Monday, February 13, 2023

Before Berry Gordy There Was Joe Von Battle Producing Records in Detroit

Joe Von Battle in his Hastings Street record shop

J
oe Von Battle was born in 1915 in Macon, Georgia and moved during the Great Migration with his family to Detroit, Michigan. In his teens, he worked doing odd jobs in Detroit’s famous Eastern Market until he found work with Detroit Edison digging trenches and burying electrical lines. During much of World War II, Joe worked double shifts. One shift at the Hudson Motor Car Company and the other shift at the Chrysler Plant across the street. When the war ended, Joe was permanently laid off like many African American workers, displaced by White veterans returning from the war.

Joe Battle vowed to be his own boss and never work for anyone again. He added Von for a middle name as a young man, emulating European film actor Erich Von Stroheim, who he admired. When Battle opened his record business, he realized the middle name Von was helpful on his business cards, obscuring his African American ancestry. In 1945, a narrow grocery storefront was vacated at 3530 Hastings Street in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood on the lower Eastside, Joe Von Battle stepped in and opened Joe’s Record shop.

Joe outside his store


In 1948, Joe Von Battle purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder and made a makeshift recording studio in the back of his shop. There he recorded artists like John Lee Hooker; Washboard Willie; pianist Detroit Count, who recorded “Hastings Street Opera;” Tamp Red who recorded “Detroit Blues;” Louisiana Red, Memphis Slim, Kenny Burrell, and many other country blues musicians.

Joe Von Battle recorded the final songs and sounds of the people who migrated north for a better life. His shop specialized in records that appealed to African Americans from the rural South who left to work in the automobile or steel industries for a better life. Country blues traveled with them. Joe is believed by music historians to be the first African American record producer in the post war period recording on the JVB, Von, and Battle Records labels.

His record shop played host to Detroit’s itinerate blues musicians. Typically, the music was performed live by a singer with his guitar and maybe a washboard and a harmonica player for accompaniment. Country blues was raw and rooted in the struggle for survival in a world of inherited misery. It sung about poverty, loss, suffering, desertion, death, booze, and loneliness. Country blues had its feet firmly grounded to the earth and rural life.

 
Joe recorded another style of music with a hopeful spiritual message born out of the same misery—gospel music. Joe was most proud of almost one-hundred sermons he recorded of legendary pastor C.L. (Clarence La Vaughn) Franklin at the original New Bethel Baptist Church on Hastings Street down from his record shop. On Sundays, Joe would broadcast Reverend Franklin’s sermons on speakers set up outside the shop. His storefront always attracted a crowd.

Probably the most precious recordings he ever recorded were eight hymns sung by Reverend Franklin’s fourteen-year-old daughter Aretha before she signed with Columbia Records in 1960 secularizing her music. When Aretha Franklin signed with Atlantic Records in 1966, she was paired with producer Jerry Wexler who helped her become the Queen of Soul.

Aretha Franklin performing


In 1956, the Federal government announced the construction of the National Interstate Highway System spelling doom for Hastings Street, the heart of Detroit’s African American business community and further down Hasting’s Street Paradise Valley, Detroit’s legendary blues and jazz entertainment district. The construction of I-375 was a useless 1.062-mile spur that ran parallel to I-75. When the Black business community was uprooted, the financial health of many successful African American entrepreneurs was cut short.

The transition prompted a Black diaspora to the 12th Street area on Detroit’s Westside, creating overcrowding and increased racial tension in the city. The Black community was boxed in by real estate covenants and red lining, restricting their free movement around the city and the greater Detroit area. There was a distinct colorline that Blacks begrudgingly conformed to. Within its confines, the African American community struggled to make the best of a bad situation.

Joe Von Battle moved his record shop to 12th Street in 1960, but by that time there was a new sound dominating the radio and television airways of Detroit threatening his business. “There is a different generation now,” Joe told the Detroit Free Press. “All they want to buy is that Motown stuff with that beat they want to dance to. Today, young disc jockeys won’t play the blues. They say it’s degrading,”

Berry Gordy brought a polished professionalism and aggressive promotion to his Gordy/Tamla/Motown record labels. The new urban sound was sleek, suave, and sophisticated appealing to a broader, younger, crossover audience. The content of the music changed from the tough realism of country blues to lyrical, hard-driving rhythms and strong choral arrangements with a pop music flare which listeners could dance to.

The modern male and female groups wore fancy, matching outfits and danced synchronized choreography to the music. The Motown sound was tailormade for television and radio, taking the new music from Detroit’s Westside to the rest of the country and the globe.

Not only did the music change, the record industry changed also. In the 1960s when the chain department stores established record departments, they began selling rhythm and blues singles and albums. Rhythm and blues had entered the mainstream. Independent, specialty record shops could not compete. Black record stores struggled to survive.

Then on July 23, 1967, to add insult to injury, 12th Street erupted with racial strife and conflagration. The first night Joe protected his store with a shotgun but the second day he was ordered by police to evacuate the premises and allow the authorities to restore order which took a week.

In the meantime, Joe’s business was looted, torched, and hosed down by the fire department. When Joe and his family were allowed to return to the record shop, the smell of charred wood and melted vinyl hung heavy in the air. Twenty years of tape-recorded blues history, Joe’s life work, went up in smoke or was washed into the street.

Looters oustside of Joe's shop in July 1967




           

Joe’s daughter Marsha laments that “Some of the most significant voices in recorded history were on those melted records and fire-soaked reel-to-reel tapes. Thousands of songs, sounds, and voices of the era, most never pressed into vinyl, were gone forever. I believe Daddy died that day. My father’s alcoholism gravely worsened after his life’s work and provision for his family was destroyed by looters and rioters.” Joe suffered for years with Addison’s disease and died a broken man in 1973 at the young age of fifty-seven.

Marsha Battle Philpot, aka Marsha Music, wrote a biography about her father to document his music legacy. Marsha brought Joe Von Battle's story back to life in 2008 in her Marsha Music: The Detroitist blog. She writes about Detroit's African American history and culture on her blog.

Marsha Battle Philpot also has published a beautifully written book of poetry and prose titled The Detroitist: An Anthology About Detroit dealing with the era of Detroit's White flight in the 1950s and 1960s and its impact on those left behind.

Marsha Music's Blog

Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Martha Jean the Queen—Patron Saint of Blue Collar Detroit

Martha Jean the Queen painted by DeVon Cunningham (1976) 

A couple of radio executives from WCHB-AM in Detroit were driving through Memphis on business in 1963 when they heard the voice of Martha Jean the Queen (MJQ) on their radio. They liked the Queen’s Southern accent and her facile deejay patter. These Northern radio men were in the South shopping for an African American disc jockey that could help WCHB-AM (Inkster, Michigan) capture the vast Detroit Black radio market. Most Black Detroiters had Southern roots, so it seemed like a sensible marketing strategy.

MJQ was number one in her Memphis time slot which was a notable achievement in the Jim Crow South for a Black woman disc jockey—a testament to her ability to draw an audience. These Northern radio execs called Martha Jean at WDIA–AM and offered her a raise of $30 a week if she would take her radio program to Detroit. MJQ was a recently divorced, single mother of three daughters who didn’t want to move, but Martha Jean had custody and needed the extra income, so she took the job.

Martha Jean Jones was born on September 9, 1930 in Memphis and graduated from a Catholic school. She began nursing school but the harsh realities of life and death pushed her into business school. As fate would have it, Martha fell in love with jazz trumpeter Luther Steinberg, married him, and had three daughters in quick succession. She saw her life as the manifest destiny of a young Southern Black woman, a child of poverty, followed by a volatile marriage, bondage to babies, and a lifespan of degradation by Whites.

Luther Steinberg was struggling in the music business when he became abusive to Martha Jean, so she divorced him. “There are two things I can’t stand,” she said commenting on her failed marriage in a Detroit Free Press feature article on January 10, 1982, “a man who is cheap and a man who runs around on his woman.”       


Martha Jean used the power of positive thinking to pick herself up and provide for her children. “We should all try to see the beautiful side, the positive side (of life),” she said, “but the ugly side has been with us as a people for a long time and with me personally as a divorced woman with children.”

Martha Jean Steinberg became a receptionist for Memphis radio station WDIA-AM. Because she had a pleasing manner dealing with everyone who walked through the door, the station manager gave her a try on the radio in 1954 as a substitute for an ill disc jockey and she stayed there for nine years learning the radio business and earning the title The Queen. Her patented tagline "You betcha!" after she read advertising copy was like money in the bank for advertisers.

In a May 21, 1967 Detroit Free Press Sunday interview, MJQ was asked what her radio name “The Queen” meant to her. In figurative deejay fashion she answered, “I was written in the sands of time 5,000 years ago, endorsed and smiled upon by the gods. I have a purpose, and I’m on my way to fulfill my purpose…. I am the Queen of the people, they are my purpose.”

When MJQ came to Detroit, WCHB wanted her to play easy listening rhythm and blues and read advertising copy. MJQ’s Homemakers Delight program ran from 10:00 AM until 12:00 PM for three years. One of her early challenges was the perception that she sounded too White to project the Black image over the airwaves. “I had to get down with it to prove I was Black enough and find my place in Detroit’s Negro community, so in many ways, I had to act and sound more colored than colored. Detroit had long been a haven for jazz musicians, so I introduced jazz to my musical lineup and my audience grew.”

MJQ became known for supporting women’s rights throughout the 1960s reminding blue collar wives when it was payday at the Ford plant or Great Lakes Steel—the two largest employers of Black men in the Detroit area. “Get that check from your man before it disappears, ladies.” Martha Jean was proud of herself for making it without "the crutch of a man.” She never forgot the desolation of being left alone with three daughters and no money. The Queen was an inspiration to her soul sisters in the audience.

Unsatisfied with her limited role at WCHB, MJQ jumped stations again when WJLB-FM offered her more money, air time, and freedom to co-produce her own programming. In addition to playing music, she added a fifteen minute call-in segment named Tasting Time where she gave her daily salute to blue collar people around the Detroit area.

In a Detroit Free Press feature article on October 23, 1966, MJQ explained her move, “WJLB-FM will give me a better opportunity to serve my people and do things for them. The secret of my success in Detroit are the people—the forgotten blue collar workers. I like and enjoy people. I feel a disc jockey has command of so many hearts and minds…. I give my listeners a positive reality and that surge of hope necessary to exist. I feel my day is in vain if I can’t touch someone or lift their spirits.

“In my own Southern way of talking, a lot of people started listening to me. My positive message gives people self-confidence to accomplish whatever is challenging them. I’d play blues, and between each bar of a song, I’d talk without interfering with the lyrics and say things like ‘Hey! You cats at Kelsey Hayes’ or ‘You guys in the hole on Ecorse Road’ when the Wayne County Road Commission was working on the roadway. These blue collar workers were listening on transistor radios at work, and it made them feel like somebody when I mentioned them or their place of work on the air. Soon, places all over town began asking me to give them a call out over the airwaves. My slogan was ‘You’re somebody, act like it’.”

 

During the 1967 Detroit Riots/Rebellion, MJQ broadcast for 48 hours straight urging Black demonstrators to get off the streets and stay home. She helped police negotiate with armed Black Panthers barricaded in a house into surrending peacefully to avoid bloodshed because innocent women and children were inside. That terrible conflagration was transformative for Detroiters. From that moment onward, Martha Jean felt a responsibility to be a bellwether for her people. In the 1970s, MJQ moderated a show called Buzz the Fuzz with Detroit Police Commissioner John F. Nichols credited with improving police/community relations. Every Thursday from 7:00 PM until 7:30 PM, callers could ask Commissioner Nichols questions.

On January 11, 1971, MJQ gave a short scream into the microphone at noon, and then there was three hours of radio silence. Nine Black WJLB staff members—including MJQ—staged a sit-in by locking the studio door and barricading the plate glass front window of the station’s offices on the 31st floor of the David Broderick Tower. The on-air staff was all Black but management was all White. The staff charged that the outgoing station manager failed to live up to an earlier agreement to appoint a Black station manager to replace him. After all, WJLB’s listening audience was primarily Black. The sit-in strike ended at about 3:00 PM after attorneys for both sides met to settle the matter with Norman L. Miller being named as WJLB’s first Black station manager.

Three weeks later on February 2, 1972, Martha Jean had an on-air, religious epiphany. While doing her Inspiration Time program, she announced, “I was just touched by the Holy Spirit.” Then there was a brief pause. Pensively she continued, “It was as if something, a different entity, came through my soul and told me my mission is to help bring Jesus Christ to the people,” she explained. From that moment, MJQ shifted from Soul Mistress of Detroit to Radio Evangelist and began featuring gospel music.

In 1972, Martha Jean became an ordained minister and established her own nondenominational church in 1974. She purchased a two-story house on Grand River Avenue with a $70,000 Kresge Foundation Grant and named her church The Home of Love. She set about fulfilling her mission to serve the downtrodden and forgotten people of Detroit. Her organization raised money and bought the house next door for a church community nursery and preschool for daycare to help young Black women earn a living and get a leg up on life. The $12,500 mortgage for the Joy Building was paid off in cash.

MJQ left WJLB-FM on May 30, 1982 over a scheduling dispute. Their new station manager told Martha Jean he was switching her popular midafternoon time slot to their spiritual hour at 5:00 AM. The time change was unacceptable, and she wasn’t having any of it.

Two weeks later, MJQ signed with station WQBH-AM that specialized in Black-oriented religious and inspirational programming. She took over her familiar 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM afternoon time slot.  The new job also came with a pay raise in line with her new status as station vice president and program director. Fifteen years later, MJQ formed The Queen’s Broadcasting Corporation and purchased WQBH for $4.1 million dollars becoming the first woman-owned radio station in the country. She financed the purchase on the strength of her radio personality, her lucrative radio contract income, and her advertising agreements.You betcha!

Martha Jean the Queen passed away at the age of sixty-nine from an undisclosed illness at 10:45 AM on January 29, 2000 in Detroit’s Harper Hospital. Upon learning of Martha Jean the Queen Steinberg’s passing, The Detroit News reported, “She was hailed as an inspirational force that motivated people and served as a conscience for those needing guidance. Her listeners were the common, everyday folks from Detroit who lived from paycheck to paycheck.” MJQ had a private funeral service and was buried in Detroit’s Elmwood Cemetery.


In her lifetime, Martha Jean the Queen was honored as one of rock music’s pioneering disc jockeys—the only woman so honored. She is also a member of the Black Radio Hall of Fame, Michigan’s Black Women’s Hall of Fame, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and what she was most proud of, the founder and spiritual leader of the Queen’s Community Workers of America, that did charitable works around the city for Detroit's forgotten people.

In 1976, Detroit docu-artist DeVon Cunningham painted MJQ’s portrait where she is wearing a blue caftan and surveys the heavens. It commemorates her trip to the Holy Land with seventy members of her Order of the Fishermen ministry. The painting is listed in the registry of the National Portrait Gallery of American Biography at the Smithsonian Institute.

Docu-artist DeVon Cunningham 

Thursday, January 19, 2023

Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts


The Rivera Courtyard

In 1932, noted Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera was commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) to paint twenty-seven murals including the massive north and south walls of the Roman Baroque Marble courtyard. The original space was filled wih fountains, potted plants, and austere marble pillars. The first DIA director William Valentiner wanted to fill the space with colorful murals representing Detroit's industrial miracle and the workforce that gave life to the assembly line.

When two out of five Detroit autoworkers were out of work during the Great Depression, raising money for public art was a hard sell. Patrons of the arts Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company, and his wife Eleanor, underwrote the project with $20,000 of their own money to pay Rivera his commission. It was DIA Director William Valentiner, who brought Diego Rivera to the attention of Mr. and Mrs. Edsel Ford.

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

Rivera and his new wife Frida Kahlo arrived in Detroit on April 21, 1932. Rivera spent three months touring the Rouge Plant, the Parke-Davis plant, and Downriver industry including the chemical plants in Wyandotte. He prepared sketches of the entire assembly line process with American Labor toiling at work. FoMoCo's official Rouge Plant photographer aided Rivera in his research, guiding the artist through the company's extensive photographic archive.

Using the Renaissance technique called frescoe, it took expertise and teamwork to grind pigment and paint the wet plaster before it dried. Rivera and his skilled assistants usually began working at noon and ended fifteen hours later, but they finished the twenty-seven panels in eight busy months. Rivera lost one hundred pounds in the process.

North Wall of Rivera Court

The large north wall fresco depicts the manufacturing process of Ford's famous V-8 engine from the steel-making blast furnances in the background to the labyrinth of conveyer belts laden with engine parts awaiting assembly. In the lower right section of the mural, Edsel Ford and Director William Valentiner are overlooking the scene. Rivera followed the fresco tradition of painting the patron(s) somewhere in the work of art.

South Wall of Rivera Court

Likewise, the south wall shows the manufacturing of the exterior parts of the automobile. Again, Edsel Ford and Director Valentiner appear on the right side of the fresco standing in front of a chalk board signifying that Edsel was a car designer and an artist in his own right. Laid out before him on a drafting table are the tools of his trade. Ford and Valentiner gaze into the gallery from the painting.

At the unveiling of the mural, Edsel Ford invited members of Detroit's religious community to comment on the mural. Catholic and Episcopalian clerics condemned the murals as blasphemous, mainly over one panel that was a modern take on traditional Christian images of the Holy Family and the nativity. They considered that panel a parody rather than an homage and demanded the mural be destroyed.

The conservative Detroit News weighed in and called the murals "vulgar" and "un-American", but Ford and Valentiner refused to destroy the epic work of mural art. Some historians suggest that the controversy may have been engineered by Edsel Ford to garner free publicity from the local media.

The first Sunday the Detroit Industry murals were on public exhibit, the bad publicity prompted 10,000 Detroiters to visit the mural to see for themselves. The people of Detroit were in awe of this masterpiece that celebrated the working man. On the strength of the public's response, the Detroit City Council increased the DIA's yearly budget.

In the early 1950s, United States Senator Joseph McCarthy was conducting anti-American hearings in Washington D.C.. Since the 1930s, Diego Rivera had gained notoriety for his Marxist philosophy, prompting the DIA to place a disclaimer at the entrance to the Rivera Courtyard stating that Rivera's personal politics did not take away from one of the crowning achievements of twentieth-century art. The notice defended the artistic merits of the murals while criticizing Rivera's politics.

For the one-hundredth birthday of Diego Rivera during February of 1986, the DIA held a celebration of his work. Of Edsel and Eleanor Ford's four children, only their daughter Josephine bothered to attend, and of their eleven grandchildren, only Benson Ford's daughter Lynn attended.

The murals were Edsel's gift to the city of Detroit, and they form what is considered one of the finest examples of industrial art in the world, worthy of both its creator and his patron. On April 23, 2014, the Detroit Industry murals were designated a National Historic Landmark.

Panoramic View of Detroit Industry Murals in Rivera Courtyard

Friday, January 13, 2023

Connie Kalitta "The Bounty Hunter" vs. Shirley "Cha-Cha" Muldowney


Baby Boomers who grew up in the Detroit area and listened to Windsor radio station CKLW were familiar with advertisements for the Detroit Dragway located at Sibley and Dix. The ads always began with "Saturday, SATURDAY NIGHT, at the DETROIT DRAGWAY." Then the card for the automotive duels would be hyped. If you don't remember or aren't old enough to know what I'm talking about, I have a link to an audio at the end of this post.

Connie Kalitta with top fuel dragster in 1967.
Two of the most popular drag racers of the 1970s and 1980s were Connie Kalitta "The Bounty Hunter" and Shirley "Cha-Cha" Muldowney. Connie was from Mount Clemens, Michigan, and Shirley was from Schenectady, New York. They shared a professional and personal relationship from 1972-1977. Connie gave Shirley a Funny Car he no longer raced, and he acted as her crew chief for many of her early races. In those days, Shirley was known as "The Huntress." 

Kalitta began drag racing when he was a sixteen-year-old student at Mount Clemens High School. He worked himself up the ranks of the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) to become one of the sport's top drivers. Known as The Bounty Hunter, Kalitta was the first driver to reach 200 mph in a sanctioned NHRA event. In 1989 at the Winter Nationals, Kalitta was the first driver to break the 290 mph barrier with a 291.54 mph qualifying run.

In all, Kalitta won ten national titles and was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 1992. The NHRA compiled a list of the Top 50 Drivers for their fiftieth-anniversary in 2001. Kalitta ranked 21st on the all-time list, and in 2016, he became the first recipient of the NHRA's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Kalitta's first NHRA win came in 1964 in Bakersfield, California. In 1967, he won his first NHRA title. With the prize money, he bought his first airplane--a Cessna 310--and started his company Kalitta Air at the Willow Run Airport shipping freight for the Ford Motor Company (FoMoCo)--his racing sponsor. 

Kalitta Air and Kalitta Motorsports company photograph.
For a time, Kalitta retired from racing and directed his attention toward building up his air freight business. Now he has a fleet of about 100 planes, many of them 747s. In addition to a bread-and-butter FoMoCo parts distribution contract, Kalitta Air provides charter flights for Medical Flight Services, Air Ambulance Specialists, the Shriners' Children's Hospital and the United States Department of Defense, to name a few. It is not generally known that Kalitta Air keeps a 747 on standby to work with the military to return fallen service men and women to their homes.

Kalitta no longer races, but he is the CEO of Kalitta Motorsports in Ypsilanti, Michigan which sponsors four cars and drivers. His love of racing became a lifelong pursuit and a way of life.

***

Shirley Muldowney
Connie Katilla first met Shirley Muldowney in 1966 at Raceway Park in Illinois when she was racing a dragster with her husband as her mechanic. In 1972, Shirley divorced Jack Muldowney when she wanted to advance to top fuel funny cars, and he refused to live the life of a Gypsy to compete on the NHRA circuit. Doubtless, there were other personal issues as well no doubt.
 
Shirley moved in with Kalitta in 1972. On the track, Kalitta was The Bounty Hunter and Muldowney became The Huntress. Connie soon tagged Shirley with the nickname Cha-Cha which she never liked but became part of her NHRA branding.

After her split from Kalitta, Shirley went on to make a name for herself in this male macho sport. At first, she had trouble attracting sponsors and finding a crew that would work with a woman. But when Shirley "Cha-Cha" Muldowney showed up at the track with her hot pink car, cowboy boots, and crash helmet, she started filling the grandstands. Even her pit crew wore hot pink team shirts.

Muldowney defied traditional gender stereotypes head-on and challenged sexism in the racing culture like Billie Jean King had done for tennis in 1973's Battle of the Sexes against Bobby Riggs. Both ladies proved women can compete in a man's world.

Shirley Muldowney was the first woman to receive a NHRA license to drive top fuel dragsters. She was the first person--man or woman--to win three NHRA national events in a row. In 1980, Shirley won the World Finals by beating her rival Connie Kalitta, and in 1982, she won an unprecedented third NHRA Top Fuel Championship.

Muldowney's achievements were not lost on Hollywood. She got the big screen treatment in 1983's Heart Like a Wheel starring Bonnie Bedelia as Muldowney and Beau Bridges as Connie Kalitta. Muldowney has said the film did not capture her real life very well but was good for the sport.

On the heels of her celebrity, Muldowney was faced with her biggest challenge. In June of 1984, her dragster crashed at over 250 mph at Sanair Speedway near Montreal, Canada. A front tire shredded and got twisted up in a wheel causing the car to lose control for 600 feet before crashing. Shirley was left with broken legs, crushed hands, a shattered pelvis, and a severed thumb. Determined to race again, she undertook two years of grueling physical therapy and recovery. Her first race back was against "Big Daddy" Don Garlits--a personal friend of hers. She lost. Shirley retired from active racing in 2003.

During her career, she won eighteen NHRA National events and was ranked 5th on NHRA's 2001 list of its Top 50 Drivers earning her the title of First Lady of Drag Racing. Her memoir Shirley Muldowney: Tales from the Track was released in 2005 depicting her drag racing life. The same year, Muldowney was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. Muldowney still makes personal appearances at racing events to raise money for her charitable organization, Shirley's Kids, which helps children in need in cities where drag racing is a part of the community. Shirley can literally be called a trailblazer for women's equality.

***
CKLW radio commercial for the Detroit Dragway from 1966: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbrdImfvFmQ

1982 U.S. Nationals Championship drag race between Kalitta and Muldowney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Q8f6bsfI0  

Muldowney on the Johnny Carson Show in 1986 after her 1984 catastrophic car crash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FeaqiczHzI