Another day, another legend lost. The great Phil Donahue who towered as the #1 talk show in America from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s has passed away at the age of 88. In today’s fragmented media age, where no one star can shine too brightly, it’s easy to forget just how big a star Phil Donahue really was.

Long before social media, streaming, and hundreds of cable channels, everyone in America just watched broadcast television, and pretty much the same few channels at that, so at his peak, probably about one in 20 American adults were watching Donahue on any given weekday, giving hosts like Donahue and his successor Oprah, a level of influence on society that was comparable to that of a United States President.

This was the true golden age of America.

Today everyone and their mother has some kind of kind of talk show in the form of YouTube, podcasts, or just tic-toc videos, so it’s easy to forget what it was like when only the absolute best and brightest held the microphone.