www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/arts/television/dick-clark-tv-host-and-icon-of-new-years-eve-is-dead-at-82.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp#"The right man at the right time, Mr. Clark was a radio personality in Philadelphia in 1956 when he stepped into the role of host of what was then a local television show called “Bandstand” after the regular host was arrested for drunken driving and fired.
"(Actually Dick Clark was scheduled to be one of the camera men that day, if I'm not mistaken. They offered him the position on the spot, and got someone else to do the camera work, from what I've heard. In those days, TV station studios were often built into the buildings of the radio stations that birthed them.)"By the following October, the show was being broadcast on ABC nationwide with a new name, “American Bandstand,” and for the next several years it was seen every weekday afternoon by as many as 20 million viewers, most of whom were undoubtedly not yet out of high school and tuned in to watch a few dozen of their peers dance chastely to the latest recordings of pop hits, showing off new steps like the twist, the pony and the Watusi, and rating the new records in brief interviews.
“It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it” became a catchphrase.
Handsome and glib, Dick Clark was their music-savvy older brother, and from that position of authority he presided, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, over a grass-roots revolution in American culture. Not only was “American Bandstand” the first show to make use of the new technology, television, to spread the gospel of rock ’n’ roll, in its early years introducing a national audience to teen idols like Fabian and Connie Francis, first-generation rockers like Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis, and singing ensembles like the Everly Brothers, but it also helped persuade broadcasters and advertisers of the power of teenagers to steer popular taste.
By early 1958, “American Bandstand” was a big enough hit that delighted network executives installed a new show in a concert format in its Saturday night lineup, “The Dick Clark Show,” and in June of that year sent it on the road, broadcasting from a number of cities. In October, when “the Dick Clark Show” originated from Atlanta, both black and white teenagers were in the audience — it amounted to one of the first racially integrated rock concerts — and, with National Guard troops present, it weathered threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
The nighttime “Dick Clark Show” lasted only until 1960, and “American Bandstand” reduced its schedule from every weekday to every Saturday afternoon in 1963, but Mr. Clark was nonetheless one of the biggest success stories in the early days of television....
...Richard Wagstaff Clark was born on Nov. 30, 1929, in Bronxville, N.Y., and grew up in nearby Mount Vernon. His father, Richard Augustus Clark, was a salesman who commuted to New York City until he was hired to manage a radio station in Utica, N.Y. Young Richard’s older brother, Bradley, was killed in World War II.
As a boy he listened often to the radio, and at 13 he went to see a live radio broadcast starring Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore. From then on, he wanted to be in broadcasting. His first job, at 17, was in the mailroom of his father’s station. He often said he learned the most important lesson of his career from listening to Arthur Godfrey.
“I emulated him,” Mr. Clark said. “I loved him, I adored him, because he had the ability to communicate to one person who was listening or watching. Most people would say, in a stentorian voice, ‘Good evening, everyone.’ Everyone? Godfrey knew there was only one person listening at a time.”
Mr. Clark studied business administration at Syracuse University, where he was a disc jockey on the student radio station, and after graduating worked briefly as an announcer for his father’s station before getting his first job in television, at WKTV in Utica, as a news announcer.
In 1952 he was given his own radio show on WFIL in Philadelphia, “Dick Clark’s Caravan of Music,” an easy-listening afternoon program. A few months later, the station’s television affiliate began an afternoon music show called “Bandstand,” with Bob Horn and Lee Stewart as hosts, which at first showed films of musical performances for young studio audiences but evolved into a dance show, as Mr. Clark recalled, when audience
members got bored with the films and started dancing to the music. As the show grew in popularity, the station changed the name of Mr. Clark’s radio show to “Bandstand” as well, even though his playlist remained uncontroversial and palliating fare for a relatively small audience of middle-aged housewives.
It was in the summer of 1956 that Mr. Horn, by then the sole host of the show, was arrested and subsequently dismissed, and the station turned to young Dick Clark.
“I was 26 years old, looked the part, knew the music, was very comfortable on television,” Mr. Clark recalled. “‘They said, ‘Do you want it?’ And I said, ‘Oh, man, do I want it!’ ”
Mr. Clark’s first two marriages ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Kari Wigton, and ; three children, Richard, Duane and Cindy.
“American Bandstand,” a cultural touchstone for the baby-boomer generation, gave rise to the Top 40 radio format and helped make rock ’n’ roll a palatable product for visual media — not just television but also the movies. It was influential enough that ABC broadcast a 40th-anniversary special in 1992, three years after the show went off the air, and a 50th-anniversary special 10 years later. Of course, Mr. Clark, who had long since been popularly known as “the world’s oldest teenager,” was the host of both.
The show’s influence waned somewhat after it changed to a weekly format and the next year moved its base of operations to Los Angeles. And as the psychedelic era took hold in the late 1960s and rock ’n’ roll fragmented into subgenres, the show could no longer command a central role on the pop music scene.
Indeed, the show was criticized for sanitizing rock ’n’ roll, taking the edge off a sexualized and rebellious music. But it was also, in important ways, on the leading edge of the culture. Mr. Clark and his producer, Tony Mammarella, began integrating the dance floor on “American Bandstand” shortly after he took over as host; much of the music, after all, was being made by black performers.
“I can remember, a vivid recollection, the first time ever in my life I talked to a black teenager on national television; it was in what we called the rate-a-record portion of ‘Bandstand,’ ” Mr. Clark recalled. “It was the first time in a hundred years I got sweaty palms.”
He was fearful, he said, of a backlash from Southern television affiliates, but that didn’t happen. From that day on, he said, more blacks began appearing on the show. And as time went on, the show’s willingness to bridge a racial divide that went almost entirely unacknowledged by network programming was starkly apparent, “providing American
television broadcasting with the most visible ongoing image of ethnic diversity until the 1970s,” according to an essay about the program on the Web site of the Chicago-based Museum of Broadcast Communications.
“We didn’t do it because we were do-gooders, or liberals,” Mr. Clark said. “It was just a thing we thought we ought to do. It was naïve.”
Mr. Clark won five Emmy Awards, including a Daytime Emmy lifetime achievement award in 1994, and in 1993 was inducted into both the Television Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He owed his success, he said, to knowing the mind of the broad audience.
“My greatest asset in life,” he said, “was I never lost touch with hot dogs, hamburgers, going to the fair and hanging out at the mall."
"-----------------------------------Les Elgart - Bandstand Boogie (American Bandstand Theme) www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGjXo-3AjCc
