Missing Letterman

The first time I remember seeing David Letterman on TV I was 13 or 14. He was appearing on “The Tonight Show” and his stand-up material was mostly observational humor about dumb commercials.

I was hooked. 

I remember one of his early guest-hosting appearances, and one of his monologue jokes concerned the small print on a shaving cream can that warned against spraying it into an open flame. “After going through all of the trouble of building a fire in the sink…” Genius.

His morning show – what I could see of it when I wasn’t in summer school failing geometry (in some sort of effort to “get ahead”) or dealing with WWBT’s decision not to show it after August – was also genius. But it was too edgy for housewives at 10 a.m. and was cancelled in four months. Nearly the same show moved into the 12:30-1:30 a.m. slot in February 1982, minus the live news updates from Edwin Newman.

That first spring I managed to see just a few episodes because it only ran Monday-Thursday. I have famously told anyone who would listen that I was watching Carson as long as I could remember in the summer and on Friday nights since my 9 p.m. bedtime was not enforced on those occasions. Seriously, by 1975 I was watching a lot of Johnny. And I loved Steve Allen.

So Letterman is to my generation what the original pioneers of television are to my parents. And while I will miss the fact he is there, we have not been watching that much in the past five years – not that we ever watched Jay Leno.

I was extremely disappointed with the way NBC handled Carson’s departure. First, I think he still had another two or three seasons in him, which would have allowed him to pass the 30-year mark as host. Then, rather than move Letterman into the 11:30 slot (and then Jay could have come on at 12:30) he was passed over.

The logic that Leno should get it was flawed at best. There was a reason Letterman could no longer guest host The Tonight Show (as he did 51 times from 1979 to 1981). He was, ummm, busy with the show that came on right after it. So for NBC to say Leno was more identified with the show at that time was just a convenient excuse. 

As an aside, the one mistake Carson made in my mind was going to a permanent guest host with Joan Rivers in 1983. Yes, she had been filling in a lot up to that point (I used to turn it off is she was hosting, by the way), but it used to be a lot of fun to see Bob Newhart or George Carlin or McLean Stevenson in the chair every once in a while. When Joan Rivers went to FOX in 1986, the new Tonight lineup included Garry Shandling each Monday, a Carson rerun on Tuesday and then new shows Wednesday-Friday.  Only if Johnny was on vacation would Leno would host for the week.

After a year, Shandling left, and Leno would go on to host once a week while still spelling Carson during his vacations. 

Letterman had hosted about 2,000 episodes of talk shows in the time Leno had maybe hosted 500, and was a much more polished interviewer by 1991.

I was happy when Letterman moved to CBS in 1993, although a bit disappointed that he reined in a lot of the stuff that made “Late Night” must-see TV. But it was nice to have Dave on TV every night, and I watched more often than not.

In recent years, I would go through six-month patches where I watched nearly every night, then would get out of the habit. Now I know I don’t have much more time (although it will be “at least a year,” he did say on Thursday night's show) to enjoy the Letterman brand, so I will have to try harder.

My one contact with the show came somewhat by accident. In 2003 Martin Short’s daughter was named queen for the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival while I was living in Winchester and working at the Northern Virginia Daily in Strasburg. This was something the festival would do in an effort to bring in more celebrity power to augment the Grand, Firefighters and Sports marshals.

But because Short and Jason Alexander were doing “The Producers” in Los Angeles, he was unable to come to Winchester for the crowning ceremony. Short was able to dispatch Letterman’s bandleader, Paul Shaffer, to Winchester to take care of the responsibility.

I contacted “Late Show” producer Mike McIntee on Thursday afternoon (since they were not taping Friday) and told him I could mail the show a copy of the front page of our Saturday morning paper if he thought it was something they would want. Absolutely, he told me.

So after the typical Friday night of Apple Blossom (which means we were about two hours late getting off the press) I drove home to Richmond in preparation for my mom and stepdad’s annual Kentucky Derby party. It was 6 a.m. when I reached the Ampthill branch (23234 and 23237 ZIP codes for those scoring at home), where I knew there was a mail dispatch early Saturday morning. There would be no chance to do this via Express Mail; it was my only shot.

I got an e-mail from Mike about 6:30 p.m. that Monday. He said the page had arrived just before they started taping and Letterman wanted to include it in the show. The rest is television history.

Of course, we still had a paper to put out that night, so we went about our work, and at 11:35 we turned the show on. During the desk piece, Letterman asked Shaffer a few questions about the event and showed the page. My favorite part was when Shaffer recounted that the queen’s first duty was to bestow a knighthood on Dick Van Patten.

“Now I know you’re dreaming,” Letterman shot back.

Following the show, which aired May 5, 2003, I even got a nod in the Wahoo Gazette.

In more recent years, the cranky Dave has sometimes worn me thin, but I’m surely going to miss him, and all of those unpredictable nights.

I could not resist posting this, since it mentions my hometown.