On each broadcast day the line of teens hoping to appear on the show snaked around the block; some were granted entry and others denied. Carol Highsmith, photographer, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. . Clark weathered the hearings by not being fully transparent, and he avoided being indicted for criminal behavior. (Test Pattern). Learning how American Bandstand made rock n roll respectable. Emphasizing this sentiment, Philadelphian John Oates (of musical duo Hall & Oates) said, The show had such an impact on the music business, it set the tone and the pace for teenage style and attitude and everything else across America., Jordan McClain is Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication at Drexel University. He died on 5 August 2021 at his home in Sydney. In the early 1960s, a new collection of teen regulars succeeded Arlene Sullivan's generation on American Bandstand's dance floor. I knew I was different early on, but being with all these [Bandstand] friends, I came to terms with my feelings. He still had that in him until the evening before he passed away. Bandstand Diaries: The Philadelphia Years, 1956-1963 shares the fascinating story of how Dick Clark's American Bandstand and its millions of viewers catapulted its teenage dancers (called "the Regulars") to fame. Most of us would love her to do a Spotlight Dance once again and tell us know how she is doing today. Watch video clips of the American Bandstand dancers here. In fact, she was "the first female car racer at Cecil County Drag Strip," according. The History of American Bandstand. "So many of the regulars who jitterbugged on the show way, way back were there. I did get to know Annette Funicello [a Mouseketeer on the original Mickey Mouse Club], who came to the show. Clark claimed that the affiliates got greedy and took the time back to put their own material on where they got 100 percent of the revenue. BANDSTAND DIARIES is a coffee-table book that offers readers a nostalgic walk through those halcyon, memory-filled days when rock n roll became the soundtrack of a generation, when television was in grainy black and white and when a 45 RPM record cost less than 70 cents. e9 = new Object(); I can honestly say that I was the most blessed person in the world the day I met Norman and he and I became steady dance partners., Meeting Norman Known then as Carole Scaldeferri, Mrs. Spada was among the teens who jitterbugged and slow-danced their way to fame in a TV studio in Philadelphia, while host Dick Clark spun what are now oldies. For a time, she dated a neighborhood boy, Danny Rapp, lead singer of Danny & the Juniors, who had the hit song At the Hop., I was so afraid that I started trying to talk myself into being straight, Sullivan says. The screen would fill with black-and-white images of teenagers dancing, the room would fill with music and she was filled with delight. He discussed his brief stay in Hollywood trying to become an actor after he and Justine Carrelli cut a 45 rpm record together. They were introduced as a result of an email sent to the Fifties Web. Sharon Sultan Cutler, who grew up in New York and now lives in Chicago, is co-author of Bandstand Diaries: The Philadelphia Years 1956-1963. (Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune). Steve Colanero, 66, a West Philadelphia transplant in Palm Beach, Fla., posted on Facebook a picture from the 1980s of himself with Clark. They werent playing basketball. Ray Smith was one of the shows secretly gay dancers. Two of the regulars, Arlene Sullivan and Ray Smith, published the volume asBandstand Diaries: The Philadelphia Years, 1956-1963,with Sharon Sultan Cutler as a non-Bandstand-member co-author. After that, management at WFIL-TV/Channel 6 (46th & Market) in Philadelphia installed the clean-cut Dick Clark to take over the teen dance party show and renamed it "American Bandstand." Shore, Michael, with Dick Clark. LOS ANGELES - APRIL 1960: Host of the television show 'American Bandstand' Dick Clark appears in a scene with Michael Callan from the movie 'Because They're Young' which was released in April 1960. "I loved those kids," she says now, living with her husband on the Northwest Side of Chicago. She was a senior.and luckily on the Honor Roll. 28 talking about this. Via this network, which advertised itself as WFIL-adelphia, the show reached almost six million viewers in the Delaware Valley, the nations third-largest market at the time. But he feared that if the shows secret ever came out, Middle America would change the channel. They were real kids from Philly, and if you watched every day, you could tell who was breaking up and who was making up. The first book party was in November in where else? The news hit hard. Variety Shows I knew when couples broke up. In 1960, in an episode that seems incredibly tame by todays standards of greed and corruption, the two major television networks, NBC and CBS were exposed as having rigged their wildly popular primetime quiz shows. Being featured on the show all but guaranteed a spike in popularity; even before it moved to a national platform American Bandstand offered a remarkably large audience base for musicians, often generating national popular demand for a new group or single. Over the decades, American Bandstands location, air days, duration, and content changed. Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy, TheEncyclopedia It was a local show Philadelphia, Jersey, the Lehigh Valley [Pennsylvania]. we were like a little family together, and we all had something in common, and we all stuck together, and that made it easier for us.. "My heart hurts," said Gibson, a regular from 1959 to 1961. He said, 'In all my days, I never thought I would ever meet you, and here you are standing right in front of me.' Who died from American Bandstand? Wagon Train Website,