Back in this post, I remembered an episode of Virginia Graham's old talk show in early 1971 on which Carmine Infantino appeared. This was back when Carmine was the top guy at DC Comics and he was on to discuss the new books DC was putting out. I wrote, "I may be remembering another show Carmine did but my recollection is that Telly Savalas was a guest on the same episode and that he started lambasting Infantino for selling comic books full of violence to children."
Well! Bill Mullins, a faithful reader of this site who has dug up additional info on many things I've written about, dug into the archives of the Los Angeles Times and he found a listing for that program. It was on at 8:00 in the evening — at least it was in Los Angeles — and Telly Savalas was indeed a guest as were Joanna Barnes and Ron Eliran. In case you don't recognize the name, Ron Eliran is a great singer of Israeli folk songs. The date is April 14, 1971.
It's doubtful a tape of that episode will ever turn up and based on my memory, that's not a great loss. Mr. Infantino was a brilliantly talented artist but he was not a great spokesperson for his product, especially compared to Stan Lee. Carmine came across not as a friendly, creative person but like a guy in a gangster movie. A few years later, called upon to defend his company's treatment of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, he gave off precisely the wrong image. Matter of fact, he sounded like Telly Savalas in one of the many movies in which Savalas played the bad guy.