Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon

It sneaked up on me, as it always seems to do in recent years. The MDA telethon just isn’t what it used to be.

I remember watching it when we lived in Los Angeles before moving back to Hawaii – from the early ones in the late ‘60s through mid-‘70s – and until the early '80s in Hawaii.

The early telethons were incredible and highly emotional, and inevitably ended with Jerry Lewis (and me) wiping away tears.

And the stars … oh, the stars! They paraded onto the show with the performances of their lives. When the telethon moved to Las Vegas, the entertainment level made a quantum jump into the stratosphere.

Then … the national broadcast began breaking away to local stations, who brought on local personalities and made local pleas for local contributions. That’s when I stopped watching – it became too much of a game to try and guess when the mega-stars were going to appear in the Las Vegas feed.

No longer did we sit on the living room couch, eyes glued to the television, trying to keep cool with fans blowing directly in our faces. No longer was it a “must-see” event.

The “good ol’ days” of the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon are but a memory. Sorry, Jerry, but I’d much rather watch baseball on ESPN today.