Word: philco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first memories of China go back almost 50 years. Sitting in front of our 10-in. Philco television, over milk and peanut-butter sandwiches, my closest third-grade friends and I watched, with fascination and terror, the grainy news footage of Chinese soldiers crossing the Yalu River into Korea. It was 1950, the year after Mao Zedong and the communists had taken control of China, exiling General Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party to Taiwan. And now they were fighting...
...delighted I was to read the review of the biography of television producer Fred Coe [BOOKS, Aug. 18]. I was lucky to be his secretary at NBC television in 1950-51. He deserved his title as the "boy genius" of TV. Every Sunday night he produced the Philco Playhouse, presenting a one-hour drama. Fred's standards were high, and because he gave his utmost, all those around him did likewise. When his wife was expecting a baby, we on his staff urged Fred to name it either Phillip or Phyllis so the child's name would be "Phil...
...Kramer's reputation is stale, Coe's is forgotten, though as producer of Philco Playhouse and later for Playhouse 90, he was the primo impresario of TV drama. Jon Krampner's engrossing The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television (Rutgers University Press; 243 pages; $32.95) helps restore the stature of the Tennessean who made trouble in the studio and at home--he told his pregnant wife, "When the child is born, I want a divorce"--but was still one of TV's smartest, boldest pioneers...
Above all, Coe doted on writers. "He felt the writer was the center of the universe," said Horton Foote, whose The Trip to Bountiful aired on Philco before Coe produced it on Broadway. "Writers like to hear that." He encouraged writers to speak in their own voice. Paddy Chayefsky took Coe's advice and gave him Marty, starring Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand; the next day Chayefsky heard people mimicking the play's dialogue ("What do you feel like doin' tonight?" "I don't know. What do you feel like doin' tonight?"). The film version won the Oscar for Best...
Time traveling with Pat--back to the '50s, to the culture war of the cold war, with that sissy Adlai Stevenson orating in flickering grays on the Philco. Gonzaga did not make Buchanan a demagogue, but something in the school's inherent anger long ago and its bullying, underdog-wants-to-be-overdog righteousness went into Pat's brain, and came out nasty and dangerous...