By Wyatt Newman
Our infant ears picked up sounds from radio, expanding the sounds of life beyond parents' voices. Music-- "Buy this now" urgings-- and to stimulate our imaginations, stories of adventure--Sky King, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and the immortal Looooone Ranger, riding again! Oh, if only we could really see their faces rather than what they looked like in our minds.
I first heard that such a thing as television existed when I lived in Mount Shasta, probably in my singe-digit years of life. Some people from San Francisco area visited us. The girl, about my age, told me about television and claimed that she watched the Lone Ranger and Tonto. I was amazed. More than amazed, I was excited and quite envious. Gosh!, I'd love to see what they looked like!
My dad, shortly after this revelation, decided to move us to Spokane. Spokane was my first city experience, which amazed me with so many new and bigger things than life in Mount Shasta provided. Stairs that moved so one didn't have to tramp on steps to get to the second floor. Machines in candy store windows the twisted and rolled rubbery-looking stuff that I was told was taffy. Hot dogs rolling around all day long on metal tubes that looked and smelled so good. And in a brightly lit store with gobs of neat stuff called "Newberry's." Spokane was really neat...a truly new adventure to a ten-year old kid. It was 1952.
Then it happened. One evening, while walking home on East Mission Street from Division, where my mom, brother and I had been shopping, we walked by an appliance store and saw in the display windo one of my radio characters, Chester A. Riley, title character in "The Life of Riley," of which I was a regular radio listener. There the three of us stood, watching the rest of the whole episode, mesmerized.
It wasn't much longer the family went downtown and bought an Emerson. Naturally, being more excited than even my first circus, we got it home, plugged it in, turned it on, disappointedly seeing nothing but something known as a "test pattern." Programs were not due to begin until evening. And then the first one popped on! I don't recall exactly what it was, but I do recall watching a rather boring show" Boston Blackie," or perhaps it was Brian Donlevy as Boston Blackie in the program, "Dangerous Assignment." I think we also watched local wrestling, which we debated if they were really that rough or if it was fake, like a movie fight.
We lived in a duplex. The neighbors upstairs came down to see the shows. We arranged chairs in the room, forming a miniature theater. Being new to such a thing resembling a movie theater, we turned off the lights so the room would be dark. My mom quickly learned how to adjust the "rabbit ears" to clear up the fuzziness on the screen. It wasn't too long before we had a sculpture of a black panther on top of the TV, which was another new thing in the early years of the TV boom, a "TV lamp."
Television brought other things into our home besides something to look at--TV trays; TV dinners, served on the trays so we could see all the excitement on TV while we ate, the trays looking like those mess trays soldiers ate their meals on in the mess halls, as seen in the many war movies we also grew up with. Popcorn was a natural food to eat at the movies, so now we had "TV Time Popcorn." "It's the perfect package, for popping corn at home!" sang a pretty woman, who played Annie Oakley, as she sang the enticing jingle pushing the popcorn product that came in a package to make popping corn easier (but certainly not as easy as microwave popcorn that we can enjoy today). Ah, the parade of TV jingles was also with us...some of the most catchy tunes ever to be recorded. I think I can recite more jingles than songs I've ever heard. "When you need coal or oil..." You can finish that one, I betcha, if you lived in Spokane in the late 50s.
Cars have always been status symbols. So it was with television, in a milder form. Who was the first in the neighborhood to have a television? Who had better pictures, evident by the antennas on roofs, knowing that home didn't have only rabbit ears? And who had 21-inch screens, instead of those dinky 17 inchers? A mere four inches was more than four inches...it was BIG SCREEN!
It wasn't until 1963, as I recall, that I was introduced to the ultimate of television. I'd spent all my years at home, in other kids' homes, at the college fraternity house, watching TV that was always black and white. Then another revolutionary experience. When first entering the home of my future wife in our early dating years, in her front room wa a huge, COLOR TV! Just like the Technicolor movies in the theaters! I was impressed. I assumed her parents must have had a lot of dough.
Our generation (What are we? The 1942 Kids? We aren't true war babies nor Depression kids and too early to be Boomers.) was all part of the cultural vanguard of television. The debate continues if it's entertaining, informative, educational, detrimental to our social mores, mind-numbing the nation, turning us into sloths or stimulating us into some sort of action. We lived at a time when we were lucky to have one. Now, we may have one in nearly every room of the house. We may spend on the average, more than 7 hours in the day watching the blessed/cursed thing. Instead of family conversations we may be rightly accused of being "glued to the idiot box."
I've seen bumper stickers that read, "Kill your television." My first thought was, "not a bad idea." But then I quickly realize, "Hey! The Cougs are on TV Thursday!" It's sure more exciting seeing guys running up and down the court instead of imagining in my mind what, "Green fires a shot from the top of the key!" must look really like. Ah, television. Pass the popcorn, please. The commercial's almost over.