SNL Mementos: Messages in a Bottle From the 1970s

"STARRING THE NOT READY FOR Prime Time Players!"

With that weekly declaration announcer Don Pardo in the Fall of 1975 introduced to the world the cast of Saturday Night Live, seven relatively unknown comic talents who would usher an entire generation into the concept of counter-culture sketch comedy. 

In the show's infancy, Pardo's intro was always preceded by a cold open featuring its first breakout star, Chevy Chase, as a stumbling, bumbling President Gerald Ford, falling over his desk, a chair, an easel or anything else in sight before rising up to shout, "Live from New York! It's Saturday Night!"

Sometimes cutting, sometimes cruel, Chase's pratfalls were rooted in President Lyndon B. Johnson's legendary quip that Jerry Ford in college had played too much football without a helmet. That and oft-heard claim that Ford couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time.

Live from New York!

More than a little of SNL's ire was rooted in the 38th president's refusal of a bailout when New York City faced bankruptcy in 1975. "Ford to City: Drop Dead," a Daily News headline famously blared.

Early SNL was very New York, very edgy and maybe just bit angry. It was a rough era.

President Richard Nixon, whom Ford replaced, had resigned in disgrace a year earlier, done in by the Watergate Scandal, his advisors' criminality and his failed cover-up.

Nixon had plucked Ford from the US House of Representatives to replace his original veep, Spiro T. Agnew. He'd been forced to resign after being accused of crimes dating back to his days as Baltimore County Executive and governor of Maryland and pleading no contest to a single charge of tax evasion.

Ford, almost immediately upon becoming president, pardoned Nixon.

So Ford, the unelected president, was at the top of SNL's shit list. He wasn't alone. The Not Ready for Prime Time Players gleefully skewered everyone and everything, though somehow they persuaded Ford's press secretary, Ron Nessen, to take a turn as guest host. But, in those pre-internet, pre-DVD, primordial days of video recording technology, if you didn't see it, you probably missed it.

The not ready for prime time cast

Sorry, no backsies.

Some of those early hi-jinx were captured in a comedy LP issued after that first season, starring Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner. 

It ran the gamut from Ford to amphetamines, from sex to guns to gays, spoofed commercials and the news. It also included a skit called "Word Association" featuring Chase interviewing guest Richard Pryor for a janitorial job.

It contained language that was inappropriate then. It would -- in most decent circles -- be forbidden today.

A steal at $6.95.

About a year later, SNL issued a kind of scrapbook of those early days: Saturday Night Live, Host: Francisco Franco.

Franco had ruled Spain since 1939 when he took power with the help of forces dispatched by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. 

His drawn out death in November of '75 after a protracted series of illnesses became fodder for Chase's Weekend Update, allowing him to breathlessly report weekly that "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!"

Viewed 48 years later, the book is a tangible treasure trove of primordial SNL shtick. It's all there including a legendary Star Trek parody featuring Belushi as Captain James T. Kirk and Chase as Mr. Spock, the Killer Bees, snooty theatre critic Leonard Pinth-Garnell and Morris as Idi "VD" Amin. There's even a never-seen sketch riffing on Hamburger Helper called "Placenta Helper."

Perhaps it was pulled for questionable... taste. Here are some other highlights:

• Curtin, Aykroyd and Newman as The Coneheads

• Radner's Barbara Walters-inspired Baba Wawa

• Aykroyd's manic Super Bass-O-Matic '76 pitch man

• The Weekend Update News Team, and John Belushi's Samurai

• Chase's "Landshark!"

• And the inevitable encounter between the "President Ford" and President Ford

The enmity between SNL and the late Mr. Ford, who died in December 2006 -- and by all reports is still dead -- may have faded, but it's not fully abated.

SNL's 50th Anniversary program, aired on Feb. 16, 2025, featured a kind of flashback mashup chronology of how things have changed since the show first aired in Autumn '75, as all that doom and gloom settled upon the city and the nation, set first to the tune of the Irene Cara hit "Fame."

It ended with the cast gathered on stage, waving I 💗 NY flags while singing Les Miserables' "One Day More," beneath a banner that read, "New York to Ford: Who's Dead Now?"

-- Follow me on no longer Twitter @paperboyarchive

The Not Ready for Prime Time '75 Islanders, an Initiation

YOU ALWAYS REMEMBER your first time, even if things didn't turn out the way you imagined they would.

What I recall most about my first time was the helmets. I didn't expect to see so many of them wearing helmets.

Fifty years ago this week, an unfathomable interval in the life of a sports fan, I went to my first National Hockey League game: the Vancouver Canucks vs. the New York Islanders, at Long Island's Nassau Coliseum.

I'm not sure how many hockey games I'd watched before that on New York's WOR, channel 9. SportsChannel wasn't yet a thing. We wouldn't get cable TV for another six years. 

But I was turning 10 and my folks had an idea. For my birthday I got a stick, a street hockey ball, a pair of roller skates and my first Islanders jersey: royal blue with orange and white trim. That and they were taking me and some pals to my very first game. 

We lived about eight miles from the coliseum and the entire guest list could fit in two good-sized 70s-era sedans. I recall writing out the invites myself, promising each kid would get a box lunch... KFC-style fried chicken in a cardboard box.

Dad had been a Rangers fan, so for him this was something of a concession. The Islanders were still very much the new kids in town. The coli had opened only a few years earlier, first housing the peripatetic Nets of the American Basketball Association and their locally-grown star, Julius Erving.

The Islanders were born out of NHL necessity, or maybe panic, in 1972 because the rival World Hockey Association was setting up and Long Island looked ripe for its New York franchise.

The visitors in their road blues.

Nope said Nassau County's government. They wanted the NHL and the NHL wanted Long Island, even if it was Rangers country. The Blue Shirts' objection to that incursion was mollified by money, a $4 million indemnity fee paid just to allow the Islanders on their turf. 

Their first year was bad. Very very bad. The Isles went 12-60-6, setting league records for the most losses and worst overall record. But badness had a reward and his name was Denis Potvin, the first overall pick in the 1973 amateur draft and a future Hockey Hall of Fame defenseman.

He stiffened the defense as head coach Al Arbour started building a systemically-sound hockey team. They won just seven more games in year two, but reduced their goals allowed by 100. The 74-75 season would be a great leap forward.

Bolstered by the acquisitions of bona fide NHL forwards J.P. Parise and Jude Drouin a month earlier they played better hockey, even if their overall talent level was still relatively modest. First season holdovers Billy Harris and Bobby Nystrom were their big guns on offense, joined by a burly rookie out of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, future Hall-member Clark Gillies.

On game day, their record stood at 24-20-15. Portentously their previous three games had been a tie and two losses.

We filed into our mid-ice seats in time to watch the players come out for their warmups, the Islanders in their home whites, the Canucks in their road blues with that weird hockey stick in-a-rink crest.

And there were lots of guys wearing helmets. Remember this was 1975. Helmets were hardly commonplace and wouldn't become mandatory for a few years yet, even then only for players who entered the league after June 1, 1979. 

Me and my friends were a bit perplexed. But this was hockey and here we were. Time to drop the puck.

The lineups.

LET'S GO ISLANDERS!!!

Fleet rookie Bobby Bourne put the home team on the board at 12:33 of the first period, his 14th goal of the season, with assists from Garry Howatt and Bert Marshall. Each team killed a two-minute holding penalty and the first period ended 1-0 Islanders.

Enter John Gould.

Enter who?

John Gould, right wing for the Canucks, in the midst of what would be the best season of his 9-year NHL career. Acquired a year earlier from the Buffalo Sabres for 6'3, 220-lbs defenseman Jerry "King Kong" Korab, Gould, 25, was coming off a season where he'd notched a modest 13 goals and 12 assists.

Today would sort of be his coming out party, starting with a tying goal at 4:24 of the second period, with assists from Mike Robitaille and Paulin Bordeleau. 

Each side killed a minor penalty during that middle stanza and the game went to the third knotted at one. 

For 10 minutes the tension mounted as the time ran down. Then Gould scored his second, beating the not yet legendary Billy Smith, breaking the tie with assists from Bob Dailey and Chris Oddleifson. Seven minutes later Gould tallied another, with a helping hand from Oddleifson and Gregg Boddy. It was his first NHL hat trick. 

With slightly more than three minutes left, it was 3-1 Vancouver. Crap!

His 1976 Topps card.

Arbour gambled, pulling Smith for an extra skater. His gambit backfired. Canucks center Gerry Meehan scored an EN and that was that. Unhappy birthday to me.

Gould had goals 24, 25 and 26, en route to a career-high 34, and 65 total points. He racked up 32 goals and 59 points the next year, after which his production faded away. 

The Canucks finished first in their division, going 38-32-10. But Vancouver was vanquished in the quarter-finals by the Montreal Canadiens, four games to one.

The Islanders, on the other hand, were poised to shock the hockey world. Finishing 33-25-22, they made the playoffs and knocked out the Rangers in a decisive first round game three, winning 11 seconds into overtime on a goal by Parise with an assist from Drouin.

They'd move on to face the Pittsburgh Penguins, lose the first three games of that series, then rally to take the next four. The Isles tried the same trick with the soon-to-be Stanley Cup champion Philadelphia Flyers, but their luck ran out in game seven of the semi-finals.

But they Islanders had served notice. Not yet the dynastic powerhouse they'd soon become, they'd be back. Armed with Potvin, Bourne, Gillies, Nystrom, Smith and more, led by Arbour, they'd be back. And so would I.

-- Follow me on no-longer Twitter @paperboyarchive

The End of the World Series Program As We Knew It

OCTOBER 1974: Gerald Ford was two months into his abbreviated presidency. The Muhammad Ali-George Foreman boxing match in Kinshasa, Zaire -- known as the Rumble in the Jungle -- was set for Oct. 30. 

Earthquake, in Sensurround!, starring Charleton Heston, Ava Gardner, Geneviève Bujold and Lorne Greene would strike America's movie theaters in November.

But something else was afoot, something far more subtle and pernicious, but to those of us of a particular bent: horrifically depressing.

Meh, before meh was even a thing.

Fifty years ago this month, Major League Baseball ended the era of team-produced World Series programs, subbing out the often charming, definitely distinct and occasionally iconic locally-designed and produced magazines for more uniform, corporate and nationally available... blah.

Yes, this is entirely about judging these books by their covers. But you only get one chance to make a good first impression. 

MLB's first cover art was a globe stand where the Earth is replaced by a baseball.

Inspired. Clever. Ooh. In other words, not good.

Who's playing in this series? Doesn't matter. And it wouldn't matter again for about 20 years and even then, well... feh.

Less than a decade earlier and from the same spherical starting point, the Los Angeles Dodgers had produced this bit of Project Gemini-inspired whimsy:

Truly out of this world.

Now artistry was banished in favor of mass produced, mass market product. At least they were up front about it, more or less.

"'1974 World Series marks an all-time first,'" the publication self-referentially declared on its page 3. "Previously the two teams involved in a World Series each published a separate program. '1974 World Series' represents the first joint World Series program. It is designed to tell the story of this year's major league baseball season and features both the East and West Division champions of the two leagues."

Yay.

It's tempting to say at least some of this was in response to frugal Charles O. Finley, then-owner of the then-two time defending champion then-Oakland A's.

The famously skin-flinty Finley just they year before had substantially just repurposed the team's joint scorecard and yearbook as its World Series program,  slapping American League Champions on the top left, New York Mets beneath "Oakland A's" at the top right, and re-labeling the bottom right "1973 World Series Souvenir Scorecard & Program."

The post-season publication was otherwise almost indistinguishable from its regular season predecessor.

 The regular season program

The not-so-different World Series edition

To be fair, the only somewhat less frugal Mets had repackaged one of their regular season game programs as their National League Championship Series program.

But when it came to the World Series, they issued a new magazine with split screen cover, the left side featuring a pensive skipper Yogi Berra, the right a photo of predecessor Gil Hodges and the team riding down Manhattan's Broadway amid a ticker tape parade celebrating their 1969 championship. Now that program was special.

Retro-perspective

And retrospective

More likely, the shift from local pubs to national had to do with the money to be had from national advertisers, and from sales to a national audience to which the new mags could be pitched. 

It wasn't a change for the better. Not for the public and, to be honest, not for those of us who collect, as part of the fun of that hobby is collecting things that are scarce. 

Those home-spun programs spoke of the teams that created them, their personas and places they played. More importantly, they spoke to their fans. 

The new generation shifted the game program vibe from Main Street shop owner to chain store shopping mall: deliberately faceless, representative of any town and any team, one size fits all, or -- in reality -- one size fits none.

Just how generic?

In the early '80s, baseball pulled its own Finley maneuver, taking the artwork created for the 1980 World Series program, a contest between the Philadelphia Phillies and Kansas City Royals, and re-using it three years later for the three-way AAA World Series involving the Tidewater Tides, Portland Beavers and Denver Bears.

From the grand stage...

... to AAA

Yes, the 1980 program artwork got demoted, and they didn't have to change anything about the image to do it.

They never really got better. In fact, as the years wore on, they got worse, more generic and more forgettable even as the digital publishing revolution allowed for tighter deadlines, more content, more recent content, contestant-specific covers and inevitably, higher prices.

Along the way Major League Baseball gained dominion over all the other post-season playoff programs, plus that of its mid-Summer classic, the All Star Game.

Product. Product. Product.

Montreal? Texas? Who knows?

Recognizably Pujols and Big Papi

Nowadays, we're kind of back to where we started: with team-specific looks, but they're soul-less mass produced representations of what once was, some with cover advertisements, and sometimes ironically shadowed by special stadium-only versions attempting to restore some of that old-time collectible exclusivity.

The 2016 Series program,
Wrigley Field edition

The 2019 series program, 
brought to you by YouTubeTV

Handsome zombies. You can buy the one for this year's showdown between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers online, or just look at it for free. 

-- Follow me @paperboyarchive on the social network formerly known as Twitter

Starliner's Big Problems With Its Little Rocket Engines

THRUSTERS, those tiny, un-sexy, worker bee rocket engines that help spacecraft make little attitudinal adjustments to keep them from crashing into things, burning up or skipping off into the void. 

The wondrous six LP Time/Life Records
audio history of space exploration up to
Apollo 11.

Like baseball umpires, editors, and sanitation workers, they're pretty much taken for granted as long as they don't make a bad call, miss a glaring mistake, go on strike or, you know, FAIL.

We put men on the moon, we've sent unmanned probes to Mars, we routinely send men and women to the International Space Station and bring them back without incident, and hardly anyone -- outside the world's various space programs -- ever thinks about those little rockets used for steering ships in the right direction.

Until now.

Now NASA has a thruster problem, or more precisely its contractor, Boeing Inc., has a thruster problem, a big, unsightly one with its ambitiously named Starliner spaceship, one that's left astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stranded on the ISS. It was supposed to be a three-hour tour an eight-day mission starting June 5.

It's August, and they're still up there.

So, basically, it's Gilligan's Island in space, where Starliner plays the S.S. Minnow, and every solution that's supposed to bring Williams and Wilmore home, only seems to prolong their stay.

Professor? Professor!

Where is Roy Hinkley when we need him? The man could fix anything with just two coconut shells and a stick of bamboo. 

But that was in the 1960 back when... back when... we knew how to build thrusters?

Yeah, we did. Pretty much.

I mean, sure things sometimes went awry, like in March of 1966 when future moon walker Neil Armstrong and fellow star explorer David Scott's Gemini 8 mission was foiled by a stuck thruster that sent them tumbling, astronaut-over-tea kettle, just as they docked with an Agena target vehicle. 

Gemini 8 approaches the Agena target booster, docks,
then spins wildly out of control with a stuck thruster.
From the full-color, hard cover book accompanying the Time Life record set.

Canny retro-rocket fire stopped the pin-wheeling before they blacked out from the high Gs, but burned most of their ship's fuel forcing an immediate return home. Immediately, but more importantly, home alive and not like Major Tom.

But just before that, NASA did something really really cool -- especially considering it was only late 1965 -- and had two Gemini spaceships 7 and 6A fly in close formation over the Earth.

It all seems simple now, but back in the day, that never been done before. But they got the chance after the failure of another Agena target vehicle scuttled the original Gemini 6 mission.

The two ships -- the 7 piloted by Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, 6A by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford -- flew three orbits while maintaining fixed distances sometimes as close a single foot between spacecraft, snapping photos of each other all the while.

Schirra and Stafford even managed to circle around their colleagues before heading home, while Borman and Lovell stayed out there in their cramped little vehicle for 14 days.

Gemini 6A circles Gemini 7 high above the Earth in December, '65.
From Time/Life's To the Moon companion book.

Thrusters!

The USSR claimed to have done something similar with its Vostock III and VI in 1962, but it was really more of a 5-kilometer flyby, according to the Encyclopedia Astronautica, as the two ships were different orbital planes and lacked the ability to fly in formation.

US thrusters for the win! 

We went to the moon, and around the moon, and back, docked with Skylab and with the Soviets, ran the whole space shuttle program from start to finish, building the ISS. We had unforgettable, tragic losses along the way, but nobody got stranded out there because of bad thrusters... until now.

Gemini 6A's Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford
welcome home Gemini 7's Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.
From the Time/Life book

Somehow the knowhow of 1965 has -- at least for one aerospace company -- become the lost art of 2024, and Starliner's name is seeming ever more ironic than aspirational.

In the immortal words of legendary starship engineer Montgomery Scott, "the more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

Here's to Wilmore and Williams coming home safely and soon.

-- Follow me on "Twitter," @paperboyarchive