R.I.P. Guiding Light

I don’t watch the soap operas, but I know that they have been around since before television. I could not name a single character on The Guiding Light nor could I tell you where the show is set.

But I note that it is going off the air this week after more than seventy years on radio and television.

When I was a child sometimes my brother and I would be at our grandmother’s house for a morning or a day. We enjoyed our time with our grandmother, but we learned that the hour between eleven o’clock and noon was time for her “programs,” four fifteen-minute serials. One of those was The Guiding Light. My grandmother could not see well, but she sat near the television and watched all four and then took care of lunch.

I may have some sense of missing something when the show goes, although not enough to watch it disappear. I don’t even know who shows it here or when. I guess it is probably a mixture of the sentiment felt whenever old things get cashiered just for being old added to a sentiment of missing my grandmother, even though she has been gone for forty years.

It may be a reflection of one’s own aging, but you feel regret when an old friend is no longer, but sometimes, although you may not feel actual regret, you get a small twinge when anything old goes.

Leno in prime time

Jay Leno’s new show began on NBC last night. There has been a lot of ballyhoo about the network’s decision to have one hour each weeknight given to the same program. Nobody has done so for as long as anybody cares to remember. Fox doesn’t even try to program that 9 o'clock hour.

Critics seem to be panning the show. I admit that I was not especially impressed. I liked the old show, and this was like the Tonight Show with the desk gone and the sequence moved a bout, but I guess I was looking for something with more splash for a grand opening. However, considering how much money Leno made for NBC with the Tonight Show even after he found out he was going to be tossed into the Burbank landfill, it certainly seems in order that NBC give him time to develop something that works. Besides, it seems quite likely that whether the critics like the product or not that it may be a money maker. Overhead is lower for that type of program than it is for the blood and/or guts and/or tears programming that usually inhabits that hour. Networks worry about appealing to too many people past prime demographic age and/or little disposable income, i.e., people like me, but that is the demographic which is most likely to take its entertainment from broadcast television.

I think he could have done better by scratching Kanye West after the incident Sunday evening. That would have showed an attempt to not reward offensiveness, but Leno has never pretended that he is in the running for sainthood, so I don’t know that there is anything surprising that he did not.

Anyhow, it could be interesting late prime time entertainment for quite a while.

Bad advertising:

The Golden Gopher football team are opening the season with a game in the un-air-conditioned Carrier Dome in Syracuse.

Mother’s maiden name

I recently read of Sephardic Jews being discriminated against by Ashkenazim at a school by asking for [among other things] an applicant’s mother’s maiden name” on the application form.

Invidious distinction and discrimination are nothing new, folks.

We see this question frequently. It has been [and often still is] on web registrations, bank forms, job applications, and a lot of other things.

Exactly where it came from has been subject to speculation. I remember reading a few decades ago that it was devised by Boston Brahmins so that they would not find themselves hiring Irish or allowing them into their neighborhoods or clubs or whatever. A person might have what seems like a seemingly respectable English name such as “Cabot” or “Saltonstall” but you never knew whether there might not be an “O’Brien” hiding in the family tree. Later, it seems that the question helped people of Northern and Western European stock make sure that there was not a “Jaworski,” “Stephanopoulos,” “Antonelli,” or “Habib” in there.

Whatever the origin, the question does seem to have been used for that effect for many decades. [Old timers might recall it being used in a “Route 66” episode for that purpose when the heroes ran into an American “patriot” who was decrying the number of outisders [non-WASP people] infiltrating the true America.] As national origin started to become grounds on which discrimination could no longer be based and enforcement started, managers and creditors and clubmasters and others still had stacks of forms and wanted to keep using them, so they invented other rationale for having the question.

“Security” was given as one reason. This was, they said, to make sure that John Jacob Smith whose mother was named Jones was not confused with John Jacob Smith whose mother was named Johnson.

I have known the mother’s maiden name of many people, some of whom I have never met. [Quick quiz: What were the mothers’ maiden names of Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, or George Herbert Walker Bush? It should not take a lot of guessing. And I never met any of them.]

I know the maiden names of the mothers of many people I grew up with because I knew their extended families [or at least enough about them] to figure it out and I have picked up more as I have gone along. After all, it really is not secret. And, since unfortunately, there are many cases of people trying to steal identities of people in their immediate or extended family that information serves as no protection whatever.

I have seen some suggestions on how to confound the people asking. Spell it backwards, use a grandmother’s instead, just make one up. None of these seems really secure, either because somebody else could still find it or you might forget it yourself.

A simpler suggestion: IF WE JUST QUIT ASKING THE QUESTION, WE WOULDN’T NEED ANY ANSWERS. AND IF WE ALL LEFT THE ANSWER SPACE BLANK, MAYBE WE COULD SCREW UP THE WHOLE SYSTEM.

I understand that there are probably times/places where the question may serve a valid purpose, such in official government vital statistics places.

I would be interested in hearing anybody else’s history with this question.