These industry leaders

In the Echo Lake section of Disney’s Hollywood Studios, on the far side of the lake from the 50’s Prime Time Café, sits the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. In this small out of the way courtyard are busts of fourteen of the most renowned leading lights of television. They have been honored for their, “outstanding contributions to the arts, sciences, and management of television,” each year since 1984.

Though the busts themselves are impressive, the back wall is lined with several plaques that include further lists of Hall of Fame inductees. Some of the more notable honorees not currently immortalized in bronze include: Lucille Ball, Rod Serling, Mary Tyler Moore, Johnny Carson, Jim Henson, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Barbara Walters, and Aaron Spelling, among others.

For their part, each of the members of the Hall of Fame, particularly the inductees celebrated in busts, are linked in one way or another to very special and specific memories in my life. For all of the members of the Hall of Fame that have touched my life, save Walt Disney, none have meant more to me than Alan Alda, whom I grew up watching with my father. The older I get, the more I wonder if my father, who spent time in Korea during Vietnam, saw, and still sees, a piece of himself in Alan Alda’s Hawkeye. Though I have admired the full body of his work, Alan Alda will forever be linked in my eyes to my father through Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce.