Maggie's Farm

Way back in '81 a small TV station in the S.F. Bay Area called KTZO got the rights to the great TV show "Mission: Impossible" and aired them all, one a night.  Then they aired them all again.  I actually drove to the station and got a complete list of the shows, checking them off as they went along.

They were shown at midnight, very hip.  You'd get all loaded up and...

DUM-DUM, duh-duh DUM-DUM!  The music would start and off you'd go on another wonderful adventure.

Then one day the music died.

They aired some notice that they were winding things down.  Something like, "Tune in this Sunday for the final episode!"

Clearly, something had to be done.

But not for me.  For the impressionable youth out there.

See, I watched the show back when it was originally aired, back when I was in my late teens, and watching them do that trick electronic stuff was extremely inspirational.  I eventually mastered the use of many of the things they used on the show, such as relays, delay-relays, solenoids, servo-motors, gearmotors; all kinds of things.  The show inspired me to become a true gadgeteer.

If it did that for me, I figured it would also do it for others.  I figured it was important that the show stay on the air.

So-o-o...

First, I organized a letter-writing campaign.  I'd go over to friends' houses and have them use different stationary, handwriting, envelopes, stamps, the whole deal, and write the station all kinds of letters, from

PLEESE KEEP MISION IMPOSABLE [signed jessie, age 6]

to

"GO TO HELL, BASTARDS!" [signed, "Angry Mission Impossible Fan"]

to my all-time favorite,

"I am old and crippled and can't afford a TV.  Every day my neighbor Henry comes over and tells me about last night's Mission Impossible.  He is the only person to visit me.  And now I hear you're taking Mission Impossible off the air.  I... I guess I won't be seeing much of Henry anymore."

Heartbreaking stuff!  So I'd take the letters and send them in manila envelopes to the various postmasters at various locations throughout the Bay Area, with a small note attached saying, "Please mail these for my kids."  The postmasters would shrug and drop the letters in the mail slot.  This way the TV station would get letters postmarked from all over the place.

Then, never one to sit still, I placed an ad in the 'Announcements' section of the San Francisco Chronicle:

"Loyal IMF fans!  Call KTZO at 555-1234 to protest!"

"IMF" stands for Impossible Mission Forces, for those of you scoring at home.

I called them myself and talked to some bigwig.  I explained how important this show was to the budding youth of America, unlike the rest of the dribble they aired.  I also asked him if they'd received any other complaints about them taking it off the air.

"Gawd, yes!", were his exact words.

I could imagine.

He then said, "Each letter speaks for a thousand voices", an axiom of the television industry.  For every letter they receive, they figure there are 999 other people out there who feel the same way, but don't want to take the time or trouble or are too embarrassed to write.

And, you guessed it, they not only ran the entire 300-odd episodes over again, but again, and again, and again.  At some point, years later, it got reduced to once a week, 4 in the afternoon every Sunday.

But...it still aired.

I could picture them every six months as they sat around the meeting room discussing what shows to add or drop.  Someone new to the staff would inevitably say, "Hey, how about dropping 'Mission'?", and there'd be this terrible silence in the room as the old-timers remembered what happened the last time they tried that.

It aired for ten years.

I picked up the TV guide one day to see how the show was doing, and it was finally off the air.  I sighed and figured it'd had a better run than most.  And, hopefully, there are lots of guys out there today who were inspired by the show, and are having fun goofing around with solenoids and servo-motors and relays and the like, fixing everything in sight, and truly enjoying being masters of the electro-mechanical realm.

Mission: Accomplished.