On Top

While 1967 was a terrible year for Detroit, 1968 was as bad for the nation and the city. As Detroit tried to regain its footing form the riots that had ripped at its very heart, the country was being pulled apart by the mounting body count in Vietnam. It became the first war to be fought daily in the living rooms on the evening news. The power and impact of television was suddenly being understood in a whole new way.

On ABC, news was being anchored nightly by Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner. By now, Detroit had become a haven for the civil rights movement. Not only did the city have a large African-American population, but Dr. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement had been financed by labor leader Walter Reuther and his United Auto Workers. It was the UAW, for example, that had put up $50,000 in bail and bond money to get Martin Luther King and his following out of jail in Birmingham, Alabama.

But 1968 was the year everything came crashing in. It began in January, when North Korea seized the USS Pueblo, a naval spy vessel. President Lyndon Johnson, weary of the anti-war sentiment against him, decided not to run for a second term. In April, King was assassinated in Memphis. In June, Sen. Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in Los Angeles. By the time the Democrats met for their convention on a steamy week in August in Chicago, tensions were at a boiling point. That week, Chicago Police and left wing demonstrators camped in Grant Park clashed in a ferocious uprising that shocked the nation.

The combination of frequency and prominence of news confirmed over and over what the executives in New York had been stressing for almost a decade: that news was the central fiber of television. ABC, like other networks, had by now consolidated all its feature programming in New York and Los Angeles. Very little of it was being done locally anymore. But news was growing and morning talk shows were still playing well locally.

The last Detroit original from radio days to make it onto national TV line-up was "Green Hornet," which had a brief run in 1966. "The Avengers," a British mystery-adventure show starring Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg led the ABC prime-time line up with "Mod Squad," "It Takes A Thief," "The Dating Game," "The Lawrence Welk Show" and "The Flying Nun."