary. But he is never dull. At 52, the graying provocateur describes himself as "a cricket-loving radical" and misses few opportunities...