The Best Is Past
January 26, 2021
ALAN writes:
“Joe, what will be good about the future?”
“Only memories. We’ve seen the best times. I only hope common sense will prevail.”
— Joe Franklin, veteran New York radio-TV celebrity, interviewed by Ellen Cohn, “Joe Franklin Lives on Memory Lane,” New York Times Biographical Edition, Sept. 10, 1972
In his reply, Joe scored a hit and a miss. He was right on the first point, wrong on the second. Not being clairvoyant, he could not have foreseen not only that common sense would not prevail, but that it would become extremely uncommon within a few decades.
He could not have foreseen that the kind of American entertainment he remembered and celebrated in his programs would vanish from American culture; that the great entertainers, musicians, composers, actors, and humorists from the 1930s through the 1960s whose achievements he commemorated would be largely forgotten by Americans less than half a century after he spoke those words; that taking their place would be a parade of pretenders, vulgarians, vacuum-heads, loudmouths, and agitators who market noise and call it music, filth and call it dialogue, garbage and call it entertainment.
He could not have foreseen that entire generations of Americans would not have enough common sense to recognize and reject those things.
Joe sought to keep alive the memory of the golden age of vaudeville, radio, music, and motion pictures. That was what he meant by “the best times”.
Frank Sinatra hit the same note a few years later. Reviewing a lengthy montage of scenes from MGM musical films from the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, he said the men and women who created and performed in those motion pictures represented a degree of talent the likes of which we will never see again. (Remarks by Frank Sinatra in the 1974 motion picture “That’s Entertainment”.)
He was right. So was Joe Franklin. I know it because I lived through the tail-end of that era in American entertainment, much of which was glorious, heroic, and uplifting. It was made that way because it was built on a foundation of solid moral capital, in contrast to what is called entertainment today, which is built on slush.
