Word: beulah
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With a well-chosen mix of film clips and interviews, the program takes us back to the ancient 1950s, when virtually the only blacks on TV were comic stereotypes: Amos 'n' Andy, Beulah and the occasional bumbling menial. "There's no room for prejudice in our profession," Milton Berle tells Danny Thomas in a snippet from Berle's old Texaco Star Theater. But of the black stars of the '50s who had their own variety shows, only Nat King Cole lasted a full season, and he was canceled thereafter when he could not find sponsors...
...mother was raised, and in the summer before college, he began to recognize it as a locus for his poetry. In the summer of 1988, he says, "I fell in love with [the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet] Rita Dove." He read and re-read her collection titled Thomas and Beulah, and then began to listen to his family's stories in a way he hadn't before, with a historic and poetic ear. "I realized I could write about my family, that it was a valid thing to write about," he says. It was then he began writing the material...
...THREE YEARS, I've had a feeling that if Chuck hadn't been on that plane, it wouldn't have been bombed," says Beulah McKee, 75. Her bitterness has still not subsided. But seated in the parlor of her house in Trafford, Pennsylvania, the house where her son was born 43 years ago, she struggles to speak serenely. "I know that's not what our President wants me to say," she admits...
...Beulah McKee the mystery deepened six months after Chuck's death, when she received a letter from another U.S. agent in Beirut. It was signed "John Carpenter," a name the Pentagon says it can't further identify. Although the letter claimed that Chuck's presence on the Pan Am plane was unrelated to the bombing, Carpenter's message only stirred her suspicions. "I cannot comment on Chuck's work," he wrote, "because his work lives on. God willing, in time his labors will bear fruit and you will learn the true story of his heroism and courage...
...Beulah McKee has given up trying to find out if Pan Am's bombers were after her son, although she says, "The government's secrecy can't close off my mind." Twice she called and questioned Gannon's widow Susan, who like her husband and her father Tom Twetten worked for the CIA. "The last time, I was accused of opening my mouth too much," says Mrs. McKee...