Back in this post, we brought you a 1973 video called either Keep America Beautiful or Keep U.S. Beautiful…either way, a light-hearted variety show telling us it was not a good idea to litter or pollute. I received this message from John R. Hall…

Here's a bit more context on Keep America Beautiful.

In 1953, America's beverage companies — led by Coke and Pepsi — formed a non-profit called "Keep America Beautiful." Its goal was primarily to reduce littering and secondarily to promote recycling — ostensibly — in order to reduce support for "bottle bills" that placed a deposit on beverage containers. The bottle bills were and are designed to create incentives to keep beverage containers out of the waste stream and the litter stream by making it more expensive to avoid small beverage containers that make up most of the non-paper litter.

K.A.B. was controversial from the beginning, because its sponsors made its purpose clear.

A few years before the special you cited, I was part of a University of Pennsylvania research center project for Anheuser Busch to assemble facts related to waste and litter, framed in economics terms. This was about the time that the Council on Environmental Quality, a federal agency that paved the way for the Environmental Protection Agency, was created. I think the timing of the special is what one might expect when the threat of increased regulatory costs seemed to be rising. Anheuser Busch was one of the few beverage companies that thought they needed to offer a serious alternative to bottle bills. More typical was Coors, which led the scorched earth companies that opposed anything that would cost the beverage companies anything at all.

The term "greenwash" (based on whitewash) was developed for projects like Keep America Beautiful. I think your challenge to readers to judge how well that approach has worked is (as usual) the right way to judge how serious the K.A.B. sponsors were about meaningful change.

I'm a big believer in "Follow the money." I think it usually explains more than most people think. I'm not a big believer in crusades that make people feel they're doing more than they have. I'm thinking now of the folks who thought they'd struck a meaningful response to the terrorists of 9/11 by spending 29 cents and putting a made-not-in-the-U.S.A. American flag on their cars. It's not nothing but if it makes you feel you've done your part and now the problem's gone away, it might be worse than nothing.

It's nice to hear that Anheuser Busch thought they needed to do something meaningful and it's disappointing (but hardly shocking) that Coors did not. That might cause me to switch brands but it would be another meaningless gesture since I've never had a beer in my life. Thanks for writing, John.

Just fixed a really stupid typo in the second part of my Blackhawk history…the kind of typo that inverts the whole meaning of a sentence. Thanks to the many, many folks who saw it when I didn't and wrote in.

As anyone in publishing can tell you, you can proofread something fifty times and once it's too late to fix it, a mistake will appear. Years ago, I wrote that when you receive the first printed, published copy of anything you wrote and open it to a random page, you will suddenly spot a large, nude, obvious error and you will foolishly wonder if there's a way to fix it when there obviously isn't.

The readers of this blog are very sharp and usually when I make a mistake, eleven people write me within fifteen minutes and politely let me know. I am grateful for this. Then again, sometimes I have occasion to look back on a post from 2007 or some other long-ago time and I suddenly notice something that causes me to wonder, "How come no one noticed that?"

If you see one anywhere here, please let me know.

There are arguments and outrage across the 'net tonight as a lot of folks, many of whom did not watch the Emmy Awards, complain about who was left out of the "In Memoriam" segment that was aired. I didn't see it and I don't have a lot of attention to give to that inevitable matter.

But I did just look at this video which the Television Academy has up on its website. It's their full list of those we lost in the last year who had some connection to television. Someone will surely note some omissions on this long, long list which even without photos — just scrolling a list of names — runs six minutes and 43 seconds. I'm sure they didn't intend it to be an answer to those who wonder why the on-air video with photos and time for applause can't include everyone…but it is.

I hope this doesn't sound morbid but I watched the whole thing and was amazed how many people I knew, many of whom I worked with, have passed in the period this covers. I run a lot of obits on my blog but there must have been a dozen names on that crawl that caused me to think, "Oh, I didn't know that person had died." Just for that information alone, I'm glad I watched the entire thing.

Before you read this, you might want to read Part 1.

DC Comics acquired the Blackhawk comic book in 1956 and published it until 1968. For most of that time, it was still about a handsome Polish soldier (named Blackhawk) who headed up a troupe (also named Blackhawk) of skilled soldiers who flew neat-looking airplanes and got into incredible adventures around the world battling evil forces. Though other members sometimes popped in for a story or two, the team members were pretty much standardized as Olaf, Chuck, André, Stanislaus, Hendrickson and Chop-Chop.

Chop-Chop started out as a racial stereotype cook/houseboy for the team and he was played mostly for laughs. As that kind of stereotype became increasingly less funny and tolerated, he morphed into a more realistic and full-fledged member of the squad — and one proficient in martial arts. When I worked on the comic in the eighties, we got some letters from folks who were very pleased with how Chop-Chop had evolved — which I'd had very little to do with — and one or two who were furious with me for not putting him back the way he was in 1941.

When I started buying DC comics around 1960, I didn't buy the war or western or romance titles because those kinds of stories didn't appeal to me then. I didn't buy Blackhawk because it seemed to be a war comic…which it kinda was even though it didn't seem to be set in any war in particular. And it sure had a lot of monsters and outer space aliens on its covers.

Many years later, I met a gent named George Kashdan who had been an editor at DC Comics at the time and who had a lot to do with Blackhawk while he was with the company. I told him I wasn't buying it for a while because I really wasn't sure if it was a war comic or a super-hero comic. He said that was the problem with it: It wasn't enough of a super-hero comic to please the super-hero comic fans and it wasn't enough of a war comic to please the war comics fans.

During most of this time, Blackhawk was published monthly, which was a status I thought DC only bestowed on their top-selling books. I asked if Blackhawk was a top-selling book. He said, "Never." I asked why it was monthly then. He said, "Damned if I know." And this man was, for several years, the editor of the comic.

Then he said, "I think it had something to do with the sales overseas. It was a huge seller, just not in this country. All over the world, publishers were paying us to buy the rights to reprint those issues." Indeed, there was so much love for this franchise that there were two separate (I think) lines of Blackhawk comics in Spanish.

I don't know a whole lot about this but one publisher was putting out El Halcón de Oro ("The Hawk of Gold") and the other was putting out El Halcon Negro ("The Black Hawk"), some with translations of the DC issues and some with original, home-grown stories.  Same premise, same characters, sometimes (I'm told) very similar stories.  I have no idea how they could co-exist.  Maybe one publisher bought the rights from DC while the other acquired them from the original publisher of Blackhawk, Quality Comics.

Perhaps the sales from overseas reprints — whichever ones DC was paid for — kept Blackhawk in the black and on the schedule. Since the editor of the comic couldn't explain it, don't expect me to. Anyway, sales in this country weren't great. In 1964, they tried to boost them a bit by giving the comic a new title logo and giving the soldiers more colorful uniforms…but I'm guessing they felt they couldn't tamper much with the content of the comics without endangering those foreign sales.

Mr. Kashdan told me he was ordered to not mess too much with the format but not why. Finally though in 1967, DC Comics was beginning to undergo some upheavals. Marvel was gaining on them in sales and artist Carmine Infantino was added to the editorial staff with the orders to shake things up. Blackhawk was one of the first projects that seemed to require a major facelift and surgery. And boy, did they shake it up…as we'll discuss in our next installment.

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Just before I went to bed last night, a friend e-mailed me with Top Secret, Do-Not-Quote Inside Info on why Donald Trump flew to Washington, D.C. last night. It was scandalous and headline-shattering and amazing and, of course, completely bogus. Yes, he flew there but we have no idea why. Someone just made up a fantasy as to why and sent it out to others, passing it off as coming from a good source. I didn't believe it then and don't believe it now.

In more interesting news, quite a few of you found that special I linked to really was on IMDB under the name, Keep U.S. Beautiful. They say it aired March 27, 1973.

Thanks for all the iPhone suggestions. No, I am not ready to switch to Android.

The Emmy Awards are tonight. I do not think it's a bad thing that the only folks who really care are the nominees and those who stand to profit from their show winning something. I also thought it was a good thing when interest in the Miss America Pageant plunged to zero.

Those of you who are waiting for an official announcement of the next Groo mini-series from Dark Horse do not have long to wait. Those of you who are waiting for the release of Volume 8 of The Complete Pogo from Fantagraphics…well, I don't know when it will be available in stores and online but I do have a finished, printed copy of it here on my desk. They bind and FedEx a couple of copies over from Korea while the rest are being bound and shipped over here via two guys paddling a canoe across the Pacific.

Yesterday, I had a great lunch with Scott Dunbier and his son. Scott's the guy assembling the Comics For Ukraine benefit book that is raising dough for refugees of that ghastly war. The book is going better than anyone expected and Scott came by to pick up a crate of autograph pages I agreed to autograph. Unlike some folks I could mention, I do not love signing my name over and over and over and over (etc.) and I had to keep reminding myself, "It's for a great cause." And of course, it is.

Speaking of benefits…

Here's a strange TV special that ran on NBC in 1973 (it says) and which appears nowhere in the IMDB or almost anywhere else online. It's called Keep America Beautiful and it stars Raymond Burr, Ruth Buzzi, Tim Conway, Don Knotts, Lena Horne, Sandy Duncan, The Muppets and a whole bunch of Boy Scouts. It was produced by a lot of the same folks who were then putting on Flip Wilson's weekly variety series. Flip, Redd Foxx, Carol Burnett and some other stars also make appearances.

Basically, it's comedy sketches and songs urging people not to pollute…certainly a worthy cause. If you actually watch it, you can decide for yourself how well they did it. My feeling is that a light-hearted comedy show may not be the best vehicle to get people to care about a serious problem.

If you just want to watch The Muppets, try this link. They have a pretty nice little spot. If you want to watch the whole thing, click below…

Donald Trump has reportedly flown to Dulles International Airport which serves Washington, D.C., and there is apparently no known event he is supposed to attend in the area.

A lot of folks on Twitter (and elsewhere online, I guess) are speculating that he's there for some sort of arraignment or plea bargain or Grand Jury testimony…or something.  Some of them are acting like they have inside information and that it's not good for our 45th president.  I tend to think that if someone is acting like they have inside information, it probably means they don't.

One thing I do believe is that we don't know as much about the investigations (plural because there are many) as we think we do.  It was not so long ago that none of us had heard about Trump having an improper stash of Top Secret documents at Mar-A-Lago.  And then suddenly one day, we did.  This could be another one of those…or a new development in that matter…

…or it could be nothing.  I'm going to go with nothing because…well, it saves one a lot of disappointment.

Because I ask for them, I get a lot of questions sent to me at askme@newsfromme.com. I get asked about a lot of things but I'm probably asked the most about the Blackhawk comic book that I wrote (and sometimes edited) for DC Comics for what, when you think about it, was a teensy fraction of the history of that property. I probably have fifty e-mails in a folder on my D drive asking me how I got the job, why I left the job, how I felt about it, how it was to work with Dan Spiegle, etc.

The Spiegle question is the easiest answer. Dan was the main artist on the book while I was involved with it and he was a joy. Everything he drew was right and beautiful. Everything he drew was on-time. Matter of fact, much of it was handed in early. As you'll see in some part of this series down the line, one of my biggest problems on this assignment was keeping Dan busy.

The other questions are a little tougher and will require more bytes to explain so I've decided to tackle this as a series of articles that will run I-don't-know-how-many chapters. And I've decided to call it…

Now then: Blackhawk first appeared in Military Comics #1 cover-dated August of 1941. The feature was created by some combination of Will Eisner, Chuck Cuidera and Bob Powell. Cuidera and Powell were artists who were both then working in Eisner's "shop" where he and his staff created comic book material for various buyers.

I never met Bob Powell who died in 1967 but I got to spend some quality time with Will Eisner and a few hours at one convention with Chuck Cuidera. Depending on how you phrased the question and what mood they were in, either Will or Chuck might tell you that any one, two or three of that trio created Blackhawk. Gil Kane once told me that if I'd been able to ask Powell, he'd have told me he created it and would threaten to beat the crap out of anyone who said otherwise.

And to further muddy the waters, that first issue of Military Comics also featured the debut of The Death Patrol, a feature by Jack Cole (best known as the creator of Plastic Man) that had many similarities to Blackhawk, and which Eisner said was written and drawn before the first Blackhawk story. And as if those waters weren't muddy enough, let's thrown in another bit of confusion which is tangentially related…

Chuck Cuidera's full name was Charles Nicholas Cuidera and at times, he claimed that he was the "Charles Nicholas" who created an earlier property for another company, an anemic super-hero called The Blue Beetle. And Cuidera was among the many people who did draw The Blue Beetle but most historian-types think the "Charles Nicholas" whose name appeared on that strip was another of those artists, Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski. And Will Eisner, I've heard, sometimes claimed he wrote the first Blue Beetle story.

So I don't want to say who created Blackhawk — or The Blue Beetle, for that matter — and I regret the few times in the past when I tried to sort it out. What we can say is that Blackhawk (published by a firm called Quality Comics) and Blue Beetle (which started at a company called Fox Features) both had long, long lives…and both wound up being published and owned by DC Comics.

Blackhawk was a hit in Military Comics and soon there was a regular, top-selling Blackhawk comic book.  Many different writers and artists worked on the strip over the years but the outstanding artist was probably Reed Crandall, who came and went from the strip between 1942 and 1953. The most prolific penciler was Dick Dillin. The most prolific inker of both was Chuck Cuidera. Dillin and Cuidera were the artists in 1956, which was when Quality Comics sold Blackhawk and a few other properties to DC Comics. And Dillin and Cuidera did almost all the art from the moment DC took it over until 1968.

In 1968, Carmine Infantino was increasingly running things at DC and he was charged with weeding out the comics that weren't selling or making them sell.  Blackhawk, for reasons we'll get into in the next part, wasn't selling.  And this feels like a good spot to end this first part.

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Here's one of the favorite songs of my childhood. My mother used to sing this to me when I was five or under…and I didn't really understand it but first of all, anything your mother sings to you at that age is wonderful. And secondly, how can you not love a song about bananas?

This is "Yes, We Have No Bananas," written in 1923 by Irving Cohn and Frank Silver. And it's sung here on The Ed Sullivan Show for January 22, 1956 by Frank Silver himself. And yeah, I know he co-wrote it but my mother sang it better and she didn't even have musical accompaniment…

One of the stranger segments The Muppets did on The Ed Sullivan Show. This is from October 13, 1968…

I'm going to stop quoting these Trumpish e-mails asking me for money but boy, am I getting a lot of them. I've received seven total today (so far) from "Jared Kushner" selling his book, three from "Donald J. Trump" offering me some sort of golf flag, one from "Kimberly Guilfoyle" demanding to know why I haven't participated in something called "President Trump's Official 2022 Congressional District Focus Group," one each from "Newt Gingrich" and "Sarah Huckabee Sanders" and a couple with no proper name affixed.

They're all obviously written by the same person and they all have the same message: America is on the brink of total destruction unless you send us money. Apparently, the real people don't care what someone signs their name to. It reminds me of the Peter Popoffs and other phony preachers who sell the notion that whatever illness or disability you have, it can be cured by sending them cash…and lots of it.

None of these, by the way, are going to my regular e-mail account. I set one up a few years ago for when I wanted to read something on some site that demanded a sign-up and I figured I'd get tons o' spam from them if I did…and I did. I can just block donaldjtrump.com and stop getting these and I think I will. And should have long ago.

Wanna see something I think you'll find fascinating? Have you got 85 minutes? That's about how long it'll take you to watch The Life of Reilly, a one-man show that has been put up on YouTube in 28 parts.

The one man is Charles Nelson Reilly…and if you only know him as that guy who was once on every friggin' game show, you're in for a surprise. Back in 2004, he toured for a while — and dummy me managed to somehow miss — this show about his life. It's a life that involved growing up in the most dysfunctional of families, coping with "being different" (i.e., gay) and trying to become an actor.

At one point, an executive at NBC told him he would never be allowed on television because he was "queer." Reilly then went on to build a career on the stage, eventually scoring an astounding Broadway trifecta: The first three shows he was in on Broadway were Bye Bye Birdie (big hit), How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (bigger hit) and Hello, Dolly! (biggest hit).

That led to TV and suddenly, he was everywhere and…well, that's just part of his story. The one-man show was filmed and its makers have chopped it up into segments running two to five minutes each but you can watch them, one after the other, at this link.

I suggest you not start watching until you're ready to commit to the whole thing. And yes, I've recommended parts of this before but I decided it was time to recommend the whole thing. Prepare for a lot of chilling tragedies, especially when you get to Part 13.

"Jared Kushner" (whoever handles this kind of thing) has now sent me about fifteen e-mails very much like this one including four yesterday…

Mark,

My brand-new memoir is ready.

I wrote a book called, Breaking History: A White House Memoir, and I'm eager for an incredible Patriot like you to read it.

In my book, I tell the American People the truth about President Trump's White House and everything that happened during his America First Presidency.

The Fake News, like The New York Times, is trying to stop people from reading it. In fact, they just reviewed my book and said it was terrible and poorly written. If I had to say why The New York Times doesn't want you to read this book, it's because it disproves all the different things that they were going crazy about in their editorial pages.

I believe they called on me to resign several times, and they said my work in the Middle East was foolish and going to cause wars…Well, we got six peace deals done. It's obvious that The New York Times wants you to believe that President Trump was incompetent and that we didn't get things done, but the results are just totally contrary to what they wrote.

All of the reasons above and more are why you need to read my new book, Mark. We cannot allow the fake news filter to silence us any longer.

Remember, because you've always had President Trump's back and have supported our family, I want to personally give you a copy of my brand-new book that I signed just for you.

I personally set aside a signed copy of my new book for you. I can't wait for you to read it and discover the truth about President Trump's White House.

Will you claim your copy today?

Again, just give $75 today to claim your signed copy of my new book, Breaking History: A White House Memoir.

Thank you,

Jared Kushner

Kind of odd that all these e-mails I receive from Donald J. Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle and now Jared Kushner — as well as many that bear no name — all sound like they're written by the same person and have the same typography and use of boldface and italics. These folks are all certain that I have been a big Trump supporter who has sent him money in the past. If they're that wrong about me, how can I trust them about anything else?

Well, that's their fund-raising pitch. Here's mine — and unlike them, I'm going to stop mine as soon as I hit a certain point which will probably be in the coming week…

I have an iPhone X that works fine except for two things. One is that if you leave a voicemail for me, it may not show up on my phone for four or five hours and it arrives with no audible alert. I just find it there, often way too late to return the call. The folks at Apple say this is a problem that can only be solved by my cell service provider and my cell service provider says this is a problem that can only be solved by Apple.

The other problem is that if someone sends me a text message, I'd like to have my phone chime or bing or make whatever sound I have it set to play whenever one arrives. And it only does this once in a rare while.

Last week, I was at the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store finding out that, as expected, what it would cost to make my non-functioning iPad function again was not that much less than what it would cost to purchase a new one. (I had already been told that by a trusted independent fixer of iPads who also said, "You have an antique. It might take me weeks to get the necessary parts. Take it to the Apple Store.")

While I was there, I told my assigned Genius about my iPhone problems. He told me the voicemail problem could only be solved by my cell service provider. And he checked all the settings and couldn't figure out why I wasn't hearing a tone of some kind with every text message arrival. Because he didn't know what else to do, he gave my phone's speakers — and while he was at it, microphone — a thorough cleaning and he did improve the sound. But I still usually near nothing when a text arrives.

I've Googled all the online info there seems to be that one can Google to find out about this problem so I'm not asking anyone here to do that for me. The Genius (of course) suggested the same solution I used for my iPad problem, which was to just buy a new one. I don't want to do that. Does anyone here have any other thoughts? Aside from switching to Android?

Every so often, I like to watch one of those police chase videos. Call it a guilty pleasure or some sort of primal curiosity or just a quick thrill ride. Almost always, they put me in awe of the police officers involved — their skill, their cool, their professionalism. They ain't all like that but I respect the hell out of those who are.

This video runs close to thirteen minutes. If you're going to watch it, watch the entire thing and don't watch it on a tiny screen. It's a member of the Macomb County Sheriff's Office in Macomb County, Michigan at the wheel, displaying amazing skill and bravery and — I'll use the word again — professionalism. And unlike most of the police chases one sees on Los Angeles TV, I don't think the officer had a helicopter guiding him or watching for hazards. Warning: The language gets pretty rough near the end.