First, the
greatest Sherman Hemsley story you will ever read.
Second...okay, I realize this is going to sound ridiculous. Chad Everett became something of a cult figure to a small group of friends in college. This was the late 1980s when my roommate and I got addicted to MEDICAL CENTER reruns on TNT. It was such a terrible show and Chad was such a terrible actor (with amazing helmet hair and insane '70s fashions) that we had to watch every day. Then I found an LP he had cut during the 70s called, of course, CHAD, which was terrible. The single was "You Set My Dreams to Music," which we played the hell out of.
When I became a DJ at a Top 40 station, the first song I played--way off the playlist--was "You Set My Dreams to Music." I had already been on the AM station for awhile, and the other DJs (we all hung out and partied together) made sure the boss wasn't listening when I did it.
One morning, my roomie Dave and I had an emergency. The power had cut out during the end of MEDICAL CENTER, and we didn't know how it ended. It was a ridiculous episode about the greatest heart surgeon in the world (Bradford Dillman maybe?) who was hiding in Canada as a draft dodger. Chad had an emergency patient who needed an operation and prevailed on Dillman to come to L.A. to do it, even though Dillman would probably be busted and go to jail.
What to do? We called TNT master control at midnight and asked if they saw the end of the episode. A guy named Mark Testa (believe it) came to the phone and started to describe the end. It turns out the guys at TNT also thought MEDICAL CENTER was an amazing show. Then he said, "Want me to just play the end for you?" He threaded up the tape and held the phone to the little speaker so we could hear the end. He said, "Hey, if you guys ever come to Atlanta, let me know."
A few months later, yeah, we roadtripped to Atlanta. Went to TNT at about midnight and got a private tour from Testa. We gifted him with some Chad stuff, and he played some hilarious MEDICAL CENTER promos he and his buddies had done...that actually aired. I have these somewhere.
There's a lot more dumb stuff like this (like the homemade Chad bumper stickers we put on our cars), but suffice to say, the loss of Chad Everett means the end of an era to us.
Here's the Chad music video my roommate edited in 1987 to "You Set My Dreams to Music":
The World's First Chad Everett Music Video 