Much as many would like to think a year like 1967 was the stepping off point in American culture, it was also the year much of America clung desperately to the familiar and the traditional – Art Linkletter was safe harbor for an America on the verge of fracturing.
At the time it was baffling and cringeworthy – vestiges of a society at odds with itself. An explosion of Youth Culture; the notorious Baby Boom generation grabbing up all the seats for the Brave New World while those members of The Greatest Generation fought an ever-losing battle to maintain the status quo and a vision of society rapidly becoming a memory.
To a lot of that generation it represented “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” – rejecting those aspects of the past that no longer seeming relevant, but not wanting them to go away. There was some comfort to be had, dialing in (on the radio and TV) each day for some assurance we still had traditional values, no matter how corny or out of place they seemed in 1967.
But the writing was on the wall – popularity was fading – Art Linkletter’s House Party, a staple on Radio since the late 1940s was, like commercial radio itself, in the process of evolving – and since America’s business was about appealing to the masses, the masses were drifting apart. By the 1970s Art Linkletter’s House Party would be a thing of the past as the Baby Boom generation settled in to take the reigns of popular culture, putting what was left in a box labeled “nostalgia”.
In retrospect, not everything needed to be abandoned or tossed into obscurity. But at the time, if it represented the values of an older generation you were at odds with, it was no longer of any use. Family Values was a phrase that didn’t come into vogue until decades later, and it’s been misrepresented and distorted ever since.
So what we have here is an episode of Art Linkletter’s House Party as it was heard on Friday, the 13th of January 1967 with “Kids letter’s To God”, women prisoners and beauty tips from Caroline Leonetti -exactly as it was heard over CBS Radio.
