The Daily Reporter from Dover, Ohio • Page 29

ABC now 3rd NEW YORK (AP) ABC, No. 1 in the average weekly ratings for 12 of the past 13 weeks, dropped to third place in the A.C. Nielsen Co. ratings last week. The ratings showed CBS an easy winner.

NBC, third-ranked of the networks in the ratings for eight weeks, barely escaped doing it again. NBC edged ABC by only one-tenth of a ratings point, which works out to a margin of 293,600 homes. The Nielsen audience estimates for last week, made -public Tuesday showed a repeat of CBS's "All in the Family" as the week's most popular show. It was viewed in an estimated 20.4 million' homes. The week's least- watched evening program was an ABC News special on health care and its financing.

The show, aired last Saturday night, was seen in about five million homes, according to Nielsen figures. The premiere of ABC's first season of covering Monday night baseball games and last Sunday's Tony awards show on ABC didn't fare well in the ratings either. Each came out third in their time periods. According to Nielsen estimates for the 4 week ending April 18, the nation's most popular TV shows were "All in the Family," Tikki Tavi," "Charlie Brown Easter Special," A-S-H" and "Maude" (A11CBS); "Starsky and Hutch" (ABC); "Kojak" (CBS); "Baretta" (ABC); "One Day at a Time" (CBS); "Bionic Woman" (ABC); "Mary Tyler Moore" (CBS); "Happy Days" (ABC); "Carol Burnett" and "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" (both CBS); "Laverne and Shirley" (ABC); "Peter (CBS); "Welcome Back, Kotter" (ABC); "Bob Newhart" (CBS), and "Streets of San Francisco" and "Barney Miller" (both ABC). Comedy series Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

is actually smiling. The usually serious TV star has been cast in a pilot for a comedy series titled "Wild About Harry." Next season Dean Martin's fans won't have to trek to Las Vegas to see their favorite he's been signed for 11 specials on NBC for next season most of which will be "roasts." Ted Mack is back, seeking talent on college circuit 'The TIMES-REPORTER April 23, 1976 DOVER-NEW PHILADELPHIA. OHIO 1 1 I I By BILL RICHARDS The Washington Post LOS ANGELES Somebody named Mr. Razzel Peewilly had just finished his act, which consisted of inflating and deflating his stomach painted like a face ocassionally inserting a small toy trumpet into his belly button while a record played a scratchy "Col. Bogey March," and Ted Mack had his head buried in his hands.

After all these years of rating divas from Moline and spoon player's out of Canarsie it takes something like a belly button trumpeter from Southern California to shatter Mack's aplomb. "There are really very few things I haven't seen," he said. Usually all it takes is a stighty quizzical look or a raised eyebrow, and the effect is every bit as devastating as the hook or gong that Mack decided to do away with after an audience booed when he gonged some particularly atrocious performer off an early edition of the old Amateur Hour. That was back in 1935 when Mack gave up his job as band leader to take over the Amateur Hour from Maj. Edward Bowes and turn it into one of the most popular radio and television shows ever.

When Mack was born in 1904, in Greeley, his father, a railroad brakem'an, named him William Edward Maguiness. A theater manager in San Pedro, shortened the name to Ted Mack when he ran out of letters on his marquee for "Edward Maguiness and his Orchestra." Mack worked his way through school playing the clarinet and played with Glen Miller, Benny Goodman and Bix Beiderbecke before he took over the Amateur Hour. When the show first went on TV on the old DuMont Television Network, it was based in the furniture department of Wannamakers. Department Store in New York City. "We used old-fashioned blow-torch lights because DuMont didn't have a studio, and one time they got so hot my hair caught on fire and one of the judges had to slap me on the back of the head to put it out, "Mack recalled.

In 1970 The Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour faded away, seemingly forever, when the show was dropped after a 23-year television run. "We lasted a year longer than Ed Sullivan," said Mack. "We were on Sundays, though, and football killed us. Sometimes they cut us so short when a game ran over that we didn't even get a chance to tell the audience who won," But talent shows like good hambone performers cannot be repressed for long, and Mack is back. The 72-year-old emcee is on the.

college circuit with his variety shows, and lecturing. He was in Los Angeles recently to oversee the second annual "Great Ted Mack Talent Search." About 500 acts nearly a sixth of them tap dancers showed up at Busch Gardens to sing, dance and show off a variety of other more bizarre talents in hopes of winning the $1000 grand prize and getting a guest shot at a local night club. The opening line "The wheel of fortune, around and around it goes, and where it stops nobody knows" is gone, as is the applause meter, another mainstay of the old show. But Mack, in a gray suit, narrow tie, white shirt and black shoes, still sits off the side watching with the look of a patient uncle at a family gathering and asking small boys where they learned to play the accordion like that. "I'm continually amazed at the ingenuity of he said during a break in the semi-finals of the week-long talent search.

"God knows why they do it. I think it's just for the hell of it, most times. It's the same thing that gets people up at a party to do their thing." Ted Mack is a walking repository of amateur talent knowledge. He remembers the old lady from New York City who played the fiddle and then startled the show's staff by finishing off her piece with a solo on her clacking false teeth. 'It sort of threw us for a moment, because we weren'texpecting it," Mack recalled.

"But her husband said later that she had been practicing for weeks with those teeth." For its size, he said, Salt Lake City is perhaps the most'talented area of the country. "It must be all those Mormon youth clubs," said Mack. But for the weirdos you just can't beat Southern Mack has seen them all, though, and most of them more than once. "Did you see the guy with the belly?" he asked. "We had another belly inflater a couple of years back who was even better.

He made his little formal cutaway outfit which started right below his naval. He didn't have a trumpet, though." Not everyone who shows up to audition is in the weirdo category. Frank Sinatra once performed on the Amateur Hour, as did PatBoone, Gladys Knight and 12 opera singers who eventually went on the Metropolitan Opera. Elvis Presley was banned from doing his act on the show, and Ann Margret lost out to a Mexican performer who blew tunes on a laurel leaf. Tiny Tim auditioned 10 times and never made it.

The American Guild of Variety Artists once told Mack that 40 per cent of its members had appeared on his show. HIM ST. NORTH PUZA CANTON OWN DAILY ll-t 5ATIWDAY ll-S SUNDAY $71.50 SP AIDING STARTER SET $39,95 $175.00 WILSON SAMSNEAD lr.m-3W.Wi $99.50 Our pros gall and ttnnis ixptrls BOLIVAR SUEMER CARPET CLEANER We will clean any: Living Room For Only $25.95 living Room Dining Room $35.95 Steams Vacuums Robert Kahler Owner 224 Tuscarawos Bolivar PHONE-874-2228 Mack's own favorite Amateur Hour winner was opera singer Robert Merrill, whom he calls "a fine gentleman and a pretty good performer." But for every Merrill there's another amateur like the woman who turned up last year with a cello swathed in bandages and a rubber swim flipper on her foot to beat time while she played. "Back when we went off the air it seemed that people had lost some of their sense of humor. People got a little serious," Mack said.

"But last year things started picking up." Sometimes, he said, it appears that the pendulum has to swing a little too far in the other direction. "Now nobody wants to hear a good opera aria anymore," he said. "They all want a two-headed harmonica player." Tap dancers, grandmothers belting out torch songs? earnest young women in white dresses doing show tunes all outnumber the rock groups who show up to perform; "I go and listen to rock groups when we do a college date and I swear they all sound the same," said Mack. For those future Amateur Hour candidates he offered a hint. "I confess that my favorite music is Dixieland jazz.

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