All  afternoon I have been taking in the news and remembering back through  the years to when Dick Clark was not there or a part of the American  life. Even now listening and watching American Idol, my thoughts keep  wondering how this contestant or that contestant would have fared back  in the day when Clark was THE star maker.

Back  then if you wanted to know you had arrived it was one of two ways: The  Ed Sullivan Show or American Bandstand. That's how we knew who were  stars, were the hitmakers, were the ones who would take America by  storm.

In  those years of the '60s I was the son and grandson of conservative,  fundmental, evangelical, Pentecostal preachers. Dick Clark reprsented  the devil's music and the gyrations on the stage symbolic of demonic  possession. Country music wasn't any better and was the tawdry side of  life in the honky tonks.

Yet,  when my parents were gone or I could spend the day with one of the  member's sons or even go "play" at one of the godless sinner's  who were  in my class at school, come Saturday afternoon, the black-and-white  boob tube was fixated on what became my Saturday sinful pleasure - Dick  Clark's American Bandstand.

I  remember listening to music, even singing along with some of the  artists, watching the dancers with the latest moves and trying to figure  out if I could imitate them. It was another world so alien to the one I  knew being a preacher's kid.

Fortunately  for me and my brothers, my parents left it up to us to search and come  to our own beliefs and ideas on everything in life including those in  which our denomination may have taken stands against. We were allowed to  listen to the music, if we decided it was OK. We were allowed to square  dance in gym class though our church was anti-dancing, if we believed  it was OK.

While  I could not partake in my Saturday sinful pleasure when my Mom and Dad  were home, at least I had the right to partake of the "devil's fare"  while they were gone. I learned an appreciation of all types of music  from those Saturdays. I learned an acceptance and appreciaton of other  races and ethnicities and nationalities as I tuned in to Bandstand.

Long  afterwards when Bandstand turned its last platter, Dick Clark and the  music show that revolutionized not just the music world, but life as we  knew it the US of A, it has remained a vital part of my memory and of my  heart. Those Saturday sinful pleasures all these decades later still  bring a smile to my face.

Dick  Clark is now spinning platters for another audience as the best of the  best move and jive to the greatest hits of all times and even those that  have yet to make debut on Earth.

Dick Clark, as the late great Jimmy Durante would close, "Good night, where ever you are!"

From the Cornfield, Bandstand will never die and Dick Clark will always be America's oldest teenager.