Science!

I weather a close encounter with Lloyd Lindsay Young

Weathermen occupy an unusual place in society. Like newscasters, they possess good looks and feel like part of the family because we see them on television every day. But although their predictions have serious ramifications for our lives, we’re not asked to take them too seriously: David Letterman, who began his career as a weatherman on WLWI-TV in Indianapolis, once congratulated a tropical storm for being upgraded to a hurricane.

They do tend to be affable, though, none more so than Lloyd Lindsay Young, who blew onto my radar screen via channel 9, WOR-TV in Secaucus, New Jersey in the 1980’s. Young grew up in Hollywood and began his career on radio station KWAK-AM in Bakersfield, moving on to WFIE-TV in Evansville, Indiana and KGO-TV in San Francisco before heading East.

He had a son, George Lindsay Young, who also was a weatherman at the time. For about five seconds I imagined that father and son weathermen would make a great sitcom, but there are only so many jokes you can make about a green screen. One, actually.

The elder Young’s trademark was winding up and yelling, “Helloooooooo” to whatever city, ball club or person he felt like spotlighting. He incorporated some prop humor, pointing at his weather map with mannequin legs and giant icicles. Quickly becoming a Garden State icon in the mold of Bruce Springsteen, Young’s antics earned him the opportunity to introduce comedian George Carlin on his live recording, What Am I Doing in New Jersey?, and to bust some rhymes on a couple of Beastie Boys albums.

When I worked at Nick at Nite in the 1980’s, Young seemed like a perfect fit as co-host for an interstitial series of 30-second segments called the String-a-Thon. As the name suggested, it was a telethon asking people to send in stray pieces of string that could be rolled into a great big ball in order to save Nick at Nite. String, you see, was necessary to make talking horse Mr. Ed’s lips move, for the stars of I Spy to tie up bad guys, and for My Three Sons’ housekeeper, Bub, to tie the boys’ laundry into three neat piles.

“Where does all this string come from?” we asked. “From thoughtful viewers like you.”

In true Dada fashion, there was no “there” there: no one donated anything, no one benefitted, and ultimately there was no point to the giant ball of string, beyond marveling at what a giant ball of string it was. And it was: different sizes were fabricated in a prop warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to show its growth into a five-foot ball as the telethon progressed.

Me, Lloyd Lindsay Young and Burt Ward. And a director trying to make sense of it all.

To pull off this non-event, we paired Young with Burt Ward, who played Robin, the Boy Wonder, on the original Batman TV series in the 1960s. On that campy show, Ward’s intense earnestness made him the perfect foil for Adam West’s droll, loopy rendition of Batman. We may have thought this pairing would recreate the formula of earnest and loopy that worked so well in the Batman series, but more likely than not we were just throwing two bugs in a jar to see what would happen.

Representatives of waxed and unwaxed dental floss associations find common cause

The repartee may not have been memorable, but we did have special guests. There was a cellist who played  a classical mash-up of theme songs from the Nick at Nite lineup; a string-manipulating magician; a woman who trilled the theme song from Mr. Ed through pursed lips; and feuding representatives from the waxed and unwaxed dental floss associations, who put their squabble aside long enough to donate a sack of floss for the cause: “Despite our differences, we believe that the fight for better television begins with the fight against tooth decay and gum disease.”

If it was more of a marriage of convenience than an affair to remember, this dynamic duo and their phony fundraiser were a perfect match for the self-aware baby boomers and good sports that comprised the core of Nick at Nite’s audience at the time. Ward was a professional actor and Young was, well, a weatherman, but I remember the confidence that informed both of their performances, and the knowledge they had of their own characters. Ward played it straight as an arrow while the scenery-chewing Young bellowed a litany of overpronounced words, climaxing with a pause followed by the non sequitur, “SCIENCE!”

SCIENCE!

I even employed a college friend and music producer to burst onstage in a tuxedo to perform the telethon theme song he had written:

This is our String-a-Thon

You can help us along

We're here to save Nick-At-Nite!

Think through the years

Of string that you've strung

And send it

To Burt Ward

Or Lloyd Lindsay-Young…

I don’t remember much about the outcome of the String-a-Thon or the whereabouts of the giant ball of string. What I mostly remember is that there was a time in my life when I could live in New York City, walk to work, and get paid for doing harebrained stuff like this.

Lloyd Lindsay Young continued his journey on WOR-TV, and a few months afterward began his weathercast with a big “Helloooooooo” to me followed by a happy birthday wish. He mispronounced my name and said I was living in the wrong borough of New York City. Also, it wasn’t my birthday. Still, I couldn’t have been more proud.

SCIENCE!

© 2022 David Potorti