Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 25

3 rmm i 11:30 ABC: McGeorge Bundy, former special assistant ilZn2yf 122. if, iJ OJUUJ UwUUuJUUwJUU 12 noon NSC: Rbundtable discussion from Geneva SOUND JUDGMENT 4 DETROIT FREE PRESS Complete tv updates, radio, soaps: Page 10D ART 5 I Ca" Entertainment: 222-6828 1 Jj I I i Ji Tl ''I La Dob Talbcrt LJ uy uLnl VJ No blessing from GOP for Lucas or Patterson Insider's Notebook OFF AND RUNNING FOR WHAT? Don't look Wayne County Executive Bill Lucas or Oakland County Prosecutor Brooks Patterson launching However one defines Presley's stirring, basic, down-and-dirty appeal, it existed. Presley had what the young Brando had: an odd talent that was defiant in its masculinity, yet an Could Elvis be 50? Not in our dreams or our memories 1 campaign trial balloons of late to be the Republican choice to combat Democratic Gov. Jim offstage personality that early bordered on the demure. 1 ii Blanchard in '86.

Democrat Lucas switching parties won't wash with the GOP no matter how electable he appears. Despite his populist crime-issue flag-waving, Patterson rubs GOP bigwigs the wrong way. NAVY CONTRACTS TARGETED: Look for Ren. Lucas I Lawicncc SKClDeVinc A half-century ago this Tuesday, at 4:35 a.m. in a cold, two-room, board house out east across the tracks in Tupelo, began the storied rhythm and the blues of Elvis Presley.

After a pitiably short 42 years and seven months', it was all over; the rock 'n' roll idol lay dead, face down on his Memphis bathroom floor. But, lawdy, Miss Clawdy, the mania goes on. Or El, someplace up in rock 'n' roll heaven, is perhaps looking down on other native American boys who are coming up on 50 years themselves, red-blooded hotspurs like Burt Reynolds, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford or wild-haired Jerry Lee Lewis. The King may be gone, but not forgotten, selling boxed six-record album sets, doing the "Jailhouse Rock" on the morning movie, appearing on HBO and Showtime specials, his glandular post obitum voice every At 50, if he'd ever shed Col. Tom Parker, his Svengali, Presley well might have become a major, serious film actor.

He had the sex appeal, the smoky voice, the good body, and the congenital instinct for what turns an audience on. Warren Beatty has been using the same equipment for years. Presley might have got the training, had he won freedom from Parker and the sycophantic stupidity of his Memphis hangers-on who stood by and let him dope himself into cloudy wet brain and fatal obesity. J. 4 where on the AM band; itching like a man on a fuzzy tree.

He needed new challenges, said Presley onetime television producer Steve Binder, who What would the poor doomed idol be like if he were alive today? Hard to say, since mesmerized followers of his careening, out-of-control life and career never could envision Pres produced and directed Elvis's famous comeback special for the Singer Sewing Machine people in 1968. "I knew him in '68, and it was an intense three to four month period when we were doing the John Dlngell, chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee and its subcommittee on oversight and investigations, to square off this year against Navy Secretary John Lehman over the Navy's defense contracts with General Dynamics, now under intense investigation by the House and the Justice Department. The charges leveled against General Dynamics officers include stock manipulation, over-compensation and misuse of vouchers. Dingell says if auditors and the Navy try to "stonewall me, they will find it very painful." RESIGNED TO CHANGES: Resignations at Monthly Detroit by senior editor Nancy Kool, Thursday, "for a variety of reasons, including pursuing other projects," and art director Roseann Hebeler Brown, last month, "for differences with the magazine's editors" are deemed regrettable by publisher Keith Crain, who says both women will work for other Crain publications eventually. Crain rebuts reports that editor Martin Fischhoff and his chief assistants have "sexist attitudes" that played a part in the resignations.

Kool and Brown had no comment on the sexism charges. LIONS FALL BEHIND: "Every day the Lions don't name a head football coach to succeed Monte Clark hurts badly," says one former top Lions figure, "because now's when the coach should be heavily and directly involved in scouting and drafting. Naming a successful college coach to the job would be a big disaster putting the program behind another three or four years." Quips another ex-Lion executive: "They should name Russ Thomas. He thinks he knows everything and gets along with Bill Ford. What more can you ask?" NOW YOU KNOW: Those billboards all over town teasing us about who puts boxing champ Thomas ley's growing old.

It wasn't allowed. Fifty an special. I saw a guy who really wanted to get out there and mm 1 meet any challenges that faced him. I believed he would have been great in 'Midnight for instance, if he done the Jon Voight role. But Elvis was such an incredibly loyal person, in unknowable place in time occupied mainly by daddies who knew nothing about romantic love and strange new tremors in a maiden's core.

Fifty didn't rock. Well since my baby left me Well, I found a new place to dwell. It's down at the end of Lonely Street At Heartbreak Hotel. Where I'll be so lonely, baby, I'm so lonely, I'll be so lonely I could die. Although it's always crowded, you still can find some room terms of his own upbringing, that whatever deals were made for him, he passionately lived up to.

He used to complain that he never got any good movie scripts. Instead of taking a million dollars, it was 0 1 For broken-hearted lovers to cry there in the gloom Well, the bellhop's tears keep flowing. The desk clerk's dressed in black. Well, they been so long on Lonely time for him to spend a million dollars for a script and get a good movie. But he certainly led the way for everybody else when it came to rock 'n' roll music Well, I quit my job down at the car wash And I left my mamma a goodbye note a Hearns on his back at night are ads for Waterbed Galleries.

WINNERS: On a hunch, Mike Ditka's Chicago Bears and the Chuck Noll's Pittsburgh Steelers in today's games, spoiling the ballyhooed NFL Super Bowl showdown between the Joe Montana-led San Francisco 49ers and Don Shuia's Miami Dolphins. IUI1.HII.II)II)UUIII. 1( HI if Tyler they never, they ll never look back They're so lonely they could die. "Heartbreak Hotel" Rock 'n' roll goes on, even if the King's slaves insist there never was an Elvis Presley before, and there never will be another. From the benign vantage point of Presley's own surviving age group, some judgments can be made.

Now-adult connoisseurs of the ancien regime of the King tend to agree with the neat, breathless junior-high girls: Elvis was sui generis, one of a kind, a native musical genius who came out of Tupelo, with the kind of dismaying shock wave that accompanied J. Robert Oppenheimer's little bomb out of Alamogordo, N.M. However one defines Presley's stirring, basic, down-and-dirty appeal, it existed. It is part feral maleness. No female rock 'n' roller ever has had it, and adolescent boys never have sweated, screamed and wrung their hands like that over any larruping redneck woman.

Presley had what the young Brando had: An odd talent that was defiant in its masculinity, yet an offstage personality that early bordered on the demure. I nearly 'bout starved to death down in Memphis, I run outa money and luck And I bought me a ride down to Macon, Georgia, On a overloaded poultry truck. "Guitar Man" Presley rode into American musical history in pink Cadillac four-doors with gold trim and a reckless performing style that so fazed the Mommies and Daddies out there in television-land that Ed Sullivan pursed his lips and wouldn't show this fine young American boy on camera from the waist down. Albert Goldman, in the otherwise ghoulish, glib biography "Elvis," describes that style precisely: "He would stand with his spraddled legs squarely before the mike shaking both limbs at once, as his band used to say, 'Wearing his britches out from the Suddenly, he would throw down his left hand which would start fluttering like a hummingbird's LOSER: Winter. Just ask the iced-over powerless in the northern suburbs and their snowless neighboring ski slope operators.

PARTING SHOT: When Detroit Piston Terry Tyler removes the plaster cast from his broken nose, will he look like Michael Jackson? names faces in his comeback 1968 TV special, top. Above left, the earliest above right, the puffy-looking, bejeweled Elvis of Las Vegas. Elvis Presley Tupelo Elvis; See ELVIS, Page 7C After 20 years, Channel 50 is riding high fi HI 1 At left: During an interview, former Michigan governor George Romney, right, told Lou Gordon, left, that he felt he had been brainwashed. 11? '11 At right: Bill Kennedy's interviews with such stars as Debbie Reynolds were the heart of his WKBD-TV movie matinee series. 'Kelly Company' head for syndication market Watch out Donahue here come John and Marilyn.

"Kelly Company," WXYZ-TV, Channel 7's top-rated morning show starring John Kelly and Marilyn Turner, will be offered to stations across the country. Available in September, "The show will be an hour edited down from our 90-minute version," says Channel 7's pro-. gram director Larry Alt. "Detroiters won't see any difference in what we do now. We aren't going to go for the national audience.

Most of the editing will be to take out references that are too local but there'll be no question it's from Detroit." 20th Century Fox will handle the syndication, says Alt. Kelly and Turner, who have been vacationing in Hawaii, will stop off on their way home. to greet programmers and possible customers at a San Francisco convention this week. Alt said he didn't know how many stations had to buy the show to make syndication a reality. "We'll know if it's a go by April 1," he said.

He had no comment on how much Kelly and Turner will make if the syndication deal flies. EX-DETROITER Lily TornHn spent New Year's Eve giving a play-by-play on the Times Square jubilation for CBS. But she hopes to make New York a more permanent venue. She'll try out a one-woman show called "Works in Progress No Costumes, No Scenery, No Props, No Refunds" via the Santa Fe Theater Festival. For anyone riding into the sunset, Jan.

16 to Feb. 3 are Tomlin's dates at the New Mexico play fest. The festival has also lined up Don Meredith and Frank Gifford for 1 1 performances in May. More play-by-play? No, the redoubtable duo will temporarily forsake football for the indoor sport known as bickering. They'll play the leads in "The Odd Couple." REMEMBER the end of Mel Brooks' largely disappointing "History of the World Part 1" (1981)? It showed a spaceship with the Star of David on the side while a stentorian announcer urged us to watch for the science-fiction epic "Jews in Space!" Brooks is keeping his promise at least the sci-fi part of it.

The actor-director is co-writing a comedy called "Spaceballs." Edited by JOHN SMYNTEK Spit and wires contributed I 1 -V Bcttelou i Peterson 1 television vs. Chicago Black Hawks hockey game, live from Chicago; Sports Central. The fate of the Spartans, Titans and Red Wings has been forgotten by all but the most ardent sports fans. The real winners were television viewers, not only Detroiters, but across the country. The success of Channel 50 helped TV grow.

TWENTY YEARS ago, most TV stations were VHF (very high frequency) channels 2-13. The only place for television to expand was into UHF (ultra-high frequency) channels 14-80. But TV sets could pick up only VHF stations. To get UHF stations, a $20 attachment and a special antenna were needed. In a city such as Detroit, with four established VHF stations and only one UHF station (Channel 56), it was tough going for UHFs.

But in 1963, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that all TV sets sold after May 1964 had to pick ufeall TV channels, VHF and UHF. vf Kaiser the California conglomerate that once built UHF station began with sports and stars "KAISER'S ALL-SPORTS UHF'ER; INDUSTRY EYES DETROIT TEST" headline in Variety, Sept. 30, 1964 Sports got it started, the charisma of Lou Gordon and Bill Kennedy gave it personality and now, with a lineup of alternative programming, movies and reruns, WKBD-TV, Channel 50, celebrates its 20th anniversary as one of the nation's top independent stations, It was 5 p.m., Jan. 10, 1965, when WKBD-TV (the call letters stood for Kaiser Broadcasting, Detroit), signed on with an evening's telecasting that included: Iowa at Michigan State basketball on Dayton at University of Detroit basketball on tape; "The Sid Abel Detroit Red Wings Jeeps and World War II Victory ships, decided it was the right time to invest in the future of UHF. Kaiser Broadcasting, which had a successful sports station in Hawaii, took the plunge and applied for UHF stations in five major areas, including Detroit.

Detroit went on the air first, but before it did WKBD-TV's first general manager, John A. Serrao, a veteran of thev Hawaiian station, and once on the staff of Detroit's WWJ-TV (now WDIV), spent almost a year finding out what Detroit ers wanted on TV and weren't getting. Sports, especially hockawas their choi. The first See CHANNEL 50, Page 6C.