The locally produced phenomenon: Dave Williams and Beyond Our Control — South Bend's teenagers, South Bend's station, tested for a Granger tie and not absorbed

1968–1986 · WNDU-TV, South Bend (boundary)

The phenomenon, whole, as its own city's: Beyond Our Control was a youth-produced sketch-comedy series made almost entirely by high-school students and aired on WNDU-TV, the University of Notre Dame's NBC affiliate in South Bend, for nineteen seasons, 1968 to 1986 — thirteen half-hour episodes a year, 247 in all, usually from late January to mid-May. It began in 1961 as WJA-TV, a Junior Achievement company sponsored by WNDU (the local JA sponsor), whose first student series was a quiz-and-variety format; in 1966–67 the students and their advisers remade it as sketch comedy, and it took the Beyond Our Control name. Some thirty Michiana teenagers a year were chosen by audition — more than 350 across the run — and did nearly every job themselves: writing, performing, cameras, switching, and selling the commercial time. Its creator and creative leader was Dave Williams (born June 1940 in South Bend; Central High School, class of 1958; a WNDU production assistant from 1960 and its promotion manager from 1964), who conceived the show at twenty-six and ran it until his death on 27 August 1977, aged thirty-seven, in surgery for a brain tumour; the adult advisers beside him were Denny Laughlin, WNDU's art director, and Joe Dundon, who taught the students ad sales. WNDU's general manager William Thomas Hamilton, who took the station's sponsorship of the teenagers when other stations would not, was the programme's institutional guardian. The show outlived its creator by nine seasons and remains the subject of a University of Notre Dame scholarly research project and book. Every seat in that account is South Bend's: the creator a South Bend man, the station a South Bend station, the studio a South Bend studio.

The Granger tie, tested — and not absorbed: the company drew its teenagers from the whole Michiana region, and the Tribune's retrospective roll names members by their high schools — Riley, Clay, St. Joseph's, and Penn (a Penn member of 1983–85, later an adviser in 1986, is named) — and Penn High School in Mishawaka is the school Granger's public-school teenagers attend. That is the whole of the possible Granger share, and it is printed at exactly that strength: individual Granger-resident teenagers may well have stood in the WNDU studio as company members by way of Penn or Clay, but no source reached names a company member as a Granger resident, the production was never seated, housed or made in Granger, and the programme is not Granger's to claim. What would settle the individual share is named here as the gap that remains inside this dug article: the Beyond Our Control alumni roster and the Notre Dame research project's participant records, checked by home address against the CDP line. Until that check is run, this section prints the phenomenon as South Bend's entire — local production made by the region's residents, outranking imported credits of the same size in its own city's build, and carried here at boundary size for that reason and no other.

Sources:

1. Beyond Our Control programme record (WJA-TV; WNDU-TV; 1968–1986; 247 episodes; the Williams, Laughlin, Dundon and Hamilton roles; Williams's birth, schooling, station career and 1977 death); University of Notre Dame, "Beyond Our Control: A Very Nice Research Project" (Christine Becker) — the Junior Achievement structure, the student labour, the Hamilton sponsorship from 1960–61; South Bend Tribune retrospective (2000), excerpted in the research record — the alumni roll by high school, including the Penn member named.