TV and Me: Early 1960s, Growing Up with the News

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

Even the idea of 1960 was exciting.  It was the first turn to a new decade I’d consciously experienced.  Plus the newspapers and television were making it a big deal.  I saw a long TV documentary with a solemn-voiced narrator called “The Fabulous Fifties” that I taped with my father’s audio reel-to-reel tape recorder, and listened to several times after seeing it.

But it was the coming decade that promoted excitement.  Even the number itself—“60” being a pretty fast speed for an automobile.  There was a sense that it was a real change, the beginning of the future.

It was in some sense the beginning of mine—by the fall I would enter high school.  But in a larger (if related) way, it was associated with the rise of Senator John F. Kennedy and his campaign for President, at least for me and many others.  Kennedy represented youth (at 43 the youngest presidential candidate in history), new ideas, and the energy he called vigor (or “vigah” in his New Englandish accent.)  Republicans may have felt the same way about their likely candidate, Richard Nixon, who was himself only 46.  Both were contrasts to the 70 year old incumbent, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the victorious General of World War II, a generation in the past.

All through the year I followed the tense primary campaigns of Kennedy and Senator Hubert Humphrey, his closet rival for the Democratic nomination, especially in Wisconsin and West Virginia. I had first taken notice of national politics during the 1956 conventions, especially when I saw my mother watching the voting for a vice-presidential nominee.  The presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, had left it up to the convention, and Senator Kennedy was in the running.  That interested my mother because he was Catholic, and no Catholics since Al Smith lost in 1928 had gotten this far.  Once it was clear he would lose, I watched Kennedy give a gracious speech in favor of the eventual nominee, Estes Kefauver.  I remembered him thereafter.

So I avidly watched the Democratic convention in July 1960, the floor demonstrations for candidates and the last minute push to nominate Stevenson for the third time, before Kennedy won on the first ballot.  Then his acceptance speech outdoors in the Memorial Coliseum in LA, where he first talked about the New Frontier—not a set of promises, he said, “but a set of challenges.”  That was intensely inspiring and exciting. I tape-recorded that speech with the microphone in front of the TV and listened to it many times.

 That fall I organized some classmates into a Teens for Kennedy club, and we did some minor work for Citizens for Kennedy at their office, handed out some leaflets, once in the pouring rain with my two friends Clayton and Mike, who were also with me whooping it up during the election eve torchlight parade—possibly the last in a long tradition in Greensburg.

I was in high school for his November election day victory (staying up nearly all night with the returns on TV, catching the official victory in mid-morning), and in January 1961 I took a bus through a snowstorm to visit relatives in Washington for his Inauguration.  I knew what church Kennedy went to, and with some luck and pluck, attended the same Mass as the new President two days after the Inaugural, becoming one of the first ordinary American citizens to shake his hand as President.

 All of this meant I had more incentive to be reading the newspapers regularly (the Greensburg Tribune Review, which I had been delivering on several paper routes between 6^th grade and the summer before high school) and the Sunday Pittsburgh Press.  I was reading more closely the weekly magazines we got: Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Time and Newsweek. Most of all, I was watching television news programs and documentaries.

But then, I had always watched the news—why not? In the beginning the news was just another program to me, all fascinating to some degree. 

 And at Pittsburgh’s only station WDTV, the news was literally just another program—one of many 15, 10 and even 5 minute shows done live in the same studio for hours of each day when the networks weren't sending their limited menu of shows.  Programs set up on each of the studio’s four walls, and the camera moved from one to the next.  They all employed simple backdrops—even the news reporter stood at a podium with just a curtain behind him.

 And like any other program of the time, the sponsor was prominently identified, so these reporters—Dave Murray, Carl Ide, Ray Scott etc.—stood behind a podium signed by Duquesne Light (an electric company) or Fort Pitt Beer. And “the weather girl” wore a negligee because the sponsor sold mattresses.

 Like everything in local TV, how newscast operated was improvised on the fly, and if it worked, institutionalized.  I interviewed one of Pittsburgh most iconic news names, Bill Burns, when he was still on the air in 1980.  He began in 1953. For his first news shows, he went out to get the stories, came back and edited the film, wrote the script, and delivered the news.  For years I watched him do the noon news; when I interviewed him he was co-anchoring the local evening news with his daughter, Patti Burns.

 Another Pittsburgh TV reporter I watched do the noon news (for Town Talk Bread), was Bob Tracey, otherwise a radio announcer with an education in acting.  I met him in the early 90s, when he’d returned to acting for local theatres, one of which was doing a reading of a play I wrote. He was part of the cast--playing the news coming from the TV. In my play the television was a kind of character, with increasingly bizarre news reports inflecting the action. Besides hearing stories about the wild days of early TV news, I had the singular experience of hearing Bob Tracey's voice that had spoken to me through the TV when I was a child, reading these surreal reports I’d written in that same news cadence. (He went on to appear in several Hollywood films.) 

The biggest name in daily national news for much of the 1950s was John Cameron Swayze, who did NBC’s evening news.  (Even on this level, the sponsor was prominent—the name of the show was the Camel News Caravan, sponsored by Camel cigarettes.) His opening remains indelible: Ladies and gentlemen, and good evening to you—this is John Cameron Swayze, downtown. On the other hand, absent from my memory is his reported closing: “That’s the story, folks—glad we could get together.” That might be followed by a mention of his sponsor.

 Even though he wasn’t identified with a daily newscast, the biggest name in television news programs in the 1950s was Edward R. Murrow.  By most accounts, he essentially invented national television news and imbued it with disciplines and ethics, encouraging its practice as independent professional journalism (so there was soon no more Camel News Caravan or reporters pitching products.) 

 Literally born in a log cabin at Polecat Creek, North Carolina, and saddled with the name of Egbert Roscoe by parents who were Quakers and farmers, Murrow had a rural upbringing.  The family moved to a homestead in Washington state, where he participated in high school debate, played for the county champions basketball team and worked in a logging camp.  A student leader, he attended Washington State College where he became “Edward,” and came under the tutelage of the most significant mentor of his life, Ida Lou Anderson, his speech teacher.  His speech in favor of students learning more about world affairs won him the presidency of a national student organization.

 After graduation he held a series of administrative jobs with educational nonprofits in New York City before being hired by CBS radio as director of talks and education in 1935.  He joined CBS news also as an administrator, and as political crisis grew in Europe he was sent there to urge Europeans of note to broadcast to America on the network.  So as Hitler began making his first moves towards war, Edward R. Murrow had no formal journalism education or experience, and apparently hadn’t yet been near a microphone.

 But CBS had few correspondents in Europe, and responding to an emergency situation, Murrow had nobody to put on the air but himself. Broadcast news would never be the same. 

Murrow achieved his first sustained fame with his London broadcasts during the Blitz.  He was known for his vivid descriptions of what he observed.  His words were sent to America by shortwave radio, augmented for broadcast by CBS.  He began each broadcast with the words “This is London,” and ended them with something Londoners said to each other in hope of surviving the next bombardment: “Goodnight, and good luck.”  His former speech teacher suggested the opening, and encouraged him to continue the sign-off phrase—which he did for every radio and TV broadcast thereafter.

 Murrow's broadcasts from Europe earlier, and then from London were the first real time reports from overseas that Americans had ever heard. They were immensely popular. Still later, Murrow went on bombing runs from London to Germany, describing them as they happened, the bombs bursting below like “sunflowers gone mad.”  In 1945 He and his colleagues were the first American reporters to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp. In a voice of restrained anguish and anger, he was the first to describe the visible consequences of the Holocaust there. 

Back in the US in the early 1950s, Murrow eventually made the reluctant transition to television with the See It Now program. As was happening in early local TV, Murrow and his CBS colleagues were inventing the form of the news program as they did them.  Such experiments as interviewing ordinary people about race or ground soldiers in Korea during that ugly war in the early 1950s became standards by which later news reporting was measured.

 This pioneering program was the first to film the eye of a hurricane from inside a B-52 (with Murrow likening the sea below to an unseen giant ruffling a rug), and covered ordinary midwestern citizens, white and black, working to hold back a raging river.

 See It Now had a vast viewership, as did a lighter interview program Murrow did called Person to Person, in which he sat in the studio while CBS cameras were in the celebrity subject’s home, sometimes showing them moving from room to room.  It also was very popular, and innovative in its way.

 The climax of Murrow’s TV career is usually described to be the See It Now broadcasts in which he took on Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Communist witchhunt which together with the related blacklists had a stranglehold on American life.  It helped to end McCarthy’s career, if not McCarthyism itself. 

 I was too young in 1954 to understand the McCarthy situation, but I do remember watching See It Now (probably after the sudden prominence of quiz shows forced it out of weekday prime time to 5 p.m. on Sundays in 1956.) I also remember Person to Person, and the unique figure of Edward R. Murrow.

 In 1959 and the sixties, I was an avid viewer of CBS Reports, an hour long program that was See It Now’s direct successor, with some hours in the first two years featuring Edward R. Murrow.  And I specifically remember seeing the last one he did, broadcast in November 1960, called “Harvest of Shame,” witnessing and detailing the tragic lives of migrant farmworkers.  (CBS Reports also had that great theme music, a bit of Aaron Copland's reworking of "Simple Gifts" for "Appalachian Spring.")

 Migrant farmworkers in 1960 looked different than today’s.  There were some Mexicans legally brought in to work in West Coast orchards and fields, but the documentary mainly followed the migrants who began in Florida, were herded into trucks and buses to follow the crops north as they ripened ending in the summer in New Jersey.  These migrants were Black and White American citizens.  The documentary showed their poverty, horrific living conditions and poor diets, and contrasted their transport with the refrigerated trucks that carried the produce they picked, and the trucks that carried livestock, obeying stringent regulations of how often the animals were fed and rested. 

Migrants who got to New Jersey for a longer harvest season might enroll their children in (segregated) schools for the summer.  The documentary interviewed two or three children: one boy wanted to be a dentist, a girl wanted to be a teacher.  But Murrow informs us, neither will likely come close to these goals.

 Migrant children were as trapped as their parents in this treadmill of deprivation, forced to work in the fields at an early age.  Perhaps one in five hundred would finish grade school, Murrow said, and one in five thousand high school.  And there was no documented case, he said, of a child of a migrant worker graduating college.

  I have always remembered that one moment from this program: Murrow saying that no migrant child was known to have gone through college.  In my memory this assertion was accompanied by footage of a flight of birds.  That part of the memory didn’t make sense, but when I watched the program again recently, I saw that the flight of birds indeed did appear but a few moments later, when Murrow noted that the federal government spends more on migratory wildlife than on the education of migrant children.

  But I can understand why I conflated this image with the words about no migrant child ever completing college. I was looking forward to the possibility of going to college, which I viewed as being my first flight upwards to the possibilities for my own life. That migrant children were doomed never to have this opportunity frightened and saddened me deeply, and opened my eyes anew to the evils of injustice.

 It was documentaries like this one, plus coverage of the Kennedy campaign in the West Virginia primary, as well as my own observations on my paper routes in my own home town, that sensitized me to the presence of poverty. They led me a few years later to read Michael Harrington’s book on poverty, The Other America, which also deeply affected JFK. (Even before reading the book, I read Dwight MacDonald's long review in the New Yorker, which suggested that Harrington had even underestimated the percentage of the poor.)  In 1963 Kennedy reputedly told aides that the themes of his 1964 reelection campaign would be further steps beyond the limited nuclear test ban treaty, and addressing poverty.  This was the initial impetus for what became the War on Poverty in the LBJ years.

 Similarly, TV news and documentaries of the Civil Rights movement (I remember watching live coverage of the confrontation between Justice Department officials and Alabama governor George Wallace at “the schoolhouse door,” in which Wallace made his speech and backed away, allowing the first Black students to be enrolled in the university) merged with reading (especially James Baldwin essays) and personal experience, all resolved me to take the freedom train down to Washington and participate in the now famous (but then controversial) March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, where I heard Martin Luther King deliver his famous "I have a dream" speech.

 So television (along with reading and actual experience) contributed to both my fascination with politics and political issues on an intellectual level, as well as to my emotional response and motivation to confront injustice and make it right, make a better future. 

Time has shown that it takes more than televised exposure and political good intentions to right these insidious and recurrent wrongs.  Though the migrant children of today are more likely to be from Latin America and in the US on their own, they are no less caught in the treadmill of low-paying work and no time, money or energy for education.  The Dickensian violation of child labor laws in the US is apparently rampant, with thousands of children in the consumer supply chain.  And after some decades of incremental progress, the current and continuing rise of racism is obvious in any day's news.   

 In the early 60s I watched other documentary programs inspired by Murrow’s example, including the occasional NBC White Paper. There were many reasons that more news documentaries began airing then.  One of the more indirect factors was the quiz show scandal.

 In the mid-1950s a series of big money quiz shows dominated ratings and national attention: The $64,000 Question and its spinoffs on CBS, and Twenty-One on NBC were the most prominent.  But a few years later, rumors and charges that the outcomes had been fixed emerged.  A grand jury was impaneled in New York County, and took testimony.  When a judge sealed the jury’s findings, a congressional investigation eventually revealed widespread cheating and manipulation, resulting in public outcry and cancellations.

 The most dramatic case was that of Charles van Doren, whose run on Twenty-One was extremely popular.  As a result of his quiz show victories he was widely considered an intellectual giant.  I remember him being interviewed on a news program about the International Geophysical Year in 1957 (which I knew about from the little magazine we got in school), and asked if he thought the Russians could launch a space satellite before the scheduled U.S. launches in 1958. No satellite had ever been launched, and no rocket had reached space at that time.  He smiled indulgently and reassured the reporter that the Russian were far behind. Month later, in October 1957, the Soviet satellite Sputnik was circling the globe, well before the US was ready.  He’d been given the wrong answer.

  In 1959 van Doren finally admitted his part in the quiz show cheating.  Twenty-One, looking to increase ratings, chose him as their big winner, mostly for his looks and star quality as well as academic qualifications.  The quiz shows not only provided answers to him and certain other contestants, but told contestants when they were going to lose (so they didn't accidentally give the right answer.) They planned entire arcs or stories for viewers to follow, which they did.

 In September 1960 President Eisenhower signed a law making cheating on quiz shows illegal.  By that time the TV networks made a number of changes, including taking control of programs away from their sponsors, in part leading to fewer shows being sponsored by a single company, with many companies buying bits of commercial time.  Another change was an increase in network-created public service programs, including news documentaries.  

 Another reason for the number of news documentaries was the sense that networks as well as individual stations using the public airways had a responsibility to air public service programs. By our time now in the first quarter of the 21^st century, the idea of news as public service has all but disappeared. It's much more about ratings and money.  Similarly, big money quiz shows, absent for decades, are back.  Meanwhile, the so-called reality shows are as shaped and manipulated as any quiz show was in the 50s, with arcs and stories for viewers to follow, which they do.

 The manipulation of reality shows is public knowledge, though I don’t know how many of their fans know.  I also doubt that they’d care. For these shows exist in a media environment in which facts are routinely manipulated and falsified, and it appears that fact and fiction even in so-called news are no longer contradictory terms.  While opinion and ideology rule cable news channels, MSNBC for example may express a point of view in selection of issue and sometimes selectivity of information (though arguably this selection is based on importance rather than ideology), by and large it respects actual facts. That is not the case with FOX and its ilk—making up and selling "facts" while ignoring actual facts are essentially what they do.  This is the information chaos that infects television and the culture, further accelerated and normalized by social media, so the kind of public outrage over quiz show cheating that erupted in the 1950s seems pretty unlikely today.