“Dick Clark died today” I said last night as my family put dinner together.
“Who?” my daughter-in-law asked.
Who? Who’s Dick Clark?! That was what I wanted to say, a little taken aback at the idea that anyone, anywhere would not know who Dick Clark is. Why, he’s— he’s— famous! His career spanned 50 years! In his heyday, he’d make ever-busy Ryan Seacrest look like a no-account slacker!
When I was growing up in the 1980s, no one would’ve asked who Dick Clark was. He was on television more often than the president and just as recognizable as Mickey Mouse. I’d see him Saturday mornings hosting American Bandstand. If I was sick some weekday afternoon, there he’d be—presiding over The $10,000 Pyramid. In prime time, I’d watch him host TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes with Ed McMahon. And at every turn of the year—including this year—he presided over America’s Times Square celebration with Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
Back then, folks still called him “America’s Oldest Teenager,” a tribute to both his preternatural awareness of what was hip and cool (and what soon would be) and his ever-youthful appearance. From Clark’s first national television appearances in the 1950s to 2004, when he suffered a debilitating stroke, he aged at the rate of a redwood—changing so little that it became a running joke. When I first flipped on American Bandstand in the early 1980s, I would’ve assumed that the guy was in his 30s. In reality, he would’ve been in his mid-50s.
Writes Time’s James Poniewozik:
The sentence "Dick Clark died today" seems like a contradiction in terms. If there was someone who was supposed to be forever young, untouched by time, it was him: if not immortal, then at least amortal. He was a contradiction: one of TV's longest-serving colossi, best known for shows that celebrated eternal youth (American Bandstand) and the march of time (New Year's Rockin' Eve), who himself was famed for seeming eternal and unchanging. Composed, sunny, gleaming and well-spoken, he was never exactly "The World's Oldest Teenager," as the cliché went, but he was a constant nonetheless—the world's longest-serving cool uncle/chaperone, and a beloved one.
It’s hard for me to gauge Clark’s real impact on culture. For me, he seems more a cultural ringmaster than a star, a guy like Ed Sullivan before and, maybe, Seacrest after, that served as a genial host—introducing us to folks that matter before leaving us to mingle. He wasn’t bombastic or showy. He knew his role and filled it with unmistakable, unrepeatable style. He wasn’t a game-changer. If we call him a star, he was like the North Star: Not the brightest or showiest thing up in the firmament, but a constant, reliable presence.
Because I had grown up with this ageless Clark, it was hard to see him host New Year’s Rockin’ Eve lately. He was no longer America’s Oldest Teenager. He looked older. He struggled with the countdown, the numbers slurring as the crystal ball dropped. On an evening dedicated to the passage of time, it was a reminder that it catches us all in the end. Even Dick Clark.
But here’s the thing about death, at least as it pertains to those still living: Death frees our memories. Our image of Clark is no longer trapped in the visage of an aging man still recovering from a stroke. We can remember him as, in a way, truly ageless—for our memories of him don’t really change: For us, all the Clarks we knew from the 1960s and ’70s and ’80s and ’90s … from Bandstand to Bloopers to even the following cameo on the Airplane-style sitcom Police Squad … become current again.
Who’s Dick Clark? Dick Clark, that’s who.
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