A disk full of regional documentaries: back in the 1980s TBS did an original series hosted by Hal Holbrook called Portrait of America about each of the 50 states and a few of the big cities (they did New York and I believe there was a Los Angeles and a Chicago as well). Here I have their "Rhode Island," "Massachusetts," and "New York City" presentations.

Also Sense of Place, a special about Rhode Island architecture hosted by David MacCaulay, and two shorts from PM Magazine: Don Bousquet, the "Beware of the Quahog" cartoonist, and Jack Major, the then entertainment editor for the Providence Journal. I once did a television survey as one of the projects in my 11th grade journalism class and sent the results to Major; he wrote an entire column about it. (For the record, this was 1973 and the favorite show of the high schoolers I surveyed was divided radically by sex: the girls' favorite series was The Waltons and the boys' was Kung Fu.)

(So who remembers PM Magazine? This was one of those shows birthed by the prime-time access rule in the early 1970s. The show actually had two different titles. It was produced by Group W Broadcasting (Westinghouse) and shown on both Group W and non-Group W owned stations. The Group W stations showed it as Evening Magazine and the non-Group W stations showed it as PM Magazine. Group W would produce about half of the 30-minute show with features about actors, parks, people in the news, etc., then the local markets would fill in the rest of the show with segments filmed about their own particular area. The host of Providence's PM Magazine was a very young and very seventies-looking Matt Lauer.)

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:34:00 PM

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