People leave some history comfortably as history. The purge feels right, like parting with worn-out furniture on Clean Sweep Day.

The catharsis of watching “Mad Men,” the television show that faithfully portrays American life in the early 1960s, comes in recognizing life we left behind: smoky offices in all-Caucasian workplaces, demeaning comments aimed at women, extreme disregard for the environment.

Did the nation really exist as that, and just a generation ago?

(The punches also land with those ugly parts of life that accelerated with the years. The program’s advertising agency conceit focuses on manipulation of the American public, work that refined itself to greater cynicism as the millennium turned.)

Anachronisms of language remain. People still refer to dialing a telephone, though dial telephones seem as quaint as black-and-white movies. A Dave Matthews Band song this year refers to rolling down a car window, though the car windows of rock stars and many other Americans operate now at a button’s touch.

This scene flashed in my head last week, that of seven American governors sitting on a stage of Phil Donahue’s syndicated show (talk about bygone days) and promoting their states for an economic development windfall.

(The next day on “Donahue,” the subject was people who not only feared that they looked like their pets but also like their veterinarians.)

General Motors, feeling the pinch of foreign imports, dangled the idea of opening a new plant to build a “revolutionary” car.

Such a factory would employ 6,000 people while also creating 15,000 jobs in supporting businesses.

Workers there would not only have the benefit of a paycheck, they would stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, at the vanguard of a new era of American industrial might.

Perhaps to seem egalitarian, or more likely to create buzz and cajole some incentives, GM executives offered the pending plant to interested states, hoping they would compete for the car company’s affections.

At least 20 states blushed at the flirtation, and seven had their governors making a case for Phil Donahue, then the daytime talk czar.

Missouri Gov. John Ashcroft sat on the stage that March day in 1985, matching wits and work-force boasts with chief executives from Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania.

It was like a beauty contest without beauty.

Love being a fickle thing, General Motors found none of the “Donahue” suitors to its liking. Company higher-ups chose a Tennessee town, Spring Hill, to be the Eden for their “new kind of car company,” the tagline that would identify Saturn.

Our times change. One can barely imagine modern daytime programming giving an hour to dark-suited men pitching plant sites. American car companies, having never vanquished competitors from abroad, got more of run on C-Span in recent times, testifying on the matter of bailout funds.

Saturn, the object of earlier desire, went away last week, abandoned by GM and no longer the ingenue to potential buyers. Its rise and fall transpired within a short run of memory.

Governors once groveled. Now, glory faded, a good car made by earnest Americans becomes a relic, still around on roadways but disappearing with the years.

History gets left to history. Phil Donahue knows.

Ken Newton’s column runs on Tuesday and Sunday.