Tag Archives: dave garroway

In addition to this blog, which I have been writing since 2012, I have written a monthly essay for the Spirit of the Senses salon group in Phoenix, Ariz., since 2015. I was, at various times, a presenter for the salon, which arranges six to 10 or so lectures or performances each month for its subscribers. Among the other presenters are authors, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, musicians, lawyers and businessmen, each with a topic of interest to those with curious minds. I recently felt that perhaps some of those essays might find a wider audience if I republished them on my own blog. Here is one, from July 2, 2016 slightly updated and rewritten.

It is said we are in a golden age of television. Not so much because of what is available on broadcast TV, but what is available on cable and on live streaming video, such as Netflix and Hulu.

It’s hard to argue against this, what with so much out there to see, from Game of Thrones (at perhaps one extreme) and Book TV on C-Span (at the other end). For many, this new Golden Age was born with HBO’s series, The Sopranos. It certainly made a quantum leap in what was possible on the tube.

But, for an entire demographic segment, the term “Golden Age” is reserved for another time, another place. I grew up in the first Golden Age of Television, its earliest years just after the Second World War, making TV, just as much as myself, a baby boomer. There is little left of that first Golden Age that isn’t merely the buzzing of neurons in the memory of an aging generation. What survives beyond that are some gray, blurry kinescopes and whatever was shot on filmstock in those nascent years. Even that is hard to come by, outside a few remnants retrievable on You Tube.

What was special about the first decade of broadcast, despite the technical and budgetary limitations, was the sense that anything was possible. Since it hadn’t existed before, no one knew exactly what TV should be, and so, they threw everything up against the wall to see what would stick. And the current generation would be astonished at what became popular, like Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in his purple vestments talking to us in his calming but authoritative Catholic voice on Life is Worth Living, or artist Jon Gnagy giving lessons on How to Draw, or Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony from 1948 to 1952.

Their modern counterparts now find their home on obscure cable channels or PBS, but Bishop Sheen was on the Dumont Network and then ABC. Gnagy was originally on NBC. In its earliest years, television was willing to try anything. There were home travelogue movies on Bold Journey and I Search for Adventure (with Col. John D. Craig); there were African adventure series, Ramar of the Jungle and Jungle Jim; there were cop shows such as Highway Patrol and Racket Squad (it is surprising how many of these shows come in competing pairs); Captain Video and Captain Midnight; Mama and The Goldbergs; Ozzie and Harriet and George Burns and Gracie Allen.

The last of these was surprisingly ante-post-modern, as George Burns would watch his own TV show to discover what was happening in the episode he was in. More than breaking the fourth wall, it was breaking the fifth.

By the end of the 1950s, television had begun to feel like the familiar boob-tube we all know and love. The programs were becoming settled and familiar. There were Westerns, cops shows, talk shows, game shows — all the usual furniture of the air waves.

But when I was a wee bairn, it was all a bit wild and wooly. Because there wasn’t enough content available to fill all the time, television went blank in the middle of the night and didn’t light up again till well into the next morning. And because there was a shortage of content, a good deal of the detritus of Hollywood was repurposed for the tube, which means that I received a graduate-level exposure to the B-Westerns of the 1930s. I knew well such stars as Hoot Gibson, Tim McCoy, Bob Steele, Buck Jones and Johnny Mack Brown. I still know the difference between Fuzzy Knight and Fuzzy St. John.

Some of the old actors found new work on the small screen. Western sidekick Andy Devine first worked as sidekick to Guy Madison in the Wild Bill Hickock series of half-hour oaters, but more memorably, as the host of Andy’s Gang, a children’s show featuring a serial of Gunga, the East Indian Boy, and a retinue of animal and puppet regulars, including Froggy the Gremlin, a classic trickster, and a phrase that re-emerged during the drug-hazed hippie era: “Pluck your magic twanger, Froggy!”

It would be easy — and tempting — to recall all that rubble that has collected in the mystic chords of memory from a childhood ill-spent in front of a glowing cathode-ray tube, but what I really mean to say is that what enters the consciousness at that tender age remains a touchstone for the rest of our lives. If our everyday childhood was one of front stoops and schoolyards, of family supper and the pinch of a new pair of shoes, what we watched through the glass bubble was the big world, the larger world that we knew we would eventually grow up to inhabit, and it was a world more interesting, more important, more everything than the ordinary one we woke up to each day, and that gave us a sense of the world that colored the rest of our lives. The actual matter of television was indeed a “vast wasteland,” but that hardly mattered. It seemed like magic to a six-year-old watching Art Linkletter in the afternoon or Abbott and Costello before dinner.

I know, for a generation earlier than mine, the same transcendent glow attached to radio — “Only the Shadow knows” — and that same sense of magic is what Woody Allen’s movie Radio Days is all about. But for anyone born after the war, it was television.

I am reminded of this by my youngers, who apparently feel the same “Golden Age” glow about their TV shows. How can one wax nostalgic about Gilligan’s Island or The Brady Bunch? They were such godawful shows. Or Scooby-Doo? Not my circus, not my monkeys. They are a grey cloud of mediocrity, but nevertheless the glowing childhood of those who came after me. Surely that is what any Golden Age is. Somewhere there is a class of novice businessmen whose sense of the world’s magic glow was a result of an infusion of Teletubbies.

When we are children — and I mean from the first memories until maybe second grade — everything is new, and because of that, it is radiant. It glows from inside and is what we aspire to throughout our lives, even when we go through divorces, failures, traffic tickets or bad clams. There is something ignited in us at that early time that is somehow a pilot light that remains. When we talk about a Golden Age of television — whichever age it is for us — it is primarily that inner light that we call gold.

And so, it feels quite different when we talk about the current era as being the second Golden Age of television. TV, like us, has grown up, and the current crop of shows that garner critical acclaim tend to be full of “adult” content, sex, drugs and vaulting ambition, violence and treachery. It speaks to us of a world very different, where orange is the new black, Kimmy Schmidt escapes from a doomsday cult, and the kingdom of Westeros is not so much dog-eat-dog, as dog-rapes-and-beheads-dog. It is a world very hard to explain to Mr. Peepers or Gale Storm.

The new Golden Age is infinitely more sophisticated and better written. It takes on the real issues of the world, albeit in metaphorical form, and gives us some real meat to chew on. I am not denigrating the new Golden Age. At its best, it is as real an art form as Greek tragedy.

But the earlier Golden Age, where “Uncle Fultie” left us rapt with homilies, and Morey Amsterdam played the cello and told jokes on morning TV, where Victory at Sea replayed the previous decade’s war with narrator Leonard Graves’ booming “voice of doom,” and Miss Frances taught us right from wrong on Ding Dong School, it has left a residue in my psyche — fuzzy as a kinescope — that has infected me with this damned unexpungeable sense that the world may be — despite House of Cards and Game of Thrones — somehow and inexplicably redeemable.

The Three Ages of Early TV

April 21, 2020

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I was born in 1948 and shared my infancy with television. Me and Uncle Miltie saw the light of day in the same instant of time, just a few clicks after the end of the war that killed 60 million people. Uncle Miltie was fun.

My father still fit into his Eisenhower jacket and automobiles were just being remarketed, having been turned back from the Sherman Tank pumpkins they had been for the duration. I, of course, knew nothing of this: I was eating pureed prunes and slapping my sippy cup on the tray of my high chair and gurgling with ignorant happiness.

I can’t remember a time when we didn’t have a television in the house. Some of my earliest memories were of watching that ovoid 12-inch screen in our house in Teaneck, N.J. and being told that I entered the world in the same hospital where Ozzie and Harriet’s son, Rickey, was born.

Those early broadcast years were sparse. There was a test pattern on the screen until about six in the morning, and by midnight the National Anthem played over a picture of a waving flag, followed by a high-pitched sine-wave note and that familiar test pattern.

In between, broadcasters scrambled for what today we call “content.” They found old movies, silent slapstick comedies, talk shows and, ever the staple, variety shows. What original material they had wasn’t really original, but was translated from radio. Many of the old familiars were now filmed (or performed live) and given new life. The Life of Riley, The Goldbergs, The Aldrich Family, My Friend Irma, Jack Benny, and George Burns and Gracie Allen. William Boyd repackaged his old Hopalong Cassidy westerns from the Thirties and such cowboy shows as The Cisco Kid and The Lone Ranger filled Saturdays for the wee bairns.

Before I was sent off to kindergarten, I watched daytime TV with my mother as she ironed or cooked. Art Linkletter, Arthur Godfrey, Herb Shriner, and Dave Garroway, always Dave Garroway, with his meaty palm held toward the screen as he signed off the Today Show each morning: “Peace.”

For the evening, a host of second-string movie actors stepped up as top bananas in sitcoms: Eve Arden, Stu Erwin, Joan Davis, Gale Storm, Ann Sothern, Robert Cummings, Leon Ames, Wendy Barrie, Harriet Hilliard and Ozzie Nelson, and the greatest leap up from B-films: Lucille Ball.

And the kiddie shows. Howdy Doody was the royalty, but the rest of the aristocracy included Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Romper Room, Ding-Dong School, Captain Video, Beany and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, Crusader Rabbit and Mr. Wizard.

Three genres ate up a great part of the clock: game shows (Beat the Clock, Truth of Consequences, What’s My Line, Name That Tune), Westerns (Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Sky King, The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock, Hopalong Cassidy), and space operas (Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, Captain Video, Space Patrol, Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, Captain Midnight). At least, on our TV.

And to fill up the empty programming hours, there were endless old Western movies. The cream were from the 1930s, with Hoot Gibson, Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, Hoppy, Bob Steele, Bob Livingston, John Wayne (in his B-movie phase). The quality plateaued in the ’40s with Johnny Mack Brown, Rogers, Autry, Wild Bill Elliott, and Buster Crabbe, and then dropped significantly after that with some truly awful films with Lash LaRue, Whip Wilson and Tim Holt. The ’50s were bad for movies in general, but disastrous for Westerns — the best of them were now made for TV directly.

I haven’t forgotten the variety shows. Way too much singing for my childish tastes. My parents loved Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Patti Page, Kate Smith and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Me, not so much. But the parental units had the power over us powerless kids and so we watched.

Toast of the Town, later called The Ed Sullivan Show, dominated our Sunday evenings. Nothing like plate spinners for the imaginations of 5-year-olds. Jugglers, ventriloquists, comics, animal acts, and Broadway tunes. The dying gasp of vaudeville.

But, I’m just naming names here, and gorging on nostalgia. What I really meant to do was point out the changing tenor of early television. I see three major periods from 1948, when I was born, to 1970, when I graduated college and pretty much ceased watching the tube on any regular basis. I’m afraid I lost touch with pop culture at that time.

The first period was the one I call “Spaghetti on the Wall.” Audiences were familiar with radio, and television was radio with pictures. To fill the time-void, broadcasters tried pretty much everything trying to figure out just what this new beast was. Talk was cheap, so many of the programs, like Arthur Godfrey, Garry Moore or Art Linkletter’s House Party went on for hours filling the airwaves with chatter. Radio had half-hour sitcoms and hour-long dramas, and so TV did the same. Music was big on radio, more the same on the tube.

There was an innocence in these first 10 years. A certain “Let’s put on a show” attitude. There were hits, such as Sullivan and I Love Lucy, but a lot of dead ends, too. Some old performers just didn’t have the TV magic and Ed Wynn, Jimmy Durante, Fred Waring, Ted Steele, Paul Whiteman, and Red Buttons simply didn’t translate well. (Loretta Young, who started out in silent films, attempted to remain 20 years old well into her 60s).

In the second period, beginning in 1957 or 1958, TV develops a confidence of its own, a kind of throaty adolescence. Radio was no longer something most audiences remembered, except as the source for rock and roll music, and some studios, such as Desilu and Warner Brothers began making TV-appropriate series. It was also the first time TV began remaking, not radio shows, but previous TV shows. There were a new Dinah Shore Show, a new Tonight Show with Jack Paar, new vehicles for Ann Sothern, George Burns, Ernie Kovacs, Gale Storm, Bob Denver, Jim Nabors and even Beany and Cecil.

It was also the era of the explosion of cheap animation. Joseph Hanna and William Barbera pumped out assembly-line cartoons, beginning with The Ruff and Reddy Show in 1957, followed by Huckleberry Hound (with Yogi the Bear), Deputy Dawg, and The Flintstones. Similar animation came from Jay Ward et al. in the various Rocky and Bullwinkle shows.

But the real prize came with popular filmed series, many from Warner Brothers, including Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, and Surfside 6. There were other stalwarts, such as Have Gun-Will Travel, Perry Mason, Naked City, Sea Hunt, One Step Beyond, Bonanza, Rawhide, The Untouchables, Route 66, and East Side/West Side.

And The Twilight Zone (and its poor relation, The Outer Limits).

This is the era that brought us a normalized suburban vision of the U.S. and its country cousin. Dick Van Dyke and The Beverly Hillbillies. Leave It to Beaver and The Real McCoys. The Donna Reed Show and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis vs. The Andy Griffith Show and Petticoat Junction. These were the Eisenhower Years reflected in My Three Sons and The Bob Newhart Show.

This was TV in its stride, its first full flowering as the universal entertainment medium for the vast majority of Americans.

After, comes a period of decadence, of imitation and slipshod production. Instead of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., we get The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. There’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Fantastic Voyage, and Voyage to the Center of the Earth.

It was also the time of America’s cultural paroxysm and it shows on the screen. Black actors and entertainers showed up beyond Beulah and Amos ’n’ Andy: Julia, The Leslie Uggams Show, I Spy, Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek, The Bill Cosby Show and Flip Wilson. The counter culture ruled The Mod Squad and Laugh-In. It was clear the world was changing …

…and TV’s response was to go for the cheese. The second half of this third era of television history is really dominated by the shows remembered fondly by Generation X and those who saw these things in later syndication. This is The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. Adam-12, Love, American Style, The Flying Nun, Ironside, My Mother, the Car, Kung Fu, The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman. There was a full reliance on gimmicks. And what didn’t depend on a gimmick still felt like a bad parody — even a deconstruction — of what bad TV is all about. Some young people, grown up in a world of media rather than one of sky, sea and soil, enjoy such programs in cable reruns precisely because of how bad they are.

Television itself has become so much more self-aware as television. Postmodernism hit the medium with a wallop. You can’t have a David Letterman without the irony of his take on the very medium that brings him bread.

This has all been a very broad overview. Certainly, there have been good shows in each era. Even in the ruins of decadence we have Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Rockford Files, Barney Miller, Soap, and Taxi. There are always creative people in the field: No era is complete dross.

I have very fond recollections of the TV I watched as a child and no doubt rank such shows higher in my estimation than they deserve and no doubt each generation feels something of the same for the fare they ingested in their formative years. We should all be forgiven the folly of our youths.

I rather lost track of the toob after going to college and since graduating. I have caught bits and pieces and I’m afraid I am rather disgusted with the current 24-hour news channels. This has been called a new “Golden Age” of TV, and no doubt it is: The quality levels of much is quite high, at least on cable and on streaming services. The networks seemed largely mired in repetition of the same cafeteria food. I find myself turning primarily to Turner Classic Movies, PBS, and British television. Or perhaps, cracking open a book.

But then, I am a crotchety old geezer.

Diary of a wasted childhood

May 8, 2019

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I see my granddaughters staring into their phones, watching video of themselves and their friends making goofy faces, or bits of viral kitties on YouTube and, like many of us of a declining generation, worry about the future of the culture. How quick we forget.

The young nowadays hardly watch ordinary television anymore, unless it is streaming video from Netflix. But there was a time when the boob-tube was the primary entertainment for an entire post-war generation. You might even call the damnable thing the “boomer-tube.” We were there at its inception. We watched it try to find its feet.

I was born the same year Milton Berle made television a necessity in the American home. In a sense, TV and I grew up together and it would be a shame not to admit it.

In my earliest years, we had no TV, but I cannot remember much before the great wooden chunk of furniture with the little oval screen of greenish gray — the DuMont television we had in suburban New Jersey.

It seemed as huge as a furnace and the fire that flickered through the window was the normal hearth of the home.

Television doesn’t seem to be any miracle if you’ve never known a time without it. It’s an appliance, like the washer or the stove.

In its earliest years, television tried to fill up its empty spaces with recycled product from the movies and radio: Many of its first series were carry-overs from radio, though I didn’t know it. We never listened to radio before television.

I watched Pinky Lee, Miss Frances on Ding Dong School, Crusader Rabbit and Rags the Tiger, Beany and Cecil, the seasick sea-serpent, Bill and Cora Baird and their puppets, including Charlemagne the Lion. With my grandmother, I would watch the Bishop Fulton J. Sheen stand with that long, lined face and tell us that Life is Worth Living.

There was Howdy Doody and Clarabell the Clown, Princess Summerfall Winterspring and Chief Thunderthud (the original “Kowabunga”). I longed to sit in the peanut gallery. I knew Buffalo Bob many years before I ever heard of Buffalo Bill.

On Saturday mornings, I’d watch Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and each weekday afternoon, there was Al Hodge (formerly radio’s Green Hornet) as Captain Video, fighting the evil robot, Tobor. (I was proud as a pre-schooler to figure out that “Tobor” was “robot” spelled hindwards.) Later, there was Rocky Jones, another space adventurer.

The broadcast bands were filled with old Westerns, too. Not only Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, but a host of older stars, from Hoot Gibson and Ken Maynard to Col. Tim McCoy. I ate up every Three Mesquiteers film ever made, and knew subliminally that Bob Steele as an actor was better with his fists than any other cowboy star.

There was at least one old Western every afternoon, introduced by an aging cowboy, who was actually Lyle Talbot, “B”-movie actor and veteran of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, which we watched a dozen times in a week on Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movie — my first serious film course. They showed the same movie all day and night over and over. I first knew King Kong there, and Wee Geordie and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It really was a great film course. (And it was only years later I realized that the theme music to Million Dollar Movie was the Tara theme from Gone With the Wind.)

We were lucky in the New York Tri-State Area: In those days when TV channels were few across the nation, we had seven: three networks and four independents (channels 5, 9, 11 and 13 — which later became the pre-PBS WNET-TV educational television.)

The kiddie hosts were all over those indies: Officer Joe Bolton, Sonny Fox, Claude Kirschner, Sandy Becker, Paul Tripp.

Late in the afternoon, Uncle Fred Sayles came on with Junior Frolics (I think it had originally been called Juniortown, or something like), where I became unintentionally conversant with the silent animation of Van Beuren Studios, Max Fleischer and Pat Sullivan. Farmer Gray (originally Farmer Al Falfa) and the Aesop’s Fables of Paul Terry — a billion stick-figure mice running all over the place. (This was also my introduction to jazz, used as background music to the silent cartoons, just as Bugs Bunny and Warner Brothers cartoons were my introduction to classical music.) There were also the Ko-ko the Clown features — Out of the Inkwell — and Betty Boop.

In those early years, they were really hurting for things to fill up the airwaves and threw up on screen anything they could scrounge.

Andy Devine hosted Andy’s Gang, with the gremlin, Froggy: “Pluck your magic twanger, Froggy!” The show featured a serial of Gunga the East Indian Boy, which was supposed to be set in India, but was shot near Los Angeles. The confusion of jungles was common. Ramar of the Jungle switched between generic Africa and fictitious India. I was a kid, what did I know? Imagine my surprise when years later, on Million Dollar Movie, I saw Ramar (Jon Hall) as a South Seas islander, Terangi, with Dorothy Lamour in The Hurricane from 1937.

I look back now and think what a pioneer I was, eating up the first indigestible offerings the networks and independent channels served up.

I remember I Remember Mama, The Goldbergs, Life with Riley, I Led Three Lives, Mr. Peepers, Bob Cummings, My Little Margie, and the early Postmodern Burns and Allen. There were searchlights that I didn’t understand in the credits of the Lux Mystery Theatre and a horrible vise that trapped a silhouette in Climax.

In the afternoons, in the years before I went to school, I watched Art Linkletter’s House Party and Ernie Kovacs, before his later primetime shows.

There was Arthur Godfrey and his ukelele and Garry Moore and his Durward Kirby, along with singers Ken Carson and Denise Lor. It was on the Moore show I saw my first stand-up comedians, when Wayne and Shuster appeared. The orchestra was led, of course, by Milton DeLugg and his accordion.

Even Morey Amsterdam had a brief afternoon show, where he told jokes between a note or two on his cello.

Television was certainly more populated than my real life: I came to know many of its citizens almost as if they were friends. I don’t know what I would have done without Hopalong Cassidy every day.

The familiarity continued as I grew up. Each age had its phosphoric denizens, and it’s astonishing how many of them were Westerns: Cheyenne, Maverick, Have Gun, Will Travel, Wagon Train, and Rawhide took the place of Sky King, Annie Oakley and Roy and Dale.

It’s a shame how much square footage in my cranium is taken up with old crates stuffed with meaningless gibberish:

“B, O — N, O — M, O — Bonomo’s” Turkish Taffy.

Hoffman Beverages, Carvel Ice Cream.

“Who’s the first to conquer space?/It’s incontrovertible/ That the first to conquer living space/ Was the Castro Convertible./ Who conquered space with fine design?/ Who saves you money all the time?/ Who’s tops in the convertible line?/ — Castro convertible.”

“Now back to those thrilling days of yesteryear …”

“What a revoltin’ development this is.”

In high school, it was Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission Impossible.

I am mortified at how much time I spent in front of the screen, soaking up American TV culture. And none of it seems to have escaped. It’s all still in there.

“A little travelin’ music, Sammy — And away we go.”

Dave Garroway holding that meaty palm up to the screen, close enough it seemed to leave a grease print on the inside of the screen glass. “Peace,” he said, every single day of my childhood. I don’t know just how large a part of my decision to become a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War that daily intonation was. I suspect it played a larger part than having gone to a Quaker college.

Joe Franklin and Memory Lane; Jack Bailey and Queen for a Day; Jon Gnagy and Learn to Draw. Jack LaLanne and Marty Glickman and Win Elliot and Jack Paar.

From infancy, plopped in front of the tube, and through grade school, when I remember spending every night spread out on the carpet in front of the console TV with my two brothers, with our parents in the chairs behind us, smoking cigarettes. We’d hit the freezer for a bowl of ice cream or the cookie jar for a handful of Oreos, and nibble and watch, hypnotized by Ed Sullivan or Carol Burnett.

Every culture has its mythology, its stories and foundational personages. For my generation — and those to follow — television and its plots and casts have replaced historical figures (at least those not turned into Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett or Hugh O’Brian’s Wyatt Earp) and the Bible stories that earlier generations grew up with. It was the TV mythology that filled out my inner picture of what the world was and how it functioned. I’m afraid it may have done the same to every generation since. Chester A. Riley gave way to Marcia Brady to Alex P. Keaton to Eric Cartman to Tyrion Lannister. If only the gray matter were stuffed with all of Dickens or Dostoevsky instead of Jerry Mahoney and Captain Video, what a wonder would have been.