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# Where'd You Go, Johnny Carson?
- URL: https://tombeaverbooks.ghost.io/wheres-you-go-johnny-carson/
- Published: 2026-10-06T01:05:53.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-06T02:34:42.000Z
- Author: Tom Beaver
- Tags: Book: Movies And TV, #Import 2026-10-09 17:51

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On one of the stations yesterday I saw a clip of Johnny’ Carson's farewell talk. Him sitting on a stool thanking Ed, Doc, and the audience. It was utterly familiar to me —strangely so. Because althoughI videotaped that final show, I don’t think I’ve ever watched the tape. I might’ve seen a clip of the farewell talk once or twice. Still, it's uncanny how familiar it was. 

His final talk was momentous enough that my mind gave it prime shelf space, next to the personal milestones. 

Seeing it again clarified something that’s been nagging at me for 15 years or so. I’ve been waiting to see what Johnny was going to do next. A lot of celebrities exit from the public eye and never reappear, but in Johnny’s case I felt I had inside knowledge that he would definitely be back. Because Johnny told me personally that he would. In his farewell talk, stored on that prime shelf of mine with my other intimate memories, he says, “And when I find something else that I want to do, I hope you’ll be just as welcoming to me as you have been for all these years…” (paraphrasing). 

I remember when he made that request, and my answer there in my living room was an immediate, impatient yes. 

When I heard yesterday he had died, along with immediate sadness I felt that let-down you get when someone cancels big on you—backs out of a weekend trip, cancels a yearly visit. I felt the same thing when Christopher Reeve died. I’d been waiting for him to walk, because he’d promised he would. It was one of the happy endings I’d written into my own future story.

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Interesting how we take people we’ve never met into our hearts. It’s one of the first things space aliens would notice about us, looking down from space and seeing how we cluster together. 

When I think of Johnny Carson I think of our living room at Holiday Ranch, my parents reluctantly giving in and laughing at the racey stuff; the well-lit colors and bright lives on Johnny’s stage given high contrast by the black picture frame of night, which had the nice secondary effect of temporarily blotting out, both from my view and from Johnny’s, the drab colors and dull life I was looking in from; sexual beauty radiating into me encoded as family entertainment; direct memories like that of watching him on TV. 

But “Johnny Carson” also makes me think of adolescence. The specific one you and I fabricated. His show was one of the places we went to for knowledge and inspiration. Johnny Carson the person has a warm spot in my heart. But it was “Johnny Carson” the show that poured large, repeated doses of mutating rays into my life. 

Physically speaking, book” were one of our great sources, TV was another. *The Tonight Show* would be the equivalent of “the school library” or “Scholastic Books” as being a particular place we frequently went to on TV to soak up the emanations of a certain part of the world’s spectrum. 

Thinking about *The Tonight Show* I end up remembering what it felt like standing in the hall before school started for the day, telling jokes a little like David Steinberg, watching our local Joey Heathertons, dissatisfied with ourselves but buoyed by the cosmopolitan future selves we felt ourselves becoming, thanks partly to those 90 minute clandestine doses of Johnny’s world. *\~ Jan. 24, 2005 / Email to Rob McCaskill*