“Homefront Airs ‘Lost’ Episode”
July 1992
Homefront, ABC’s primetime soap which began encore performances July 21, will air a never-before-seen episode July 28. (The encore episodes resume next week.)
“Take My Hand” was supposed to have aired as the follow-up to the series’ pilot last fall. However, the episode – revolving around the funeral of WWII soldier Mike Sloan Jr. – was considered such a tearjerker that Homefront’s brass felt it might jeopardize continued viewer interest. Now that Homefront is in repeats, the episodes are being aired in the order originally intended.
In “Take My Hand,” Gloria (Hattie Winston), the black housekeeper who works for Mike Jr.’s wealthy parents, Mike Sr. (Ken Jenkins) and Ruth (Mimi Kennedy), offers to sing at their son’s funeral. “Mike Jr. used to write to Gloria that in the event something should happen to him overseas, he would want her to sing,” explains Winston. “And Gloria shows the letter to Mrs. Sloan, and she of course declines. Gloria thinks she doesn’t want this black woman coming to her church. But that’s not spoken.” However, Mike Jr.’s friends Hank (David Newsom) and Charlie (Harry O’Reilly) “risk going to jail,” when they arrange for Gloria to sing.
Gloria will sing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” at the funeral. Grammy Award winner Harold Wheeler, Winston’s husband, arranged and scored the show’s music, and also appears on-screen as the choir-master. “The producers were aware of my husband’s work because he is a composer and orchestrator, so they called and asked if he’d be interested in doing it.
“As an actress I imagined the time I spent with Mike Jr., the time he spent with my son (Robert, played by Sterling Macer Jr.), little things like that,” Winston says of her preparation for the scene. “I’m positive that there were times he would come in the kitchen and I’d let him play, and I’m also positive that he had his favorite sweets, which I would make for him. And I would bake the cakes, bake the cobbler, and I would let him come and lick the bowl. For some reason in my mid I have the picture of Robert and Mike Jr. sitting on the floor in the kitchen, licking a bowl.”
The solo is a live recording. “As always, there are technical problems, but the way it was set up I could never go in and just sing one verse. Each time we did it I had to sing the entire song,” she notes. “They used two cameras, for the master shot and close-up.”