When the WKRP series first ran I saw only part of one episode. It didn’t make much of an impression on me. But, with the passage of time, many odd minor incidents accumulated.They seemed unrelated at first, but later came into focus to give me a better picture of what had happened.
Two people who could have provided me with more information, in addition to Mary Tyler Moore, were Valerie Harper and Julie Kavner. Harper blamed me when her acting career went into temporary eclipse. She’d been a member of the MTM acting ensemble, with her own CBS series, Rhoda. Rhoda was canceled the year that WKRP, which was also produced by MTM, premiered.
“In your walk to the moon, Harper later asked me,”did you have to step on a star?”
The logic of her blaming me for that event was tenuous at best, but she wouldn’t have done so if she hadn’t felt that I was somehow a catalyst for WKRP. Julie Kavner had also been a regular cast member on Rhoda. I saw Kavner a number of times when she was working in a convenience store in Indianapolis in the late ‘90s.
That store had been supplying me for a number of years with certain well-made and reasonably-priced products made by the Miller Brewing Company. I had discovered that those products were important for my maximum functioning and good cheer.
So I had often visited the store. I was somewhat predictable as a customer. While I was probably consuming somewhat more Miller Brewing product than I should have, my life then was overly complex and confusing. It was a mystery with many clues, but the solution was to be revealed only by slow degrees in the decade or so that was to come.
I don’t think Kavner was there because she needed a job in that particular store. It seemed instead that I was still seen at that time as a “person of interest” to her friends in Hollywood. And perhaps, like Harper, she was still nursing a grudge. (Theatrical people often aren't very sensible. That is especially true of actresses, if I may be permitted to say so.)
Let’s turn now to the actors in WKRP itself. How much did they know? Would they claim that they knew nothing and were just reciting prepared scripts? They might–but that wouldn’t seem credible in the case of either Mr. Howard Hesseman or Mr. Richard Sanders.
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