With the passing of Dick Clark last week, the world is short one teen-ager – permanently.

I was kind of surprised that none of the obits for Clark that I saw mentioned the sobriquet “world’s oldest living teen-ager,” which was, at time, a standard joking reference to Clark. Of course, it’s been a long time since he was a) close to being a teen-ager and b) the guy who sort of facilitated teen-agerhood with “American Bandstand.” People of an age who, 50 years ago, would have idolized Clark now know him pretty much only as the guy whose name was attached to a New Year’s Eve celebration on which he didn’t even appear.

In fact, it had been some time since Clark even was much of a public figure. The last time I remember seeing him in anything was a Michael Moore movie, in which Moore tried to humiliate him with his standard ambush-interview technique. I don’t remember what the matter was Moore was calling Clark out on, but I remember it was one of the few times I ever saw Clark come off bad in anything (he pretty much shut down Moore and refused to talk). It was also vaguely weird because to people of a certain age Clark was, if not a demigod, a guy who got to hang out with demigods.

It’s really kind of hard to conceive of now, but there was a time when nobody really cared about teen-gers. Teen-agerdom, as we recognize it now, was really sort of a creation of post-World War II America. (In fact, childhood itself had been created not all that much earlier; for most of history, until about the Victorian era, children were treated as little adults and considered no big deal.)

What happened, of course, was rock ‘n’ roll. When it first reared its shaggy head sometime in the 1950s, rock ‘n’ roll became one of the first ways kids in their teen-age years could really differentiate themselves from Mom and Dad. It scared the older folks. And while scaring your folks is now something teen-agers do just by existing, back in the days before rock ‘n’ roll it still seemed possible for parents to understand their kids. That all ended when the propulsive beats and sexuality of people like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley set the kids dancing. The very name of the type of music was a sexual euphemism. Parents of the 1950s heard music that they didn’t understand, watched dances that seemed at best weird and at worst threatening, and the panic began.

Dick Clark and “American Bandstand” were part of that panic, albeit in retrospect a fairly benign part. Dick and his imitators – if you’ve seen “Hairspray,” you know there were a lot of local versions of “Bandstand” – helped bring rock ‘n’ roll out of the seamy underbelly of society and into nice, white, suburban homes. You turned on the TV and there it was. In some ways, it was one of the earliest examples of reality television.

Of course, to watch old “Bandstand” shows now is to wonder what all the fuss was about. The kids on there looked like well-scrubbed and wholesome. I always got the impression that most of them left the studio and headed home to work on the signs used in their campaigns for student body president at Wonder Bread High.

But that’s with the benefit of hindsight. To a teen-ager growing up then, the kids on “Bandstand” were avatars of cool. For one thing, they could dance. A significant number of baby boomers, at least among the boys, learned to dance by watching Dick’s kids. That includes me (although the concept of “Tom dancing” has about as much validity as “Helen Keller playing tennis”). The only time it really sucked to watch the dancers on “Bandstand” was during the disco era. They were, to a person, all budding disco kings and queens and few of us could ever hope to have their moves.

But to the generation of parents who were teen-agers in the ‘30s and fought a world war in the ‘40s, and then came home to build a life, “Bandstand” must have been at least vaguely disquieting. Yeah, Dick wore a suit and tie, the kids he interviewed seemed polite enough – if a little flummoxed by their proximity to their heroes, and the reflected glow of those heroes coming off Dick – but these weren’t kids who were going to burn down the neighborhood. Some of them did later, but a lot happened before they started looking for the matches.

For all the gassing we Boomers do about what the music meant to us, man, we tend to conveniently ignore that the reason it took off wasn’t really because it was so good or so significant or so powerful. It took off because people could make money off it. It was in the early rock ‘n’ roll era that business first saw teen-agers as a distinct market, one that could be schmoozed and flattered and cajoled into buying stuff. Make no mistake about it – the movers and shakers behind the music were businessmen. If you don’t believe that, do some research on the payola scandals of the 1950s, when disc jockeys were bribed to play records, and look into the number of African American artists who were screwed out of their music because it was easier to sell it to whites and there were more of them.

So that, children, is as bit of Dick Clark’s back story. Within his narrow sphere, he was a pretty big name. He didn’t cure cancer or stop wars. But he taught us to dance, and there’s a surprising amount of influence, and value, in that.