Texas Tech University - La Ventana Yearbook (Lubbock, TX)

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M.I.A. Holleman said that while the television show wandered far afield in some of its portrayals, the medical scenes were well done and the operating room on the television screen was just as he remembers it in Korea. He says the show also ac- curately depicts the differences in military medicine between World War II and the Korean War. Even with all the criitical and au- dience support, even with all that money that rolled in every week, the cast of M ' A ' S ' H managed to keep their heads out of the clouds and their feet on the found. Rather than let the series run on forever, they chose to quit while they were ahead, voting to take themselves off the air while M ' A ' S ' H was still a gigantic success. From Bark ' s article in The Dallas Morning News: On Jan. 14 at 6:00 p.m. PST, director Burt Metcalfe shouted, ' That ' s a wrap! ' The M ' A ' S ' H cast members hugged and kissed as best they could under the watchful eyes of some 200 reporters and cameramen. And then they en- dured one last mass press conference. How much will they miss M ' A ' S ' H? As usual, Alda said it best: ' How much would you miss your arm? Like M ' A ' S ' H itself, 1 don ' t have just one emotion. I ' m both sad and happy. We ' re stopping because if we ran fur- ther, we would be taking the risk of squeezing it dry. 1 hope people will understand. We ' re stopping out of respect for the work we ' ve done up until now. And we don ' t want to diminish that. Not every show was a gem. Nobody ' s perfect, but we had such a high average of good shows. There ' s never been an idea for a show where you had people under the greatest stress possible, where people were dying and you were standing in their blood, and hating it, and wanting to do something about it, and wishing you weren ' t there, and going crazy Class picture - The people who gave us 1 1 years of laughs and tears — William Christopher (Father Mulcahy), Gary Burghoff (Radar O ' Reilly), David Ogden Stiers (Charles Emerson Winchester III), Jamie Farr (Max Klinger), Loretta Swit (Margaret Houlihan). Harry Morgan (Colonel Potter). Alan Alda (Hawkeye Pierce), and Mike Farrell (B. J Hunnicutt). from that. ' But don ' t think for a minute that this cold rationality was the norm for the last day of filming. In Newsweek. Waters and Huck said, Never has so disparate an ensemble presented as much in- telligence, idealism, agony and love in 24 minutes and 40 seconds of weekly diversion and managed to lift it to the realm of art. Nor has a plastic-phony Hollywood set ever witnessed a part- ing of such honest sorrow. A thoughtful makeup man provided a box of Kleenex for each of the show ' s ' Magnificent Seven ' and executive producer Burt Metcalfe had to periodically stop the filming when the grief got out of control. ' I was choked up all day, ' recalls Alan Alda. ' Every time I did anything, I thought, this is the last time I ' ll do it, and I ' d start to cry. ' Cast members surely weren ' t the only people to cradle a box of Kleenex during the final episode. But, as Waters and Huck said, it ' s far from the end of M ' A ' S ' H. Think of it: those 250 fragments of shared love will one day entrance our children ' s children. So hold the eulogies for the 4077th; a hundredfold host of videotape ghosts is out there keeping alive its flame. IS — M-AS-H

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After 1 1 years of war, the 4077th finally went home, leaving M ' A ' S ' H fans . . . Missing in eiction Question: Where were you the night of Monday, Feb. 28, 1983, between the hours of 7:30 and 10 p.m.? Answer: If you were like 125 million other persons in 50.3 million homes, you were watching history being made — the last episode of an American tradition, M ' A ' S ' H. M ' A ' S ' H was a way of life for many of us. We grew up during its 11-ycar run, watching its characters come and go, love and hate, live and die. We laughed at Hawkeye ' s and Trapper ' s jokes, we shuddered at the marathon operating sessions, and above all, we learned that war is hell. Who can forget the shock of viewers and cast alike when, in a surprise and com- pletely unrehearsed ending. Radar reads the telegram: Lieutenant Col- onel Henry Blake ' s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors. And all the time we watched, we were not alone. The 2V2-hour M ' A ' S ' H series con- clusion entered the Nielsen record books as the most-watched single TV show of all time. It posted a 60.3 rating and 77 share, meaning that 60.3 percent of all TV homes and 77 percent of all those TV households with TV sets in use in its time span watched M ' A ' S ' H end its 11-ycar run, said James P. Forkan in the March 7 issue of Advertising Age. The runner-up show was the Who Shot J.R. episode of the series Dallas, which posted a 53.5 rating in November 1980. During its 251 episodes, M ' A ' S ' H was nominated for 99 Emmy awards and won 14. Counting the reruns, the series was watched by 224 million people a week and has already grossed $200 million. For the last epi- sode, producers asked and received $450,000 for a 30-second commercial spot, the highest advertising rate recorded for any program. Before the last episode aired, the cast and crew received telegrams from President Ronald Reagan, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. After a faltering start, M ' A ' S ' H has gone on to become both a critical and a commercial hit. Year after year, it has been a beacon amid the mostly banal series that make up Nielsen ' s top 10, said Ed Bark, television critic for The Dallas Morning News, in the Feb. 27, 1983 issue of The News. In its first season, the series was ranked in 46th place out of 67 shows but a change soon took place. In 1975-76, the season of its heaviest cast changes, M ' A ' S ' H dipped slightly to 15th place. It has made the top 10 ever since, and in the fall of 1978, M ' A ' S ' H finally was made a fixture at 8 p.m. Mon- days, Bark continued. And how many of us rearranged our lives to get our weekly M ' A ' S ' H fix? What made M ' A ' S ' H such a hit? Harry F. Waters and Janet Huck said in the Feb. 28 issue of Newsweek it was the writing that made the show. ... Larry Gelbart and his team hit their stride and the writing emerged as the show ' s real star. The scripts were electric. They soared and pummeled and bled, ricocheting like forked lightning between hilarity and pathos. The actors were so dazzled they fre- quently broke into applause during readings. How many shows can made a claim like that? The movie itself could have been a catapult for the series ' popularity. The movie, starring Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, burst upon America at the crescendo of the an- tiwar movement and, though its draftees were called dogfaces rather than grunts and lobbed one-liners in- stead of frag grenades, it tapped deeply enough into the nation ' s general disenchantment with the military to become a sleeper smash. M ' A ' S ' H received five Academy Award nominations and earned Twen- tieth Century-Fox a robust $40 million, reported Waters and Huck in Newsweek. The timing was right for the movie and the series soon followed. Not everybody will miss M ' A ' S ' H though. One of the series ' biggest critics is Dr. Richard Hornberger, the man who started the M ' A ' S ' H craze when he wrote the book about his own experiences in Korea. In Bark ' s article in The Dallas Morning News. Horn- berger said, No one in their right mind would be pro-war. But I operated on a thousand or so wounded kids, and I know more about war than a bunch of undereducated actors who go around blithering those sanc- timonious, self-righteous noises. The book is only anti- war in the minds of a lot of flaky people. You might call the book anti-Army, but then very few doctors like the Army. That is why we were able to survive and have a fairly good time in the midst of a lot of chaos. In the same article, Robert Altman, director of the 1970 M ' A ' S ' H feature film, said the television version is the most insidious kind of propaganda. I just think it ' s terrible, he told The Dallas Morning News in November 1981. It says, no matter what platitudes they come up with, that the guys with the slanted eyes are the bad guys. And they don ' t show the blood, they don ' t show the horror. They don ' t make you pay for your laugh. Of course, Hornberger and Altman, although closely acquainted with M ' A ' S ' H, are in the minority when it comes to the series. An Associated Press story in the Feb. 27 edition of The Lubbock Aualanche-Journal interviewed Dr. Henry Holleman of Columbus, Miss., the real-life Lt. Col. Henry Blake. M ' AS-H— 17

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We won ' t soon forget M ' A ' S ' H or e people who made it possible. ery costume party will still have a II, lanky guy in a red robe, combat lOts and a cowboy hat. Every televi- :)n schedule with syndicated shows II still have M ' A ' S ' H somewhere in (e lineup. But where were we when M ' A ' S ' H ;st hit prime time? Waters and Huck ifreshed our memories: On Sept. ' . 1972, the day the 4077th was lobilizcd, presidential candidate ijorge McGovern accused Richard xon of ordering a ' whitewash ' in the deral investigation of Watergate; tional-sccurity adviser Henry Kiss- inger reported little progress in the secret peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese; ' Jesus Christ Su- perstar ' was beguiling Broadway, ' Jonathan Livingston Seagull ' was perched atop the best-seller chart and ' The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour ' was beginning its second year on CBS. The times certainly have changed. We have changed, too. Perhaps change is best described by Father Mulcahy in a 1976 episode entitled, The Interview, and quoted in the March 7 issue of People IVee c y. ' ' When a doctor operates in a thin canvas tent in sub-zero weather, ' Fa- ther Mulcahy explains with a mildness that somehow makes his words more horrifying, ' the steam rises from the body he is operating on, and so that he can continue operating, the doctor will warm his hands over the open wound . . . can anyone look on that and not be changed? ' Can anyone look on 11 years worth of the war-weary 4077th and not be changed? I think not. And so, in the final episode entiteld Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, we all said good- bye and farewell to the people with whom we ' d spent many an hour. May they all rest in peace. — Kellie McKenzie M ' A ' S ' H— 19