The "Piont" Was Laughter

Sometimes when “The Tech Guy” podcast is at its wildest, it reminds me of an old favorite local television program, but the memories of that didn’t get kicked into a higher gear until a couple of weeks ago, when I found out WBOQ in Gloucester, MA, had a familiar voice manning the morning drive, the guy who was once one of the voices of New England.

This story starts with the “TV Guide.” The real “TV Guide,” that is, the one founded by Walter Annenberg, not today’s magazine-sized “People” knockoff that knocks off IQ points when you read it, but the digest-sized one with the glossy pages of national stories enfolding a unique black-and-white print center that differed depending on where you lived. The Northern New England edition didn’t look like the Southern New England one, and differed from the New York City edition as opposed to the Adirondak edition and the Buffalo edition and the Schenectady edition, the eastern Pennsylvania edition, etc. They each had their own channels with their own programming and their own ads, no cookie-cutter cable series in sight. Most of this local programming showed up early in the morning. The coastal editions had boating and surf reports, the Midwest its farm journals, the mountains their hunting and fishing shows. And among the public affairs programs in the New England (later the Southern New England) edition was a little program squirreled away on weekend mornings called Ask the Manager. I got curious about that listing one fall day in 1978 and decided to tune in. It was a love affair that lasted two decades and a change of venue during which I had my mother record the show for me.

WSBK-TV38, an independent station, premiered this simple little diversion sometime in the 1970s with the concept of having the station manager, for a half hour each week, answer viewer questions via letters read by an offscreen entity. The offscreen entity was “the voice of WSBK,” the distinct baritone notes of announcer Dana Hersey. Once you heard Dana’s voice you never mistook him for anyone else. So many letters came in asking to see the person behind the voice that Hersey finally ended up on stage as well.

For its fans, “ATM,” as it was affectionately called, became a weekly habit occasionally disguised as a vaudeville act. Perhaps manager Bill Flynn wanted a static question-and-answer show, but later managers Joseph Dimino and Daniel Berkery loosened up the format so that testy viewers often shot off letters asking the guys to “stop goofing off and answer the questions.”

Those fools. It was the goofing off that gave the show its charm. Really, how was one to keep a straight face week after week plodding through the weekly letter (sometimes it was multiple weekly letters) asking when the Three Stooges were coming back on (or if they were on, when they would be shown at a better hour). WSBK’s premiere attraction in the Boston market was the broadcast of the Red Sox and Boston Bruins cames, but they were Boston’s telecast address for the Stooges for years, and when Larry, Moe and Curly were missing, the audience got restless without their fix. The next most highly requested show was Hopalong Cassidy, and those of you who have seen Hoppy endlessly bouncing along on the new digital subchannels probably won’t understand the frustration of fans who couldn’t understand that at that time William Boyd’s estate was holding up the reruns. Some days most of the letters were an endless litany of “can you get [fill in the blank series],” so to break up the monotony, some joking was inevitable and some weekends we got it in spades, whether it was Dana’s snarky remarks or Joe getting Dana in trouble for alleged snarky remarks or Dan tossing a mini-basketball in a hoop to make decisions. Sometimes it was hard to get to “the piont” (a running gag engendered by a typo in a letter). Once in a while, the letter routine was broken up by an interview with someone in Boston broadcasting or featuring some new technology: one show was about the then-new process of colorizing black and white films. Another introduced those new home video recorders in both flavors, VHS and Beta. (Yeah, we know which one won now.)

Sometimes the ATM joke was on someone else, mostly on Cliff Allen, the good-natured producer of the show, who was ribbed for eating too many doughnuts or being “yes-man” to the current manager. Basset-eyed Sean McDonough, the sports reporter, promoted to the reader’s chair when Dana took a sabbatical, brought deadpan, and often deadly, straight-faced humor to his role. And lest you think ATM was a boys’ only club, Meg Lavigne, the assistant manager, gave as good as she got—but with Cliff as the reader, especially if Leslie Savage was sitting at the desk, the shows were a bit tamer. Often a bit of shakeup at the desk brought unexpected fruit. A couple of shows had Dana in the manager’s chair squaring off against Sean, and one totally undisciplined effort had Carla Nolan in the reader’s seat while she and Dana had trouble sticking to the letters. (Along with Dana, Carla contributed one unforgettable visual the day that Dan Berkery’s successor, Stu Tauber, was late for an ATM taping and walked into the studio still in his National Guard uniform. Both she and Dana promptly snapped to attention and gave him a salute. The crew howled.) One of the usually unseen fan favorites on ATM was Kim, the floor director. Kim was camera-shy and the letter writers and the cast were always trying to coax her on stage. Once she skittered out like a timid deer and fixed Joe’s microphone,  a major victory for her fan club.

The cast’s family lives often crept into the broadcasts. Joe used to needle Dana about his small flock of chickens (“If there was such thing as a Gucci chicken, Dana would have it.”) and eggs from the Hersey flock often made their way to Dan’s ten children. The show followed Cliff’s bid for selectman and Kim’s trip on a sailing vessel. Dana’s wedding photos were shown on the program and later snapshots of his children, and I still wonder what Dan’s daughters said after the broadcast of an ATM where he complained about the girls’ predeliction for leaving training bras hanging all over the bathroom. I’ve yet to get that imagined, horrified “Daddeeeeeee” shriek out of my head.

Two of the show’s fun traditions were the annual “tour of the station” and the yearly Christmas show. The former was anchored by Dana, who brought the camera outside of the building to answer the oft-posed “who was Leo Birmingham” question (WSBK was located at 83 Leo Birmingham Parkway, an address I once could recite in my sleep, complete with ZIP code) to show people the plaque for Birmingham, a state official. He then proceeded to walk “us” through the station, showing everyone from the accountants to the film editors to the lady who ran the Chyron graphics that superimposed words on the screen. There would always be something goofy when he came to the manager’s office: once it was out on the roof. Not to mention there was the time Dana turned a cartwheel in the hallway…

The Christmas shows could be plain or sumptuous, depending on the year, and by the second half of the show all pretense of answering questions was gone and gag gifts were distributed—one year Joe got back his own tie, another year Dan was presented with a “Movie Loft” (Dana’s other WSBK gig, announcing the nightly movies) mug that, of course, as general manager, he had authorized the purchase of. Usually the Christmas show was done on the standard ATM office set, with its stock desk and chairs and the fake books at the rear, with a Christmas tree and maybe some garland in attendance—one year low-cal goodies were spread out on the desk, another year Dan lost all interest in answering letters and started singing Christmas carols instead—but one particular year Joe and Dana filmed three shows on a Christmasy set with an artificial fireplace, a Christmas tree, and two big wing-backed armchairs. They were drinking plain old Hood’s eggnog during the three shows, and by the time the third rolled around had such a fit of the giggles that everyone suspected it was spiked.

Another particularly amusing Christmas digression had “the guys”—Dan, Stu, Sean, Dana, and Cliff--sitting in a living room type set with a Christmas tree, just chatting what they were going to do for Christmas. Dana, of course, told about his usual pre-holiday expedition with a couple of close pals: they would go up to Freeport, Maine, have a nice dinner, and then, at midnight, do their shopping at L.L. Bean, which is open 24 hours. Dan would chat about his family’s “Christkindl” tradition: each one of the family would pull out the name of another family member out of a bowl right after Thanksgiving, and then would be that family member’s “Christkindl” until Christmas, doing nice things for them like folding their clothes, leaving them a chocolate, helping them with homework, etc. Sean then admitted he didn’t give gifts, only money, and when the rest of the guys turned on him, Stu just shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I’m Jewish.”

ATM was a WSBK fixture for years, and even had its imitators, the most famous being rival station WLVI’s Meet the Manager, which had two earnest hosts and no character whatsoever. Alas, time marched on and WSBK was bought by the old United Paramount Network. The barebones ATM set became covered in posters for UPN programming and very often the entire show was devoted to promoting said programming. More often the show was pre-empted for sports, then dwindled to once a month broadcast, and then took one last gasp in January of 1999. Sadly, a couple of weeks later ATM’s longtime producer Cliff Allen died of a heart attack.

So when, via that “newfangled thing” called Tune-In Radio, I listen while commuting in darkness to “Mornings with Dana and Mugs,” somewhere in the back of my mind, hearing to Dana Hersey trade banter between traffic reports and Jimmy Buffett, I can still recall those vintage Saturday mornings and Sunday evenings eagerly awaiting a new Ask the Manager and wondering what they’d be up to this week.

Miss it.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

More ATM and photos here.