Which to me seems like a ridiculous name. It certainly isn't similar to Black Tuesday – October 29, 1929 – when the stock market crashed. It's a good day – heck, even a great day – for shoppers and a retailers alike. So why is it Black?
Anyway, to a lot of Baby Boomers like me, the day after Thanksgiving used to mean one thing: special cartoon programming for kids who had the day off from school.
Since my memory isn't always the greatest, I went back to the newspaper microfilms to see just what was on the day after Thanksgiving from the mid-1960's to the early 1970's. As it turns out, there really was just one TV network that did this: ABC. And more often than not, it was a wholesale rehash of the Saturday morning cartoons from that period.
1967 seemed to be a banner year as far as I'm concerned. The day started off early with Bullwinkle at 9:30, followed by Milton the Monster, Casper the Friendly Ghost, The Fantastic Four, Spider Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth, King Kong, The Beatles and George of the Jungle last at 1:30.
Here's the TV listing for Thanksgiving 1967 with the next day's listing under it. (Give it a click so you can read it.) It sure is weird remembering how stations signed off back then – and how some of them signed on with a Farm Report!
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| 1967 Thanksgiving Day TV Listing |
I think I was probably watching channel 8 that dday in 67.
ReplyDeleterae
-Alan (not Rae)....
ReplyDeleteWe watched the Macy's Parade on Channel 3; that particular Thanksgiving, we were in Cleveland, visiting relatives.
As for the parade, I was only interested in seeing the balloons (Bullwinkle, Underdog, etc.) and maybe Santa Claus at the very end. But all that singing and dancing meant it was time to change the channel!
ReplyDeleteIt's called "Black Friday" because most retail stores do enough business on the day after Thanksgiving alone to put them into the "black" or profitability for the year.
ReplyDeleteJohn Kovacs
Hi John!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the explanation--I had never heard that particular one before, if you can believe it. It makes sense. (I had always thought it was "Black" because the store workers were dreading what was going to happen that day.)