TV Legends: Dick Clark

It's just come to my attention that Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve is now forty years old.  My God . . . where does the time go?  When you are young, the future seems to stretch out ahead to an infinite distance; but when you are old, you realize the road was not a very long one at all:  more like a few blocks down a wide, busy boulevard.  Which is why you should certainly enjoy your youth while you have it for that wonderful moment.  Don't be an asshole, but don't be a monk, either.  You will certainly live to regret either one.

Your Head Trucker hasn't watched television for nearly twenty years now - by deliberate choice, though I have rented plenty of videos, and now use Netflix - so it really hadn't occurred to me to wonder whether Dick Clark was still doing the New Year's Eve show.  I just pulled up a tape of this year's program, and was shocked - I had no idea he had had a stroke.  But God bless him, he's still keeping on keeping on, a real trouper.

Here's a short clip from a long interview with Clark in 1999 at the Archive of American Television, where he discusses the creation of the show, back in 1972:




(Confidentially . . . I still miss Guy Lombardo.  Anyone else remember the Royal Canadians?)