Back when ABC, CBS and NBC had cartoons in their God-given spot on Saturday morning, those shows were occasionally truncated or otherwise abbreviated for "educational content." The FCC mandated that certain quotas of pro-social material be broadcast along with the Hanna-Barbera madness and the commercials for foods with high sugar content. A lot of half-hour shows became 25-minute shows so we could get little short segments that lectured kids on good nutrition or history. For a brief time, ABC had little consumer tips and I seem to recall writing a few of them that were vetoed because they would have rebutted certain commercials that were then being broadcast.
I only recall two kinds of spots that I thought were at all worthwhile, let alone entertaining. One was the Schoolhouse Rock segments that popped up on ABC, usually in the fringe time slots. They were cleverly written and well-animated and to this day, I'll bet a lot of folks my age can still sing, "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here." Last year, I attended a party where the great jazz musician Jack Sheldon performed with his combo. The number one request, and the number which caused all the adults present to flock around and applaud with glee, was when he sang "I'm Just a Bill," a number he performed for Schoolhouse Rock.
The other segments I liked then — and remember, I was more or less an adult in the seventies; I was writing some of the shows these spots appeared in — was a series on CBS called In the News. They were short summaries, ranging one to two minutes in length, of what was going on in the world, illustrated with news footage. I thought I was pretty well informed from my reading of newspapers and my viewing of adult newscasts, but the In the News segments often outlined a story with such clarity and lack of sensationalism that I'd find myself going, "Oh, so that's what that's all about."
The In the News segments were narrated by the gent whose photo I've posted above right…Christopher Glenn, a reporter that CBS usually had assigned to radio projects. I believe he also wrote — or at least, supervised the writing of — the spots which ran from 1971 to 1986. What prompted this posting is that I see that Mr. Glenn is retiring after more than 50 years in broadcasting, the last 35 of which he spent at CBS. Obviously, he did a lot of other things for the network but every time I hear his measured, authoritative voice on one of them, I'm reminded of what a fine job he did with In the News, and how it was one of the few things I didn't mind interrupting my viewing of Road Runner cartoons. A lot of those who today are doing more elaborate, allegedly "in depth" news reporting for an older audience could learn a lot from what he did for kids.