Leader-Telegram from Eau Claire, Wisconsin • 24

NBC SWEEPS UP: NBC claimed its 11th straight victory in TV ratings sweeps during November, but the network led ABC and CBS by just one-tenth of a point. Total network viewing was down 3 percent. Page 4D FRIDAY Nov. 30, 1990 Leader-Telegram FCC corisiders Chippewa TV station Gamer clicks in 'Decoration Day' By Phil Rosenthal Los Angeles Daily News LOS ANGELES James Garner is a national treasure, an actor so effective and unaffected, so seemingly effortless and easygoing. Garner once again merits watching in NBC's "Decoration Day," set for 8 p.m..Sunday.

With its Southern setting, black-white theme and sentimental subplots about love and disease, this Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation had all the hallmarks of an overwrought film that would have swallowed up lesser talents. But Garner and the rest of the cast feast on their I IICV ICV roles, making "Decoration hhhibm Day" something to behold. Garner plays a retired judge who gets involved when an old pal of his (Bill Cobbs) mysteriously refuses a Congressional Medal of Honor offered more than 30 years after his World War II heroism. Like-Garner, Cobbs, best remembered as the sage bartender on "The Slap Maxwell Story," allows the unspoken to speak volumes. There is pain in his eyes that betrays his character's claim to a young government lawyer (Larry Fishburne) that he doesn't want the medal merely because of the length of time it took the government to bestow it.

Director Robert Markowitz aiso coaxes fine, understated performances, from Ruby Dee as the judge's housekeeper and Judith Ivey as a remarkable legal secretary who falls in love as she helps the judge work on the old soldier's legal appeal. Whether Robert Lenski's script needed to lop sentimentalities on top of one another the way it does what with Garner and Ivey's characters becoming romantically involved and another character revealing he is afflicted with leukemia is debatable. But so good are Cobbs and, particularly, Gamer, that this is quite forgivable. over to the debtor-in-possession group, rairuiy Group, now based in Punta Gorda, aslcea the FCC on June 26, 1989, to assign the station licenses to Krypton. But that deal fell through.

About six months later, on Dec. 22, 1989, Family Group agreed to sell its Wisconsin stations to Aries. On Feb. 8, Aries agreed to buy the stations and WEUX's license for $7.6. million, with $3.25 million going to secured creditors and $3.6 million for Family Group.

Another $750,000 was set aside for an escrow deposit. But Family Group's plan was contested in bankruptcy court by MCA Television which proposed taking over the stations for $2.5 million. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Thomas Baynes Jr. Tampa on Nov.

1 selected Family Group's plan to pay back debtors by selling the stations to Aries. The Green Bay company said in documents filed with the FCC that it will fund its purchase by selling common and preferred stock at $10 a share. Mitchell Lambert of Green Bay is listed owning 93 percent of the corporation's stock. Other corporation officers include Gordon Van Dreel and Floyd Meyer oLGreen Bay, and James chneider and Thomas Olejniczak, both of De-Pere. It could take months for the FCC to decide whether to assign the stations to Aries.

By Rod Stetzer Chippewa Falls News Bureau CHIPPEWA FALLS The proposal for a television station in Chippewa Falls has gotten out of a Florida bankruptcy court and is again before the Federal Communications Commission. Aries Telecommunication which has offices in Green Bay but is incorporated in Nevada, wants to buy the yet-to-air station's license from Family Group Ltd. Ill, legally known as the debtor-in-possession. Aries also wants to buy Family Group's stations in La Crosse, WLAX, and Green Bay, WGBA. Both are affliates of Fox Broadcasting and WLAX is currently seen on the Wisconsin CATV-CableVision system in Altoona, Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire.

The closing date of the sale of the stations was Wednesday. Family Group asked the FCC on Nov. 20 to assign the license of the Chippewa Falls station, which would be called WEUX and broadcast on Channel 48," to Aries. The action is just the latest in a long line of efforts to start a television station in Chippewa Falls. Along the way the proposal has stalled by a bankruptcy proceeding and Federal Aviation Administration opposition.

Family Group, which originally was based in Tampa, applied for the station license on Aug. 20, 1986, and proposed building the $ta-. tion's antenna in northern Eau Claire County. The FCC granted the license to Family Group, which announced in a March 20, 1987, press release that WEUX "is now scheduled to be in full operation by mid-summer, 1987." It never happened. Family Group changed its proposed antenna site to the Dunn County town of Colfax in July 1988, and some work was done there.

But the FAA balked at approving the site. Family Group said in its latest application to the FCC: "Construction has not been completed because of the loss of the site originally specified in the application (and an) inability to obtain -FAA approval to build a tower at the site." The company is preparing to propose a new antenna site, but didn't say where that would be. It argued that the station license should be assigned to Aries "because of the lack of progress in construction resulted from reasons clearly beyond the control of Family." While it had trouble with its antenna site, Family Group was having increasing financial woes. On Dec. 19, 1988, Family Group agreed to sell its stations to Krypton Broadcasting Corp.

of New York. Less than five months later, on April 7, 1989, Family Group filed for Chapter 1 1 bankruptcy protection in Tampa, and later was turned 21st Smash Week! GHOST BELIEVE E3 Fri. 1 Sat-Sun. Sorry, No Reduced Ticked Rare tunes found in sheet music collection Michael Caine James Bulushi li Ik est i ny tl 0' Fri. CHUCKY'S BACK! CffllES 1 II Mi FIAY Fri.

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MISERY Rl 1 WASHINGTON (AP) Smithsonian Institution curators are busy cataloguing a monumental new collection of nearly 200 years of popular American sheet music, including stacks of rare, long-forgotten Broadway melodies by George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin. "This bonanza from the nation's musical past, a gift from Fort Wayne, broadcaster Sam de Vincent, consists of 130,000 original editions of illustrated sheet music, nearly 20,000 recordings and boxes of posters, concert programs, newspaper clippings and other memorabilia. "This is one of the great, legendary collections of sheet music in the world," said John Edward Hasse, curator of American music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. "It contains some of the rarest of the rare." The scope of the de Vincent collection is staggering. It ranges from yellowing reprints of parlor piano pieces of the 1790s to mournful Civil War ballads, the shameless bigotry of minstrel -showmusicr railroad songs and ragtime, military marches, antiwar protest songs, Beatles favorites ana political cam- paign choruses.

The bulk of the collection focuses on the golden era of Tin Pan Alley, from the 1890s to the 1940s, when Gershwin, Berlin, Cole Porter and other great songwriters were churning out Broadway show tunes. Scores of large cartons in the museum's archives are stuffed with their most memorable hits and some of their most forgettable words and lyrics. Among the latter is a 1919 Gershwin song titled "Tee-Oodle- Um-Bum-Bo" and a few of Hoagy Carmichael's obscure World War II morale boosters, including "I'm a Cranky Old Yank in a Cranky Old Tank Berlin wrote "I'm the Guy Who Guards the Harem (And My Heart's in My Work)" for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919. And little remembered from his 1933 hit musical, "Easter Parade," is a song titled "I Say It's Spinach." Hasse says the deVincent collection, a rich and diverse repository of Americana, will give historians an intimate portrait of the nation's cultural tastes and social upheavals over the past two centuries. The collection represents a 60-year labor of love by deVincent, retired music director of Fort Wayne radio station WOWO, who began hoarding sheet music as a 12-year-old in Chicago.

Eve. Sat. A Sun. i 0 JI.HeMOvw... 2nd Fun Filled Week 2.

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V.tNCOniR "IT'S A DEFINITE WINNER. 'MISERr KEEPS YOU AT THE EDGE OF YOUR SEAT. SHEER Marilyn Beck. CHICAGO TR1BIM SYNDICATE "GREAT PERFORMANCES BY JAMES CAAN AND KATHY BATES, COMBINED WITH ROB REINER'S MASTERFUL DIRECTION, MAKE FOR PULSE-QUICKENING ENTERTAINMENT;" IPG Eve. Sal.

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1. 5:00 Sorry, No Passes or Bargain Nights! IPG! 00 Round trip '199 air rrom Minneapolis HotelAir Packages Start at 33900 mm t'C'Mlli WW tin- mm Now Showing at the Hollywood 3 Eve. Sat Sun. 9:15 31 E. Columbia Chippewa Falls 723-9352 1801 Hastings Way Eau Claire 834-8870 Glenn Close Jeremy Irons Ron Silver Rated IR The Cox of Claus Mm Buhm An American Saga of Money and Mystery..