Many of my blog posts can be attributed to my fixation with “six degrees of separation,” the catchphrase for someone’s connection with people or events beyond their immediate sphere of influence.
I never met Peter Marshall, the sometime actor but long time host of “The Hollywood Squares” who died last week at age 98. But I had a two degrees of separation from him—my best friend from graduate school worked as a question writer for “The Hollywood Squares” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/arts/television/peter-marshall-dead.html?smid=url-share).
After earning our master’s degrees in newspaper journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications in May 1972, Steve Kreinberg and I departed for separate coasts, he to return to San Francisco, I back to Brooklyn, where we respectively sought our first jobs as a reporter.
I secured a spot on The New Haven Register, beginning in September. Steve could only manage a return to his pre-Syracuse employer, a public relations firm. After several months he opted to try his luck in Los Angeles.
He nabbed one of five question-writing spots on “The Hollywood Squares.” Though each week’s shows were filmed on the same day, Monday, Steve and his colleagues were each required to submit 50 accepted questions every weekday. Questions were not revealed to the celebrity participants who included Paul Lynde, Joan Rivers and Jonathan Winters, but the comedians were counseled as to potential topics, allowing them to seemingly ad lib funny responses.
Technically writer’s contracts restricted their ability to work on other television shows, but the prohibition was honored more in the breach than in enforcement. Steve and his outside writing partner, Andy, wound up becoming staff writers on several comedy shows including “Archie Bunker’s Place,” “Herman’s Head,” “Saved by the Bell,” “Head of the Class,” “Nine to Five” and “Mork & Mindy.”
Lunch with Steve and Andy at the Universal Studios commissary provided a classic example of why one should never order food one is not familiar with. A country fellow from Tennessee only recently living the Hollywood experience, Andy ordered what he thought was a well-deserved steak. He was quite embarrassed, even repulsed, when steak tartare was placed before him.
More Degrees: Sunday’s extreme downpours produced “1,000 year” flooding in parts of Connecticut, specifically in four towns that were part of my reporting beats 50 years ago—Shelton, Seymour, Oxford and Southbury. Two women from Oxford were swept to their deaths by the flash flooding.
Seventeen years before I began covering those Lower Naugatuck River Valley towns the area was devastated by two hurricanes, Connie and Diane, that dumped huge amounts of rain in just over a week in August 1955, causing what was considered the nation’s worst flooding along the East Coast.
Prominent flood control embankments were constructed and an upstream dam was built by the time the Valley became my assignment.
