August 5, 1957: "American Bandstand" Goes National

August 5, 1957: American Bandstand, previously a local program on WFIL-Channel 6, the Philadelphia affiliate on ABC, is taken national by the network.

The show, titled just Bandstand, began on October 7, 1952, running weekdays, Monday through Friday, hosted by Bob Horn, as basically a televised extension of his radio show on WFIL, 560 on the AM dial, a.k.a. "The Famous 56."

Essentially, it was Horn introducing records, and, while the record played, teenagers would be shown dancing at the WFIL studio at 46th Street and Market Street in West Philadelphia, across 46th from the Philadelphia Arena, 3 miles west of City Hall. But Horn was fired on July 9, 1956, after being arrested for drunk driving.

Another WFIL disc jockey got the job: Dick Clark. On August 5, 1957, the show went national, as American Bandstand. The timing was exquisite: Within a few weeks, a doo-wop group from South Philadelphia, Danny & The Juniors, came along with a song they'd recorded titled "Do the Bop." Clark had a sense for such things, and told them the bop was on its way out as a dance, and suggested a new title, "At the Hop," because dance halls invited teenagers to take their shoes off, and dance in their socks, calling the dances "sock hops."

Clark wasn't completely right. True, the stroll came along and replaced the bop as the top teenage dance in America. But the re-recorded "At the Hop" made his prediction a self-contradicting prophecy: By playing the song on Bandstand, people around the country saw kids doing the bop, and it got a second wind. By the end of 1957, "At the Hop" was the Number 1 song in America, and remained so for the first few weeks of 1958.

Clark and the Juniors helped each other: The first "veejay" (video disc jockey) made the group famous, and the group raised the show's profile. Kids rushed home form school in time to turn to Channel 7 and watch Bandstand. (Not every ABC affiliate was a Channel 7, but they were in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and several other cities.)

And so, in 1958, with Elvis Presley in the U.S. Army, Little Richard stepping aside to enter the ministry, Jerry Lee Lewis marrying himself into scandal, and Chuck Berry going to prison under the Mann Act, American Bandstand introduced America to rock acts both new and established, and helped ensure, as Danny & The Juniors said in their follow-up to "At the Hop," "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay." Bandstand did as much as anything else to ensure that this would be true.

On September 7, 1963, Bandstand was moved to become a weekly show, airing after ABC's Saturday morning cartoons. And on February 8, 1964 -- the day between the Beatles' arrival in New York and their groundbreaking performance on The Ed Sullivan Show -- American Bandstand began broadcasting from the ABC Television Center in Los Angeles. It continued to air from there, with Clark earning the nickname "The World's Oldest Teenager," until its last show, on October 7, 1989, the show's 37th anniversary.

That same day that Bandstand moved west, WFIL moved out of the 46th & Market studio to its current studio on City Line Avenue, 5 miles northwest of City Hall. On May 1, 1971, the station's call letters became WPVI, which they remain to this day: P for Philadelphia, and VI for the Roman numeral 6. I can hear "Closer to Your World," the Action News theme, now.

Bob Horn tried to rebuild his life by moving to Houston, where a former boss hired him at KILT, under the name Bob Adams. In 1966, while mowing his lawn in that famously hot city, he died of heatstroke. He was only 50 years old.

Clark was considerably more fortunate. While Bandstand was in L.A., he formed Dick Clark Productions, which is still in business. And he began producing and hosting all kinds of shows, including the game show Pyramid and, starting on December 31, 1971, the nationally-broadcast Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. In 2004, he suffered a stroke, and Ryan Seacrest has hosted the show ever since, with Clark making brief appearances close to midnight until his death in 2012.

An Aldi supermarket is now on the site of the original Bandstand studio.

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August 5, 1957 was a Monday. Only 2 baseball games were played that day. The New York Yankees lost to the Cleveland Indians,7-2 at Yankee Stadium. Mike Garcia outpitched Don Larsen. Mickey Mantle went 0-for-1... with 4 walks. Former Yankee Gene Woodling went 2-for-5 with a home run and 5 RBIs. He was later replaced for defensive purposes by a rookie and future Yankee: Roger Maris.

And the Brooklyn Dodgers beat their arch-rivals, the New York Giants, 5-2 at Ebbets Field. Rookie Don Drysdale outpitched Ray Crone. Gino Cimoli went 3-for-4 with an RBI. Willie Mays went 4-for-5 with a home run and 2 RBIs.