In the early days of television

 

The difference between my sister and myself is vast and deep.  We are seven years apart in age, and that is not as important as what lies on either side of those seven years.  I was born in 1940 and she in 1947, my birth occurring before Pearl Harbour and so long before the Second World War began for the United States, hers many years afterwards, my painful childhood shaped by radio and iceboxes, hers by plastic toys and rock’n’roll music.  But most important is, please be aware, television.  That’s right: this all important forerunner of the digital revolution.  Though my parents claim to have seen early programmes as early as 1936, it was not until the 1950s that broadcasting became regular enough to warrant buying a set for the home.  Even then, because of the expense and the scariness of it all, my father put off any purchase until the Kefauver Hearings roused his interests, enough to warrant the Great Step Forward.

Meanwhile, along with all the other kids in the neighbourhood, hundreds and maybe thousands of us, when a Wednesday night rolled around, we all went as special invited guests to the Old Man’s house to watch “Uncle Milty.”  The Texaco Hour.  The Old Man was the father of our doctor, my Uncle (unofficially) Joe, and a constant visitor in our house.  Just a few years ago, at the age of ninety-two, he slipped off the mortal coil, my last link to the generation of my parents; but that is still yet another story.  His father sat at home and  looked out the window and so knew about the younger generation and bought a television to entertain us, and thereby himself. 

Uncle Milty, Milton Berle surely was the most exciting and funniest thing I had ever seen and heard.  From the minute the Texaco gas station attendants started singing their song about rubbing the hub and shining the windows and pumping the gas until the spectacular emergence of Uncle Milty in some gorgeous and outrageous costume.  This was truly the society of spectacle, the modern age in all its optical splendour.

I was, like all the kids in the surrounding streets, invited to see this marvel, not in our own homes, as I said, but in a public gathering, a great festival of youth, and so we spent the whole week in absolute anticipation.  Never having been to a vaudeville show or the burlesque—all timeless shows whispered about as naughty and secret, which only grown-ups could attend and rich people could afford to see—this, I was told, by whom I can’t recall, was the closest thing—and probably even better because you were right up close.  Forget that it was only in black and white.  Who noticed that you were staring through a magnifying glass standing between you and the 12-inch Dumont screen?  This was utter magic.  First came the Texaco singers in their gas-station attendant uniforms who would wash the dash and scrub the hub before they returned the next day to be servicing your car and then announce the grand entrance when the curtain parted and there would be a magnificent parade of elaborate proportions of some fantastic scene out of which Uncle Milty would emerge dressed in robes and gowns and phantasmagoric hats.  Then the skits and guest artists, the singers and acrobats, the ventriloquists and tap dancers, and the repeated gag lines and slapstick tricks by the Make-Up man with his sock full of talcum powder.  Make up! Slowly I turned and step by step, until whack, slap, puff and roars of laughter, each week the same and each week funnier and funnier.

At the time, please understand, the fun was without meaning.  Fun have meaning?  It was visceral, like being tickled.  If there was social commentary, no child was wise or sophisticated enough to know it.  But looking back, in the theatre of my memories, and placed in contexts of a lifetime of study, these scenes played out once a week on Wednesday night at eight o’clock, were as full of significance as the earliest attempts by conjurers and prestidigitators in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to exploit the potentiality of the camera obscura and the magic lantern.  Even before Méliès, Pathé and other pioneers in silent film—who could envisage sound and colour even when they could not yet coordinate the phenomena—the very idea of the phantasmagoric stage subverted the official notions of what constituted reality.  And here was Uncle Milty, dressed in his over-the-top costumes and rolled on to the stage in a magnificent carnival of activity and props—no matter that it was all in black and white, and we had to squint to see anything on the tiny screen in Uncle Joe’s father’s kitchen where we all gathered.

And then there was the Howdy Doody Show, with Buffalo Bob, Claribell the Clown, Mr. Bluster, Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring, the whole Peanut Gallery full, it was a mixture of rodeo and circus scenery, and anything else the producers could think of: the kids watching had no sense of decorum or genre—all was sheer delight.  It mesmerized the audience.  You knew some of the characters were string-puppets, some were circus clowns, some were actors playing cowboy parts, some cartoons shown in between to fill in the time, but it all fit together in your imagination, a coherent fantasy of entertainment.

And then, a half hour later, on Captain Video you could see a bizarre pseudo-science fiction story with special extras like old Tom Mix or Hopalong Cassidy short films supposedly from outer space agents on the opticonscolamameter, and a mysterious Chinese coolie with pigtail and arms folded in a black gown who for no reason at all walked back and forth across the set.  The mysterious child’s version of Foo-man Choo.  That was what I liked.  But it was the other programme, the baby show with puppets and clowns, The Howdy Doody Show that got all the attention at our house.  My sister loved it.  Remember she was seven years younger than me, so even less experienced and sophisticated.  At the same time, as she now assures me whenever she points out how stupid I was back then, much more mature and worldly-wise.

Every afternoon she would go next door to her best friend’s house and watch The Howdy-Doody Show  there, and then afterwards she would come home and cry because it was not on our television set, the black-and-white 12-inch Dumont with a square magnifying glass set discretely in the corner of the living-room.  Bo-hoo, says I.  How could anyone be so silly?  I wanted to see Captain Video on his secret mountain retreat and watch all the flashing lights, whirring gears, and other great stuff.  It was on the other channel.  So you see, big brothers always have to give in.