As reported by my hometown’s local rag, a fixture of my television-dominated childhood, who was still working in conservative radio until just a few months ago, has passed on at age 94 . Though he was a force in Los Angeles area news television for decades, its possible that he will longest be remembered as the main inspiration for Ted Baxter — though it’s also true that Putnam would have eaten Baxter (and definitely Rod Burgundy) for lunch. Wonderful as it was, the late Ted Knight’s intepretation lacked Putnam’s John Wayne/George C. Scott-style machismo.

Admittedly, most of my memories of Putnam are hazy — I didn’t get a chance to be outraged by him until I was a teenager and, by then, watching less television. As a child, I likely thought he was correct. Probably because my parents could best be described as either Rockefeller Republicans or Nixon Democrats, I thought of myself as a moderate, anti-dove Republican, until roughly the end of elementary school when Watergate and the growing realization that the Vietnam war was killing thousands of civilians and soldiers for no particular reason helped flipped me over permanently to the other side of the fence.

Putnam, who described himself as a conservative Democrat, was part of a now increasingly forgotten nucleus of show business conservatives who really did stand athwart the late sixties and early seventies culture revolution and yell “stop.” Naturally, they were ignored by millions of youth who continued to smoke pot and have premarital sex (as opposed to drinking and committing adultery), while many of the rest correctly mocked them. By far the best known and most accomplished member of this group was the talented actor-producer-director Jack Webb who certainly wasn’t afraid to put his particular political stamp on his best known product, TV’s Dragnet.

Others in this crowd — who existed before the right wing made “Hollywood” wrongly synonymous with “liberal,” — included my second favorite DJ at the time, big-band-playing Dick Whittinghill, who regularly warned against secret drug messages in Beatles tunes while having professional fake-drunk and future Branson, Missouri mainstay Foster Brooks as a regular. (Bob Crane also turned up on the show and was an occasional substitute host, but I guess that’s another story entirely.)

Putnam, Webb, and Whittinghill all paid obeisance to another conservative (and by “conservative,” I mean “ape-shit”) Democrat, Mayor Sam Yorty. Suffice it to say that, even as a youth I dispised Yorty. “Mayor Sam” was beloved by this group, but to me he remains the genuinely despicable pol who, at first successfully, battled the first serious African-American candidate for the mayoralty of Los Angeles by painting a moderate ex-policeman as somehow tied to the Black Panthers and other radical groups. (Sound familiar?)  The very day “Mayor Sam” announced he had registered as a Republican, I announced to an uncaring world that I was now a Democrat.

What does any of this have to do with Putnam? No idea. Also, I’m not sure what it means that I can do a pretty decent impression of the closing of his commentaries, when he stepped out of his newsman role into the role of a pre-Rush pundit, “That’s one reporter’s opinion, I welcome yours.” Or the fact that, after going to a seminar for high school newspaper editors at the L.A. Times, me and my Venice High cohorts saw Mr. Putnam walking out of a bar with a buddy or two and, then, seeing us, straighten himself up for a typically stentorian, “Hello!” (Note: It is absolutely impossible to write about Putnam without using the world “stentorian.”)

He was a blowhard, perhaps a hypocrite on sexual matters (see his obit for who he’s survived by and then see the videos below), and his politics in general were from the stone age, and that’s probably a kind way of putting it, but he was also friendly face. Also, like another lovable troglodyte/genius, Pat Buchanan, he opposed the Iraq war. So, there’s that. I’m sorry I didn’t know he’d been on the radio all this time and I’m sorry he’s gone now.

A Memento

And a Remix….