Johnny, it felt as if we knew ye

It’s hard to say goodbye twice.

On May 22, 1992, “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson ended a long, unprecedented television career. Reluctantly, America said goodbye.

Now, nearly 13 years later, we’re say goodbye to him a final time — only this time, we realize what we’ve truly lost in the decade since his retirement from the airwaves.

This is one of those watershed moments in life when you realize not only that this is the great loss of a person who was an exceptional talent, it also marks a time and space in the world that has passed — one that will never be seen again.

Carson began his “Tonight Show” career just five years before I was born. That didn’t seem so long ago to me until I realized that there were only three networks on television then. It didn’t seem so long ago that I was a young child who had my first exposure of Carson through a few clandestine late night glimpses on our family’s small black &white TV, the kind that sat on a flimsy wire stand with the absurdly protruding antenna “rabbit ears.” It didn’t seem so long ago that as an older teenager, I stayed up late as often as possible to watch him, because there were no VCRs to record the action to play back at a more decent hour.

Watching television then — watching Carson on television — was an event. Five nights a week, for 90 minutes (then later, 60), it was a steady parade of stage, screen and recording stars, comedians wild animals and even wilder comedy sketches, populated with some of the most absurd and hilarious characters imaginable. It was like a three-ring circus had set up camp by the coffee table. The urbane ringmaster at the center of the mayhem was Johnny, always ready with the perfect comeback, even when the scripted snowballed into the improvised.

To say that his work was “superficial,” as his few and far between critics occasionally would, was missing the point. At the end of the day, he served up an escapist bedtime story for an America that was wearied by a daytime filled with war, assassinations, political and social upheaval. He seemed to intuitively know that the thing we most desperately needed was humor. And he delivered, for 30 years. Then, he was gone.

All that didn’t seem so long ago to me until this week. The passing of a person of Carson’s caliber is not just a cultural signpost, it’s a personal one as well. You realize the volume of memory you’ve accumulated in your lifetime may soon be greater than the sum of what’s to come. The evolution of technology may allow future generations to appreciate Carson’s exceptional work, but what you choose to store in your memory is even more precious. For me, growing up watching Johnny Carson is something that will live on in me until I, too, am gone.

Thanks for the memories, Johnny.

Andrea Miller is editor of the Out &About section for The Enterprise Newspapers.