THE GHOSTS OF OPRAH, IF ONLY THEY COULD SPEAK

As Oprah Winfrey plunges into her final season of early-morning master-strokes here in Chicago, we watch with mixed emotions. However, the emotions of the ghosts in her Harpo Studio on Washington Blvd are more sad than mixed. To think their old hang-out may soon seal its doors forever. Some of these ghosts are still very much alive: Chicagoans like Bob Newhart and Kim Novak. Others are now performing in a far bigger studio: Celebrities like Studs Terkel, Van Johnson, Ethel Merman, and Vince Lombardi.

Back in the Mad Men days of the Sixties here in Chicago, the Michigan Avenue agencies used our studio to shoot many of their TV commercials. It was then called Fred Niles Studios where the Mad Men with the narrow ties and wide-open expense accounts did their drinking while watching their commercials being shot. Now, where once booze, broads and bamboozle reigned supreme in front of the cameras, Oprah has transfigured this into the nation's plushest therapy couch.

In the pre-Oprah, pre-inner-child, pre-lets-get-in-touch-with-our-feelings years, the tears that flowed in here were not from audiences being touched. More likely from sponsors being bilked. Our staff knew how to dazzle both the sponsor and the ad agency who brought them here. The usual menu of downtown dinners, shows, and leggy starlets shortly before submitting our bill for those "unanticipated cost over-runs."

But no one much minded. Just as the TV series portrays, both sponsor and ad men were part of the money-is-no-object trajectory our booming post-WWII America was riding. Frankly, the boom was so big and loud, they didn't much notice a struggling young comedian around here like Bob or a wordless refrigerator model like Kim (Marilyn back then). Not even Studs, conjuring up his off-beat reality show, caught their capitalistic attentions. That this hard-sell studio would some day be preaching to morning America about finding their true center was as crazy a thought as Bob becoming a television legend and Kim a Hollywood star.

But then -- just as in Mad Men -- something happened to this free-spending, high-living America. Starting the day after Dallas in that ugly 1963. There had been no calculation by our booming superpower for a presidential tragedy quite like this. Nor for the tragedies just five restless years later with the assassinations of Martin and then Bobby. This very Washington Blvd, immediately west of downtown Chicago's glitter, roared those nights with anger and bled with rage.

Oprah has over the years mounted some remarkable moments in this studio where I once scribbled last-minute edits to the scripts being shot. None of us then -- including the now-gone ghosts -- could have imagined how our scruffy workplace would emerge as a citadel of truth and enlightenment for millions of raptured viewers. Not even Oprah, who wasn't even a glint in the eye of busy, bawdy Chicago back then. Still, I often think that one of her most remarkable moments in here could and should be how this unpretentious old building once helped house the flamboyant values and fiery fall of an America that has now become a hazy history.

A history, let it be said, which has become the political play-dough of legions of angry Americans who have heard the siren call about "getting back the real America." A shibboleth oozing out of mouths that never actually lived that America. For that hazy America never really existed. Oh, maybe in Norman Rockwell calendars, Andy Griffith Mayberry, and for few blissful years in my own Chicago youth. Surely, though, not on Washington Blvd and other such mean streets in our big cities where there were few real Tom Sawyers and Becky Thatchers; a great many Black Jims and assorted minorities; plus the same great divide between the poor in this neighborhood and the rich in the Michigan Avenue ad agencies.

So if Oprah ever does this show, she might use it to remind America that the only "real America" is what we really make of it along Washington Blvd, not just Michigan Avenue. An America where folks keep trying to close the great divide....where majorities and minorities keep trying to talk with one another...where the ad men's staged promises and the entertainment moguls' spun dreams dare to allow a bit more honesty. For unless some of this happens soon, neither Michigan Avenue nor Washington Blvd will capture any of Oprah's best visions for the America who watches her.

And right now, right in here, there is a clock ticking...