Strath Haven's David Letterman Club

In February 1988, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a story about the coolest club we had at Strath Haven High School in Wallingford, Pa. Yes, indeed, we had a David Letterman Club, in which students gathered after school to watch VHS tapes of his shows on a rolling AV cart.

The Inquirer story was reported and written by Gloria Hoffner¹, with a group photo that was taken by Al Tielemans. I'm way in the back of the photo and clearly in need of a haircut. This wasn't my only appearance in the Inquirer. I was also mentioned numerous times, in conjunction with the Steve Jeltz Fan Club, in Jayson Stark's Baseball Week in Review. And a ridiculous full article about that club, with a photo of me wearing a tie, was published by the Inquirer in, I think, the summer of 1990. I'll have to dig that one up.

Here are some excerpts from Hoffner's article:

• Each Wednesday afternoon, about 20 Strath Haven High School students gather around a TV set in science room 211. But instead of of watching the usual educational-television fare, they watch stupid pet tricks.² Did someone sabotage the videotape? Nope. It's Late Night with David Letterman, and it's no mistake.
• Armed with a fast-forward control button, the club members search past the commercials³ for the meat of the programs. They say their favorites are the animal acts and the sports foul-ups.
• Rick Kosel, a Strath Haven science teacher and the club's adviser, said that "about three or four years ago" Jamie Hooper, a resident of Swarthmore who is now attending Dartmouth, asked if we could have a club to watch taped videos of David Letterman because the show comes on at 12:30 p.m., and he didn't want to stay up that late. "We have a school policy that if a student comes up with a club idea, has 10 interested students and an adviser, then it can be considered an after-school club," Kosel said.
• "When I heard about the David Letterman Club, I thought it was a good idea because there are many students from one-parent homes or from homes where both parents are working, and this was a place they could go while waiting for their bus," [Activities Director Charlotte] Higler said.
• [Higler] said the David Letterman Club costs the district about $200 a year — the cost of Kosel's adviser's salary of $11 per hour. Kosel pays for the tapes, and the school already owned the videotape player.
• "I think it is a good thing because this way the kids who love David Letterman don't stay up until 1 a.m. watching, and it keeps their minds on their homework rather than on TV," Higler said.

That was 37 years ago. In 1993, Letterman left NBC's Late Night with David Letterman and began hosting Late Show with David Letterman on CBS. He retired in May 2015 after more than 4,200 episodes at CBS, including being the first talk show to return after 9/11. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert took over the famed Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan after Letterman retired, and Colbert was still going strong when CBS abruptly announced Thursday that his show will be canceled effective May 2026. There are strong indications that CBS's announcement represent a form of appeasement to the president of the United States, who has long expressed disdain for Colbert. Silencing comedians who poke fun at you is apparently what we do now in our democracy.

Speaking of the president, this is what David Letterman himself had to say about him way back in an interview with The Associated Press published on July 10, 2017:

QUESTION: Speaking of the current administration, late-night seems to have become mostly Trump jokes and tirades. Do you miss not being part of that?

LETTERMAN: "Here's what I keep saying: We know there's something wrong, but what I'm tired of is people, daily, nightly, on all the cable news shows telling us there's something wrong. I just think we ought to direct our resources and our energies to doing something about it. And other people have made this point: If the guy was running Dairy Queen, he'd be gone. This guy couldn't work at The Gap. So why do we have to be victimized by his fecklessness, his ignorance? But it's just the behavior is insulting to Americans, whether you voted for him or not — and I feel bad for people who did vote for him because he promised them things that they really needed and one wonders if he's really going to come through. I know there's trouble in this country, and we need a guy who can fix that trouble. I wish it was Trump, but it's not, so let's just stop whining about what a goon he is and figure out a way to take him aside and put him in a home."

That was eight long years ago. Which paradoxically seems even longer ago than when I was watching Letterman VHS tapes at Strath Haven in 1988.

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Footnotes

1. What a cool story Gloria Hoffner has! Here's an excerpt from her About the Author page on Amazon: "When I was a little girl my dream was to be an astronaut. So in 7th grade I wrote to NASA to ask what I needed to study in high school and college to travel into space. NASA sent me a form letter. It said study Latin and German, the language of scientific papers at the time, to study physics, math etc. Then as I reached the bottom on the page, in blue ink, handwritten, was a note that said, 'Of course we do not accept women into the space program.' It was 1967 and discrimination against women was legal and accepted. So, I turned to my second love, science fiction, and decided I would be the next Jules Verne. I read and wrote stories constantly(asked my teachers, family and friends to read them) and planned my career. I met a science fiction writer in high school and applied to college. I realized that I needed a full time job as I worked towards a career in fiction, so I majored in journalism." That led her to a career at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and later she published the award-winning book Science for Seniors: Hands-On Learning Activities.

2. Some "Stupid Pet Tricks" trivia from Wikipedia: "When Letterman left [for CBS], NBC asserted their intellectual property rights to several of the most popular Late Night segments. ... Notably, however, 'Stupid Pet Tricks' originated on Letterman's 1980 early morning show The David Letterman Show, to which Letterman, not NBC, owned the rights. This meant 'Stupid Pet Tricks' was able to cross over to the CBS show with its name and concept unchanged."

3. Nowadays those commercials would make those VHS tapes (if they still exist) pure gold. VHS tapes are making quite the comeback, as I plan to delve into later this summer. But even more valuable and collectible than certain commercial VHS tapes are home recordings of shows, movies and live sporting events onto blank tapes. They can contain commercials, news broadcasts, bumpers and other content that would otherwise be long lost. If you have these from the 1980s or 1990s, they usually sell for a decent price on eBay.

Sunny day shelfie miscellany

Sunny day
Sweeping the clouds away
On my way
To where the air is sweet

1979 middle school book: "The Mysterious Ghosts of Flight 401"

• Title: The Mysterious Ghosts of Flight 401
• Author: Burnham Holmes. He also authored the Contemporary Perspectives book about Nefertiti, plus books about the Third Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, Edward Hopper, Paul Robeson, Cesar Chavez and George Eastman. In May of this year, he retired from Castleton University in Vermont. As Emily Ely wrote for the student newspaper, the Castleton Spartan: "After nearly three decades of teaching, mentoring, and storytelling, English professor Burnham Holmes is retiring, leaving behind a legacy that’s impossible to summarize with a single title. 'Oh, a man of all the wonders. He is insane. He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met,' said junior Nickels Thomas. That sentiment echoes across generations of students and colleagues who have learned from Holmes, not just about writing or speaking, but about life itself." Holmes is also on Instagram. His most recent post calls poet Frank O'Hara his "Lodestone."
• Cover and interior illustrator: Abel Navarro
• Publisher: Contemporary Perspectives Inc. 
• Year: 1979
• Pages: 48
• Format: Hardcover
• Topic: On December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, traveling from New York to Miami, crashed into the Florida Everglades.¹ There were 101 fatalities, including the three cockpit crew members, and 75 survivors. Then came the ghost stories. As Wikipedia explains, "In the months and years following the crash, stories began circulating that numerous employees and passengers of Eastern had reported sightings of deceased crew members ... sitting aboard other [Lockheed] L-1011s. ... These stories speculated that the sightings were connected to the fact that parts of the crashed aircraft were salvaged after the investigation and refitted into other L-1011s. The reported hauntings were said to be seen only on the planes that used the spare parts." There was a 1976 book, The Ghost of Flight 401, by John G. Fuller, and a TV movie in 1978 (starring Ernest Borgnine and Kim Basinger) that helped the ghost stories become even more widespread in the late 1970s, perhaps leading to the publication of this middle-grade book, which I remember reading at the wonderful C.E. McCall Middle School library in Montoursville in the early 1980s.
• 
  Excerpt #1: The heavy clouds and cold air were only the first of many strange incidents aboard the Eastern plane. A stewardess on plane 318 saw something that looked like a cloud. It formed near where she was standing. At first, she thought it was only water vapor condensing. It could have been caused by a change in temperature. But the cloud wasn't like anything she had ever seen before. Little by little, the features of a human face took shape in the cloud.
• Excerpt #2: In none of the stories about the ghost captain and second officer was anyone hurt — in fact, quite the opposite. Some airline people even wanted to work on planes where Loft and Repo had appeared. They felt safe. They felt that the ghosts would protect them from harm.
• Excerpt #3: Very few people today have ever really seen ghosts, but there have been many legends and stories throughout history of people who have. Until Flight 401, never had so many different people — at different times — actually witnessed the appearances of the same ghosts.
• Reviews and memories: I couldn't find any reviews of this book on Goodreads, Amazon, Kirkus, Newspapers.com or Google search. And that's weird, because I know of lot of kids from my generation read this book, and used copies now sell for a pretty penny. I did find a 2022 Facebook post in the Vintage Airliners group. One commenter states, "I was a young guy when I read the book and it totally gave me the creeps." But it's not 100% clear whether he's talking about Fuller's book or Holmes' book. Maybe this post can become the go-to site for folks who want to remember and comment upon Holmes' book. Please comment!
  

My copy was circulated quite a bit at the public library in tiny Duncan, Arizona (in the southeastern part of the state) between 1987 and 2003. So perhaps millennials have some thoughts, too.

Previous Contemporary Perspectives books covered on Papergreat:

• This House is Haunted!
• The Case of the Ancient Astronauts
• Visions of the Future: Magic Boards
• The Abominable Snowman

(Note: Those four books are all Contemporary Perspectives Inc. (CPI) books distributed by Raintree Children's Books, Milwaukee. The Mysterious Ghosts of Flight 401, which follows the same format, was not distributed by Raintree. Instead, it was distributed by Silver Burdett Company of Morristown, New Jersey. Purely speculative on my part, but I wonder if Raintree didn't want to be associated with such a recent and horrific air disaster and its subsequent exploitation for ghost stories. I held some long misgivings about doing this post for that reason.)

Somber footnote

1. I can't help but connect old books to current events. The 1972 crash site of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 in the Everglades is only about 20 miles from the newly constructed Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp. 

Writing for the Guardian yesterday, columnist Moira Donegan noted: "It has long been a feature of Trump’s regime that displays of domination and cruelty have to be made in public, in a style of vulgar, over-the-top obviousness. Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement’s style of masculinity."

Andrew O'Hehir, the executive editor of Salon, wrote a July 6 column about Alligator Alcatraz that featured the subhead: "Yeah, it's a concentration camp. It's also a meme, a troll and an especially ugly distillation of American history." O'Hehir writes: "To describe this evil little zone of exclusion as sadistic, despicable and insulting, or as a symptom of incipient or actual fascism, is accurate enough. But it’s most definitely who 'we' are in 2025. If we claim that such a thing is 'un-American,' then we’re the ones who haven’t paid attention to history."

And the Miami Herald reported this morning that hundreds of immigrants with no criminal charges in the United States are already being held under tents and in chain-link cells at Alligator Alcatraz: "The information ... suggests that scores of migrants without criminal records have been targeted in the state and federal dragnet to catch and deport immigrants living illegally in Florida," the Herald notes.