A little bit about a lot of things about Dick Clark and American Bandstand:
- As a youngster, Clark operated something of a restaurant out of his family's living room, trying to sell peanut butter sandwiches. Apparently an elderly upstairs neighbor was his main customer. Clark later went into the restaurant business for real, owning three franchises of the Steer Inn hamburger chain with business partner Bob Keeshan, better known as Captain Kangaroo.
- When Clark wasn't pushing the PB sandwiches, he was just as likely to be playing marbles in the living room, where he was known to mark out a circle with chalk.
- Arthur and Kathryn Murray were Clark's neighbors in
his boyhood home in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Besides occasionally performing babysitting duties for Clark and his brother, the Murrays also presented Clark with dancing lessons for his 13th birthday. In his later years, Clark acknowledged that he only danced overseas "where they don't know who I am."
- Before landing the hosting duties for TV's Bandstand, Clark had a radio show where he played what could be charitably called "easy listening" music. He was unfamiliar with the early rock music that was emerging that summer of 1956, but claims he was a "quick learn." One of his mentors at that crucial time was popular Philadelphia rhythm and blues deejay Georgie Woods, who Clark called several times a week.
- Clark's decision to leave the music business in 1959 to concentrate on television was a wise one. Clark sold Dick Clark Productions for $175 million in 2007. Not long after Clark's death in 2012, it was sold again, for $370 million. A Chinese company offered $1.07 billion for DCP in late 2017, but the deal fell through.
- In a 1986 video interview by Joe Smith, Clark said that he and business partners Bernie Lowe and Simon Singer each chipped in $10,000 to bankroll Jamboree, a 1957 rock film produced for Warner Brothers. Singer is better known as Pop Singer, the owner of the corner drug store near the Bandstand studio where regulars and the show's fans gathered every weekday afternoon.
Just for fun: John Mellencamp released a single in the 1980s entitled "Pop Singer," but it has nothing to do with Philadelphia's famous drug store owner.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. Go here to learn the story behind the writing of Bandstandland or here to listen to the Pennsylvania Cable Network's interview with author Larry Lehmer.
Larry Lehmer's book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
