Nicest Kids in Town

by Delmont, Matthew F.

  Thanks to a three-week promotional campaign and the proximity of three high schools—West Catholic High for Girls, West Catholic High for Boys, and West Philadelphia High—Bandstand had no trouble filling the studio to its two-hundred-person capacity. Only two blocks from the studio, the predominately Irish and Italian teenage girls who attended West Catholic High for Girls became the most consistent visitors to Bandstand. Teenage boys from West Catholic High for Boys were nearly as close, as were boys and girls from West Philadelphia High School, a public school that enrolled mostly Jewish and black students. Teens from other schools and neighborhoods also visited Bandstand shortly after its debut, and teens from South and Southwest Philadelphia became some of the most visible stars of the program.

  The production format Horn and Mammarella established in Bandstand’s first days remained largely unchanged during Bandstand’s local years. During the broadcasts, Horn introduced records, and the cameras focused on the teenagers dancing. At the midway point in the show, Horn yelled “We’ve got company” and introduced that day’s musical guest, who would lip-sync his or her latest record.97 On its first day, as it would in its first two years, Bandstand featured music primarily from white pop singers such as Joni James, Georgia Gibbs, Frankie Laine, Connie Boswell, and Helen O’Connell. In an era before black rhythm and blues crossed over to mainstream white audiences, and “rock and roll” was not yet a household term, this selection of artists reflected what most radio stations played. Jerry Blavat, who became a regular on Bandstand and went on to become an R&B deejay in the Philadelphia area, remembers being exposed to both white pop music and black R&B as a teenager in an Italian section of South Philadelphia:

  When I was a kid at 12 or 13 years old, I lived in a neighborhood where there was always music. And I would hear my aunts and my uncles playing the Four Aces, the Four Lads, Frankie Laine, and Rosemary Clooney. And then all of the sudden I turned on a television show in 1952 and I see kids dancing to this music. But I also hear rhythm and blues. “Sh-Boom” by the Chords and “Little Darling” by in those days the Gladiolas, before “Little Darling” was remade by the Crew Cuts. And this music hit my ear even though I was listening to my aunts and uncles play the pop music of the day.98

  While hip teenagers like Blavat were becoming familiar with R&B through jukeboxes and records, Bandstand’s white pop songs proved popular with many of the city’s young people. By the show’s first anniversary, Bandstand fan club membership neared ten thousand local teenagers, and the Philadelphia edition of TV Guide praised the show as “the people’s choice” (both Bandstand and TV Guide, of course, were part of Annenberg’s Triangle Publications).99 In outlying neighborhoods, where young people could not make it to the show’s studio, Bandstand annexes were set up in fire houses and other public buildings where teenagers gathered to watch the show on TV and dance. By the start of 1955, the show was the top-rated local program in its time slot, and tens of thousands of teenagers had attended a Bandstand show at WFIL’s studio.100

  The teenagers who visited Bandstand came not only from Philadelphia, but also from across the wider WFIL–adelphia area. Pennants along the studio wall featuring the names of high schools and towns outside of Philadelphia reminded television viewers (and advertisers) of Bandstand’s geographic scope, as did a daily roll call during which teens in the studio audience gave their names and high schools. The show also featured a character called Major Max Power (a man dressed in a dark military-styled uniform with a large MP on his chest) who appeared weekly to tell host Bob Horn (and the studio and television audiences) about new viewers seeing the program.101 With each of these features, Bandstand made reference to the WFIL–adelphia market and to the show’s ability to deliver a large regional viewing audience to advertisers.

  Although Bandstand was not always on the cutting edge of new music, Philadelphia was a “breakout” city where producers would test records before distributing them nationally. Producers looked to Philadelphia because of its proximity to New York, where many of the record companies were located, and because it was the third largest city in the United States in the early 1950s, with more residents than St. Louis and Boston combined. Philadelphia’s racial and ethnic makeup also made the city a productive place to test new music and find musical talent. The city’s black and Italian residents lived in close proximity in many neighborhoods, and despite significant tensions over housing and education, musical styles and tastes often overlapped. These interracial music exchanges made Philadelphia a thriving market in which to test new R&B and rock and roll music.102

  FIGURE 7. Bob Horn, the original host of Bandstand, interviews audience members during the daily roll call. This segment, along with the pennants displayed in the background, reminded viewers of the show’s large regional audience. The Official 1955 Bandstand Yearbook.

  From its earliest days, Bandstand’s producers viewed the show as a regional program with the potential, given Philadelphia’s clout as a test market, to influence the music played on pop radio stations across the country. The decentralization of the recording and radio industries made the show even more valuable as a platform for artists and record labels to reach larger audiences. Through the 1950s, a number of small record labels and local radio stations emerged to challenge the major record firm oligopolies and national radio networks. This decentralization occurred for four reasons. First, in 1947 the FCC approved a large backlog of applications for new radio stations. As a result, many independent stations emerged, doubling the number of radio stations in most markets. Second, the advent of smaller, lighter, and more durable 45 rpm records (as opposed to delicate 78s) made it possible for smaller companies to ship records across the country. Third, after television took much of the entertainment talent and national advertising spending away from radio, radio stations focused on local markets and turned to records as inexpensive forms of programming. And finally, these smaller record firms and radio stations thrived by marketing to distinct segments of the audience, including the teenage market that grew in size, had more access to music through cheap and compact transistor radios, and gained recognition among marketers through the 1950s.103

  Taken together, these changes profoundly affected the range of music available to consumers via records and radio. For example, the four largest record firms—RCA, Columbia (CBS), Capitol, and American Decca (MCA)—held an 81 percent market share of hit records in 1948, but by 1959 this share declined to 34 percent. The four radio networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, and Mutual Broadcasting System) that vied for a share of the total national radio audience in 1948 gave way to more than one hundred autonomous local markets by the end of the 1950s.104 Many of these radio stations followed the network standard and programmed news alongside vocal and orchestral popular music. A smaller number of stations looked for attention-catching records that would attract teenage listeners. These radio stations turned to the recently founded companies that recorded R&B rather than the big band swing and crooners still favored by the major labels. These stations first emerged in cities with sizable black populations, like Philadelphia’s black-oriented WHAT-AM, and there were at least fifty other R&B stations across the country by 1960.105

  Compared to these radio stations, Bandstand was conservative in its musical selection. While Bandstand sampled watered-down covers of black R&B records by white artists in the early 1950s, radio shows in other cities introduced teenagers to a variety of original R&B records. While these radio R&B shows caused some controversy, radio continued to have more freedom than television to play new music by black artists because the stations broadcast later at night and did not feature visual images. Foremost among these radio outlets, Memphis’s WDIA, the first radio station programmed by blacks for a black audience, and Alan Freed’s popular Moondog radio show in Cleveland and later New York played original R&B songs produced by small independent record companies.106 Audiences for these radio shows varied based on the demographics of the areas in which they broadcast, but most attracted young peop
le across racial, class, and spatial lines.107

  Bandstand was among the first television programs to join these radio broadcasters and record producers as an important promotional platform for music. For example, the Three Chuckles, a white Detroit-based group, drove all the way to Philadelphia to perform on Bandstand in 1953. The group performed “Runaround,” which at the time was a local hit released on Boulevard, a small Detroit label. Fueled by sales of the song in Philadelphia, major label RCA Victor released “Runaround” nationally, and it became a hit in 1954.108 On television’s power as a promotional tool in this era, jazz trumpeter and trombonist Kirby Stone told Down Beat magazine, “We could have knocked around in clubs for 10 years and never have been seen by the number of people who have seen us on television. One night on TV is worth weeks at the Paramount.”109 Even though Bandstand was not yet broadcast nationally, it offered recording artists exposure far beyond the show’s point of origin in West Philadelphia.

  With its regional and national influence, Bandstand was at the leading edge of the emerging relationship among television, radio, and the music industry. Bandstand was not the only local television show to create a niche in this changing media landscape, and by 1956 nearly fifty markets had television dance shows similar to Bandstand.110 However, with a broadcast signal that reached parts of four states, positive publicity from Walter Annenberg’s media properties such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and TV Guide, and daily musical guests, Bandstand was the most influential of these locally televised music shows. Before Alan Freed brought his popular radio shows and concerts to television in 1956, and before Ed Sullivan broadcast Bo Diddley in 1955 and Elvis Presley in 1956, Bob Horn’s Bandstand had grown into a local show with national influence, making it the most important television venue in this era for artists and producers looking to reach a large audience. This success, however, came at a price for the black teenagers in the West Philadelphia neighborhood around Bandstand’s studio. While the program started playing black R&B by 1954, the show also implemented admissions policies that had the effect of excluding black teens. While the producers’ racial attitudes may have contributed to these policies, their desire to create a noncontroversial advertiser-friendly show did more to encourage the policies. For Bandstand, reaching teenage consumers across WFIL–adelphia took priority over providing a space that would be open to all teens in its backyard of West Philadelphia.

  “OBSERVERS NOTE A LACK OF NEGRO PARTICIPATION”

  Over the course of Bandstand’s local production history (September 1952to July 1957), teens who visited the studio or watched the show experienced it first briefly as an integrated space and later, after changes to the admission policy, as a segregated space. When it started in 1952, Bandstand admitted teenagers on a first-come first-served basis. Weldon McDougal, who attended West Philadelphia High School, remembered that although Bandstand did not yet play the R&B music he liked, he had no trouble getting into the show in 1952 and 1953:

  West Philly [High School was] so close to Bandstand. Bandstand used to start at 2:45. West Philadelphia at the time, we used to get out at 2:15. When Bob Horn was there, I’d rush over there and it was first-come first-served. So I’d go in there and dance, until they started playing all of this corny music. Then there weren’t many black guys who would go over there. I was considered corny going over there. I was just seeing what was happening. It wasn’t like I wanted to be on television, because I didn’t care after awhile.111

  As the show’s popularity increased, however, Bandstand adopted admission policies that, while not explicitly whites-only, had the effect of discriminating against black teenagers. In 1954, Bandstand selected a group of twelve white teenagers to serve as the show’s “committee.” Committee members enforced the show’s dress code (a jacket or a sweater and tie for boys, and dresses or skirts for girls) and were tasked with maintaining order among the other teens on the show.112 In the Bandstand pecking order, the committee members were followed by studio regulars and by periodic visitors to the show. The committee members exercised considerable sway over who would be admitted on a regular basis, and, by 1954, Bandstand required everyone but the committee members and the regulars to send a letter to WFIL in advance to request admission to the show on a specific day.113 In practice, this admissions policy resembled the discriminatory membership policy of the skating rinks outlined earlier. Teens who gained admission to Bandstand after 1953 did so in one of two ways. Some teens were in the same social peer group as the show’s committee and regulars, who by 1953 came mostly from Italian neighborhoods in South Philadelphia or West Catholic High School (which was predominantly Irish and Italian). Other teenagers had to plan their visits weeks or months in advance and request tickets. This became a common practice for teens who lived in Allentown, Reading, and other cities and towns outside of Philadelphia. These teens became familiar with the show from television and from the record hops in the areas around Philadelphia that Bob Horn hosted with the Bandstand regulars. These areas included growing suburban counties with small black populations, such as Delaware County (7 percent black population in 1950), Montgomery County (4 percent), and Bucks County (less than 2 percent).114 Given that the outlying areas had fewer black residents, the teens who traveled to visit the show were predominately white. For black teens who lived only a few blocks from the studio, the advance notice aspect of the admission policy further marginalized them from the show. As a result of these admissions policies, Bandstand’s audience became almost all-white by the end of 1954.

  The admission policies appealed to the producers’ commercial goals for the program. By encouraging teenagers from outside the city to attend the show, Bandstand further established its popularity with WFIL–adelphia. Inviting teens from this regional area to watch the show, request tickets, and write fan letters strengthened Bandstand’s ability to persuade advertisers to sponsor the show. Here again, Bandstand’s producers marketed the program to the largest possible regional audience, appealing to those teens in the four-state broadcast area rather than the local teenagers in Bandstand’s West Philadelphia neighborhood.

  Bandstand’s producers also adopted the new admissions policies to minimize the potential for racial tension among teenagers outside the studio. Yet while the producers hoped that distributing admissions passes in advance would make it easier to control the crowd of teenagers, the policy had the opposite effect. It provided black teenagers with an opening to protest their exclusion from the show. West Philadelphia teen Walter Palmer, for example, organized other black teenagers to test the show’s admissions policies. “Bandstand was segregated,” Palmer recalled. “There were white kids from all of the Catholic schools, but no black kids. West Catholic was on 46th, and they were always there; our school [West Philadelphia High School] was on 47th [and we could not go].” After graduating from West Philadelphia High School, Palmer remembered that “I engineered a plan to get membership applications, and gave them Irish, Polish, and Italian last names. They mailed the forms back to our homes and once we had the cards we were able to get in that day.” Palmer’s plan successfully undermined Bandstand’s admission policies, but that day, and other times when black teens attempted to gain admission to the studio, they frequently dealt with violence from white teens. While Palmer recalls that he and his peers from the “black bottom” held their own in these fights, he remembered there were “all-out race riots outside the studio.”115 In their attempts to challenge Bandstand’s racially discriminatory admissions policies, black teens faced verbal and physical harassment that further marked Bandstand as a site restricted to white teenagers.

  Concerned that racial tensions would threaten Bandstand’s image as a safe place for teenagers and scare off advertisers, WFIL sought help from the Commission on Human Relations (CHR) to calm the tensions among teenagers waiting in line. A May 1954 CHR case update, titled “WFIL–TV v. Negro and White Teen Agers,” states: “Plans for admittance for teen agers as guests of the Band Stand program have been
ineffective and conflicts have arisen principally on the part of those teen agers who could not gain admittance.”116 In other words, Bandstand implemented a racially discriminatory policy, and then asked the city’s antidiscrimination agency to address the resulting protests. The Philadelphia Tribune reported that Horn assured the CHR that “the only preference shown was the case of special out-of-town groups visiting the studio” and that teens “who adhered to the policy of proper dress and conduct were readily admitted, without regard to the race.”117 Nominally nondiscriminatory, this policy gave Bandstand the flexibility to exclude black teenagers. Concerns about the potential for race riots among teens strengthened the producers’ policy of admitting only committee members, regulars, and those who requested cards of admission rather than admitting teens on a first-come first-served basis. A second CHR report on intergroup tensions in recreation facilities in March 1955 makes clear the outcome of this policy:

  Police reported that disorderly behavior of teenagers at Bob Horn’s Bandstand program, where the audience participate in the show by social dancing, had resulted in the absence of Negroes from attendance. The management denied having a discriminatory policy, and CHR had little upon which to base a case of discrimination. Observers note a lack of Negro participation.

  The report went on to state that young women from the mostly black William Penn High School in North Philadelphia had raised “the question of elimination of Negro youth” from Bandstand, and that the CHR saw a need for “broad planning to effect integration of this activity for high school youth.”118 There is no evidence that the CHR ever undertook such efforts to integrate Bandstand, and available pictures of the show from 1955 and after reveal that the show remained segregated.