Hartford Courant du lieu suivant : Hartford, Connecticut • Page 11

THE HARTFORD COURANT: Monday, April 8, 1991 All Forced into liquidation, Channel 18 signing off for good at well over 100,000 people and added, "It would be a tragedy in the lives of so many people if this mass were to be discontinued." Cable operators are also watching carefully. Like Planell, some were caught off guard when what seemed to be the end of the tunnel turned out to be the end of the line for Channel 18. Tad Diesel, director of government and community affairs for United Artists Cable of Connecticut, said, "We're being courted by a lot of cable networks" as well as broadcast stations, and "the intensity has increased these last several days." United Artists has not decided which station will take Channel 18's place on its cable lineup. If Channel 18 does go dark Tuesday, few expect another commercial broadcast station to take its place. Usually when a TV station is liquidated and its broadcasting equipment sold, the license is returned to the FCC.

But if that happens, it would most likely be subject to a 1987 freeze on granting new licenses. For Planell, the decision-making is all but over, but if she ends up out of a job along with Channel 18's 30 or tive and general manager Dale Fo-shee said he might be interested in some of the Hartford station's movie packages and hopes to pick up any cable slots left by 18. But because WHCT did not generate much in the way of the market's $135 million in ad revenues, Foshee said there won't be any big financial rewards. "I would just think it spreads it around a little more." The Rev. John Gatzek has been praying for Channel 18.

Gatzek is director of radio and television for the Archdiocese of Hartford and executive producer of "The Celebration of the Eucharist," a live, weekday morning mass (and one of Channel 18's higher rated programs), which has been running on the station for several years. "I've been keeping the viewers informed as to what has been going on and asking for their prayers, not only for the continuance of the mass but also that Channel 18 might be able to resolve its financial problems, pick up the pieces and continue," he said. Gatzek said he is actively talking with other stations about moving the program if Channel 18 is liquidated Tuesday. He estimates his audience Lite rock: songs that make the baby-boomer girls cry Contiiaed from Page A9 today) Plaiell expects the lights to go out and broadcasting to cease sometime Tueslay, barring some llth-hour rescie. "If just more evidence that it's a tougl arena," said Chris Rohrs, vice presdent and general manager at WFS3 (Channel 3).

"They came into a converging group of cycles and forces that just smothered them." Wiat killed Channel 18? Ttat's like asking which bullet kilUd Sonny Corleone in "The Godiather." Astroline Communications Co. of Saugus, which owns Channel 18, could only have predicted some of th; obstacles it would face when it purckased the station in 1985 for $3.1 millitn from Faith Center Inc. of Glenfale, Calif. Astroline bought Chamel 18 in a so-called "distress sale" that allows broadcasters (in this case, Faith Center) to avoid dis-ciplirary actions by selling to a company. Bu: a Rocky Hill computer consultant, Alan Shurberg, challenged the sale, tnd a costly legal battle ensued, ending in a narrow 5-4 U.S.

Supreme Baseball books on deck i From Angell tp Will, writing is fair game Continued from Page A9 i Mantle looks back fondly on the season in which he won the Triple Ciown and made a famous running cstch to preserve Don Larsen's perfect game in the Yankees' World Series against the Brooklyn D)dgers. "Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures" by Dick Johnson and Glenn Stout (Walker, In his new book Mickey Mantle calls Ted Williams, whom Mantle beat out for the 1956 batting title, "(he greatest hitter I ever saw." Fans of the Red Sox batting champ will enjoy the wealth of photos (black-and-white) of the slugger in his prime. "I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story" by Hank Aaron with Lonnie Wheeler (HarperCollins, When he hit his 715th home run, Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record. That wasn't the only barrier he broke in a long career with the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves. One of the last Major League players to start out in the Negro League, Aaron writes about racism in baseball as well as his moments of glory.

"Once More Around the Park" by Roger Angell (Ballantine, Further musings on the game by the New Yorker's Roger Angell, possibly the most admired baseball writer currently plying the trade. "Our Game: An American Baseball History" by Charles C. Alexander (Henry Holt, $25). The great players, the scandals, the statistics and the roots of the game are all here in this compre- Court decision last June in Channel 18's favor. Operating with a cloud over its license, Channel 18 had trouble getting everything from loans to cable distribution and was further crippled by the end of the Federal Communications Commission's must-carry rule, which would have required key cable operators to carry the station.

Simultaneously, the price of programming much of the best of which was already owned by other stations skyrocketed in the mid-'80s. And then there was the recession that hit New England. Yet despite the doom-and-gloom predictions that came true, local competitors said they would be sorry to see Channel 18 go. "I'm sorry to see anybody in our business not survive," said Lew Frei-feld, vice president and general manager of WTNH (Channel 8). But, he went on to note, echoing the thoughts of many of his colleagues, "I just don't think anybody who's familiar with the industry would have felt it would have turned out any differently." The Hartford-New Haven television market, one of the nation's top Safe or out? Action photographs out now.

hensive history by Alexander, a history professor at Ohio University who has also written biographies of Ty Cobb and John McGraw. "The New Baseball Reader: More Favorites from the Fireside Books of Baseball," edited by Charles Einstein (Viking, If sports have inspired some of otr finest writing, baseball has made certain writers absolutely sing. In "The New Baseball Reader," Charles Einstein has selected fiction and non-fiction that first appeared in his "Fireside Books of Baseball." The new anthology includes writings by Ring Lardner, John Updike, Bernard Malamud, James Michener, Philip Roth, Red Smith and a host of other literary baseball fans. "The Home Run Heard 'Round the World: The Dramatic Story of the 1951 Giants-Dodgers Pennant Race" by Ray Robinson (HarperCollins, Another excursion to baseball as it was played in the '50s. "The Home Run Heard 'Round the World" was cracked by Bobby Thomson in the bottom of the ninth inning in the third and final game This year's decline in contributed income is the principal reason why the symphony will end the season with an estimated budget deficit of $100,000, Reuter says.

John Simone, executive director of the Hartford Ballet, says his company's decision to pull out from the symphony core contract was more pragmatic than philosophical. "There are a lot of issues in the core contract that have nothing to do with us, especially including scheduling things that we never really had any input into," Simone says. "We wanted to have an arrangement that focused more on our own requirements." But George Osborne, general director of the opera company, offers a more blunt assessment of his organization's motives. "The primary reason we wanted out was to try to avoid being hurt by another strike," he says. During the 1988 strike, the opera company was forced to cancel two of its four scheduled productions for the 1988-89 season, and with them it lost roughly 1,000 subscribers who, Osborne says, have never returned.

The issue this time around is critical because in October the company plans to mount a reprise of its massive, and massively expensive, production of Verdi's "Aida" in the Hartford Civic Center coliseum. Under the about-to-expire arrangement, in which the opera and the ballet companies fall under the symphony contract, a musicians' strike could force a cancellation of "Aida." If that happened, Osborne says the company could lose a quarter-million dollars in marketing and The Hartford-New Haven television market is one of the most competitive in the country. 25 markets and most heavily cabled, with stations from New York, Boston, Providence and elsewhere competing for viewers, is one of the most competitive in the country. "It's a shame if in fact they are going dark and off the air," said WTXX (Channel 20) vice president and general manager Rod Bacon. "On the one hand, there's certainly one less competitor, on the other hand, I hate to see it happen." Few expect to gain from Channel 18's loss.

Beyond the station's sports contracts, there are few programming leftovers of interest to the remaining six major commercial broadcast stations in the market. WTWS (Channel 26) chief execu abound in "Baseball in America," of the National League playoffs, giving the New York Giants the pennant over their hated cross-town rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. "On the Run: The Never Dull and Often Shocking Life of Maury Wills" by Maury Wills and Mike Celizic (Carroll Graf, If the subtitle doesn't grab you, revelations of cocaine and alcohol abuse by Maury Wills surely will. Wills, who is now sober, made his mark in the '60s stealing bases for the L.A. Dodgers.

"The Baseball Chronology: The Complete History of Significant Events in the Game of Baseball," edited by James Charlton (Macmillan, $35, June). Statistics are the name of the game these days, and this volume is crammed with 150 years' worth of baseball minutiae. "Extra Innings: A Season in the Senior League" by David Whitford (Edward Burlingame-HarperCollins, Old baseball players don't die; they go to play in the Senior Professional Baseball Association. Alas, the league for oldsters turned out REUTER pre-production costs. Such a loss would bankrupt the Organization.

"And that is why we have notified the musicians union that if we don't have an agreement with them by July 1, we will cancel our entire season," Osborne says. Formal talks between all three arts organizations and the union are expected to begin within the next several weeks. Meanwhile, the players say they are taking a wait-and-see attitude. "I would say the mood of the orchestra players is one of concern," says Barry Stees, the orchestra's principal bassoonist and head of its negotiating committee. "We still stand committed to working toward our goal of a living wage for the musicians.

But right now, it's certainly too early to tell how things are going to work out." il PLANELL so staff members, she will leave with a sense of accomplishment. She kept the station on the air for 2Vz years against incredible odds, she said, and that was important to her, her employees and the city. "The last thing downtown Hartford needs," she said, "is another empty building." distracting and annoying to the person who is using the radio to relax. It just doesn't fit the style." Indeed, fit is passionate matter in WIOF's otherwise ultra-mellow world. Operations manager and afternoon disc jockey Jack Carney recalls jumping up and down when he first heard Bette Midler's "Wind Be- neath My Wings." "We said, 'This is us! This is what our listeners expect from us," Carney recalls.

"When somebody turns to us, they know what they're going to get." Typically, WIOF waits out a song's mainstream exposure, waits until it has gained an agreeable patina of public acceptance before slipping it into the station's precision flow of romance. Computers now make it possible for a station's sound to be remarkably consistent. Disc jockeys no longer play personal favorites. At both WRCH and WIOF, the laid-back, on-air voices reel off sets of songs selected by their station's software days in advance, sets that balance male and female, old and new. WP.rH's songs have all been rated on a scale of 1 to 5 for their intensity, tempo, texture and even mood, says Schroeger.

As he talks in his office, the on-air sound of the adenoidal Russell Hitchcock (on solo leave from Air Supply) and a "cooking" band push "the upper edge of acceptability" before the computer mix cools things down with Carole King's "It's Too Late." Whatever the blend, lite rock is heavily larded with sad songs. Stadlen jokes that the most doleful tunes are "music to slit your wrists by." Check out a three-hour stretch of local soft rock as we did, and you'll, hear Phil Collins whining, "Oooooh. how typical, love leads to isolation before giving way to Dan Fogelberg, who bumps into his ex-love in a grocery store with predictably maudlin results. Not long after, singing sociologist Streisand reports: "Out on the street anybody you meet got a heartache of their own," and then the sadly psychic Dionne Warwick serts "I know, I'll never, love this way again!" Eventually, this segues into James Ingram's soulful survey: "When was the last time music made you cry?" Got a stopwatch? Despite the quieter context, some lite songs are ecstatic about love. Billy Ocean croons, "Life has new meaning to me there's beauty up-above in things we never take notice of." What does this mixed message say about the "soft adult contemporary" psyche? It says romance is overloaded with expectation, says Charles Lind-holm, a professor of anthropology at Boston University.

In an age when the social institutions that gave meaning to life the extended family and religion have, fallen by the wayside, romantic love has taken on a burden of transcendency it can't live up to. Thus the typical sadness of adult pop, he says. "It romance never offers enough, so there's this sense of love as permeated with nostalgia," Lindholm says. Psychologists assert that love-sickness is a historical constant, but see an increase in insecurity and anxiety about love especially as the children of divorce start dating which makes for a bull market in sad songs. They concur with pop analyst Stadlen, who sees disappointment in love as a mark of modern adulthood and who believes the boo-hoo ballads of lite rock play a comforting, cathartic role.

So, given today's raw, rapping pop, what will be mellow music for a generation hence? As Stadlen notes, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that in 10 years the music playing on WRCH or WIOF will be different." Continued from Page A9 WRCH 100.5"), the two regional purveyers of "soft a.c," popular stations that at any given 15 minutes during morning drive-time-have enough combined listeners (34,600) to pack Fenway Park. They've got listeners like Patricia Hastings, 48, of Wallingford. At home her boys have a rock band. Nuff said. In the car, her husband's punching buttons.

But at the office she finds her Magic 104 equilibrium. "It's not so mellow that it would put you to sleep. It still has a little bit of, you know, like, zing to it." Maria Diaz, 33, of Glastonbury likes mellow, too. She's outgrown 96TIC. But there are times when the lovelorn lyrics embedded in those softer sounds, well, they get to her.

"If you're in a lowdown, dumpy mood, forget it. You'll cry if you listen to that station," she says. She's turned it off for fear of weeping at work. How do stations find that mellow brick road? Take WRCH, which switched to the format two years ago after the audience for its stringy "beautify! music" got too old for advertisers' tastes. (WIOF has been a "soft a.c." station for 14 years.) WRCH tested 800 soft pop tunes on local groups of 100 adults ages 35 to 54.

Mellow-music fans, the listeners checked out six-second snatches of each song before marking preferences on computer-readable score-cards. "On my lap is $30,000," says WRCH operations manager Warren Schroeger, holding a black notebook. Secretive on details, Schroeger allows that Barbra Streisand's three-hankerchief number "The Way We Were" ranked "right up there," along with stuff by the Righteous Brothers and Lionel Richie. "The music test is to find out which songs you play the most and which songs you don't play at all. The rest you just fill in," he says.

It gets more complex, of course. To help decide which songs are right for lite especially new ones stations also hire expert ears. WIOF's consultant ministers to the station's mellow sounds from his office overlooking the Pacific Ocean in California. WRCH's consultant, Richard Stad-len, helps decide what Greater Hartford's mild crowd will hear from his basement office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He advises seven other stations around the country.

Among adult listeners, he notes, familiarity breeds content. "As you get up into your 30s and 40s there is less of a need to hear new songs and be introduced to new stuff. There is more of a desire to hear the music you know." And while young listeners look to get cranked up, adults are just cranky. They don't like "repetitive or very loud thumping beats, things that are treble-y," Stadlen says. Otherwise, the lite format is a crossroad, a place where mellow ancients like David Gates and Bread mingle with such new pop divas as Mariah Carey.

No pop artist is necessarily excluded. Foreigner, the British band that plays the notably adolescent "Hot Blooded," is regularly represented on lite stations by its gospel-flavored "I Want To Know What Love Is." Programming lite radio which now draws listeners of both pre- and post-rock adolescent vintage can echo the watershed musical differences of a generation ago. No matter how well their songs test, Stadlen says, WRCH can't play Andy Williams for fear of alienating younger adult listeners, or Steve Winwood, for fear of losing the older ones. And no matter how popular an artist is overall with the adult crowd, each song must pass its mellow test. Take New Haven's Michael Bolton, the soulful crooner who has become a darling of "soft a.c." And take "Georgia on My Mind" hard ly heavy-metal.

But Stadlen nixed play of Bolton's "Georgia." "He really wails on that and kind of grabs you. It can be City's ballet, opera dissociate from HSO's players' contract John Biever one of a league of baseball books to be little less than a field of dreams. It folded after 1 Vz seasons. David Whitford follows the likes of Luis Tiant, Rollie Fingers, Earl Weaver and Vida Blue and their adventures in the league's 1989 inaugural season. "Men at Work" by George F.

Will (HarperPerennial-Harper-Collins, Last year's No. 1 best-seller about the craft of baseball as practiced by four contemporary superstars is now out in paperback. 2 kinds of teddies nice for hugging By MICHAEL GARTNER "Why are 'teddies' called that?" asks Amy Soden of the San Francisco area. And she makes it clear that she's talking about the lingerie, not the bear. But let me tell you about the bear first.

President Theodore Roosevelt was a sportsman and a conservative, and in 1902 he went hunting for bears in Mississippi. His hosts, the story has it, stunned a small bear and tied it to a tree so he could shoot it. But Roosevelt would have none of that; he turned his back on the bear and refused to fire. bb That story got around, and the Wash- WOluS ington Post ran a car- toon showing Roosevelt refusing to shoot. A Brooklyn man named Morris Michtom saw that, and it prompted him to make a little bear.

He called it a teddy bear, and it was so popular that he went on to make and sell lots more. The teddy bear is kind of cute and shapeless but cozy and huggable, and in the 1920s, someone no one knows who decided that a cute and shapeless piece of underwear for women made the women as hug-gable, lovable and cuddly as a teddy bear. So that piece of lingerie was called a teddy. Today, a teddy combines a shirt-like top and loose-fitting panties, and it's considered sexy, not shapeless. Write to Michael Gartner in care of The Courant, Features Department, 285 Broad Hartford, CT 06115.

Continued from Page A9 six years have been folded into the symphony's contract with its players, have withdrawn to make their own deals. The two groups accounted for a total of 42 symphony services rehearsals or performances this season. Among other things, this development may call into question the future of the core-orchestra concept, the 6-year-old plan by which 21 members of the orchestra have been guaranteed annual salaries for a season of 42 weeks. "I don't think the situation with the opera and ballet needs to have any impact on the core," says William Steinberg, president of Local 400 of the American Federation of Musicians, the union to which the players belong. "One way or another, those two organizations will still be covered." But Paul Reuter, executive director of the symphony, is less certain the core arrangement can be continued in- its present form.

"The problem is that many of the services that have been supporting the core for the past six years have been contribution-based. And while we have tended to do very well with ticket sales to most events, the contribution component has always been ambitious. And this is the area that has become such a problem with current economic conditions." In particular, such initiatives as the Symphony on the Hill series for Asylum Hill residents and many of the orchestra's public school appearances depend heavily on outside funding..