Summer Nights

Lately, I've been recalling the summer of 1982 quite a bit.  Specifically, the late summer nights of that year.

I was 15, and I spent most nights in my bedroom, watching a portable b&w TV that looked just like this, orange color and all:

1982 was the year that LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN premiered on NBC, and I was hooked.  It was like nothing I'd ever seen on TV before...incredibly funny, fresh, and subversive.  And things really were kicked up several notches the night in late July when Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler guested, to promote their pro wrestling feud:

And even after Letterman, there was good reason to stay up:  that summer, NBC debuted their new NEWS OVERNIGHT program.  Ordinarily, stations went off the air after 12:30 AM (or switched over to local programming), but the network decided to fill a few of those hours before dawn with this.  Although OVERNIGHT only lasted a couple of years, it proved to be a prototype for the 24 hours news cable channels.  Plus, it made a news star out of the awesome Linda Ellerbee!  It also made me into a hardcore news junkie.

Filling out the trifecta of late night enticements that season was an offering from my local PBS station, WTTW.  They had an early-morning series called SUMMER CAMP, in which they aired adventure serials and B-movies from the 1930s and 40s.  At a time when this stuff was hard to come by, I loved it.  In particular, I thought the "Flash Gordon" serials with Buster Crabbe were particularly terrific, and I still remember them fondly to this day:

I suppose the end result of all of this...beyond having my sense of humor shaped by Letterman, my inquisitiveness sparked by Ellerbee, and my love of old Hollywood adventures instilled...is that the summer of '82 left me to this day as an incurable night owl.  I just wish television now offered fare half as great as they did that year.