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.
It gives me the creeps now to think about how much of my childhood was wasted utterly. But it’s all in there, the well I draw on.
Richard Nilsen 