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.

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute 

 As a globed fruit, 

Dumb

 As old medallions to the thumb,

 Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

 Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless

 As the flight of birds. 

              *

 A poem should be motionless in time

 As the moon climbs,

 Leaving, as the moon releases

 Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

 Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time

 As the moon climbs. 

               *

A poem should be equal to:

 Not true.

 For all the history of grief

 An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

 For love

 The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean 

But be.

Archibald MacLeish

1926

top photo: Cartier-Bresson

"A poem should not mean/But be" became the credo of the modernist poets of the early 20th century, and a foundation of most of the poetry published since then.  It is a statement often associated with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, but it came from this poem by Archibald MacLeish, a famous American poet in his time but largely forgotten and dismissed in academic literary circles.  Yet his accomplishments were remarkable: among them were three Pulitizer Prizes (one for drama, two for poetry) and a second (or third) career modernizing the immense Library of Congress as its Librarian, appointed by FDR.

Born in Illinois, he served as an ambulance driver in World War I (as did Hemingway) before becoming an artilleryman.  His brother was killed in that war.  He joined the expatriate Americans in Paris after the war, though his presence among the Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Picasso set is seldom mentioned. 

He  began as a modernist poet who admired Pound, but he also became politically active, first in the anti-fascist movement preceding World War II, and his literary work opened up to engagement with his times.  His book of poems accompanying photographs by Depression era photographer Dorothea Lang was a reference point for John Steinbeck as he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. 

 

MacLeish's verse play JB won both a Pulitzer and a Tony Award for best play in 1959.  Perhaps because he was prominent then and in the 60s (I recall witty essays in the American Scholar magazine) he was a poet whose name I knew and whose work I appreciated, at least until I took my first college literature courses and learned better.

There are many ways to consider those famous last two lines.  First of all, poetry and literature in general are made of words which have meaning--words refer to things, etc.--but literary works should be experienced as artworks--like paintings or concertos, composed of paint or notes but something in themselves.  (That was a creed and part of the cross-fertilization that went on in modernism and specifically in Paris between the world wars.)  Words have meaning, as do sentences or statements, which may be ironic or paradoxical or nonsense.  But the poem is a whole, an orchestration--that's another suggestion of the contrast between "mean" and "be."

To be also may mean to be alive--to the responses and interpretations of the reader.  MacLeish's poem  is very musical and somewhat whimsical, reminding me of Wallace Stevens (whose subject often was the nature of poetry.)  It is in part an entertainment, a show.  What messages may be gathered from a show may be part of the experience, but also, the show's the thing.  It is what it is, and how you respond to it.    

TV and Me: Drama in the Living Room

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

The game—and I doubt I was the only one in any generation to play it—went like this: with one or both parents watching TV or at least in the living room with me, and the clock moving closer to 9 pm and bedtime—I got very still and quiet, I made myself as inconspicuous and potentially invisible as possible, hoping they wouldn’t notice me as the show and its commercials end, until we were through the gap between programs, and the nine p.m. show has begun.  I then had a better argument for staying up to watch it, because it had already started.  Partly because I had two younger sisters my mother needed to get ready for bed, this sometimes even worked. 

 Many of the comedy and variety shows started as early as 7:30 and were over by 9 or 9:30 (we usually could beg extensions for something like I Love Lucy.)  But after 9 was often when the drama programs were on.  They would continue—some an hour long—until the news at 11. 

Rocky King, Dumont

The additional delicacy of needing to change channels at this point to see the show I hoped for (it was best if parents left the room for some reason) didn’t come up often. We got only two commercial stations until 1957, the Johnstown NBC affiliate WJAC-TV and principally WDTV Pittsburgh, the Dumont station, that broadcast all the Dumont shows plus their favorites from the other three networks (sometimes on kinescope days or weeks later.)  Even when Dumont folded and it became KDKA-TV, we could see their selection of programs from three networks. So there were some early to mid 1950s shows we missed altogether. By 1958 Pittsburgh had affiliates for all three networks plus the educational/public station WQED.

 The effort to see these dramas past assigned bedtime led to other kinds of drama in the living room.  But I remember quite a lot of these shows anyway.

 Some of these were drama series of one kind or another, like one of my early favorites, Rocky King, Detective, a low budget Dumont show starring Roscoe Karns as a world-weary police detective in a trench coat who at the end of the episode was seen in a phone booth explaining the case to his never-seen wife Mabel. 

Jack Webb, Ben Alexander

There were other police and crime shows:  Racket Squad, Mr. District Attorney, The Big Story (crime-fighting reporters) and the Jack Webb and Ben Alexander Dragnet, its famous monotones and plodding plots concerning what today would seem laughably minor crime for a TV series, with occasional humor (as in the drunk they pulled over who kept insisting he was on his way to Pismo Beach—just the way he said Pismo was funny.)  Another characteristically 1950s cop show was Highway Patrol starring Broderick Crawford, his car and his radio, 10-4.  This syndicated half hour ran from 1955 to 1959 and forever in reruns.

 

There were a scattering of other drama series during the 1950s of the kind that became familiar in the decades following: such as the medical shows (Richard Boone’s classic Medic of the mid-50s; its fictional but fact-based story about responding to an atomic attack presaged The Day After, and is still valid) and the first “adult westerns”(meaning hour long dramas with characters and plots a bit more complex than The Lone Ranger, and sometimes the suggestion of sex), beginning with Gunsmoke in 1955 and Have Gun, Will Travel (starring—again—Richard Boone) in 1957, and eventually taking over what came to be called prime time.

 There was an early 50s science fiction anthology called Tales of Tomorrow, live from New York, which I don’t recall seeing, possibly because it didn’t make the WDTV cut.  But in 1955 I became an immediate fan of the syndicated Science Fiction Theatre.  It ran three seasons, the first two filmed in color so it got a second life in the  60s. Announcer Truman Bradley would begin each episode with a science demonstration, sort of a capsule Watch Mr. Wizard. It would bear in some way on the fictional and often speculative half hour story that followed.  Then Bradley would return afterwards and remind us that: “our story is fiction.  It did not happen…But could it?” 

Truman Bradley

 I remember that this distinction so impressed me that when our fourth grade teacher asked for examples of words of opposite meaning, I volunteered “Fact and fiction.”  She was startled and hesitated before accepting it, a hint that the distinction is not so clear to everyone.

 As for the stories, the one I remembered for years starred Don DeFore, who I knew as Thorny, affable neighbor of Ozzie and Harriet. It involved DeFore’s new neighbor (Warren Stevens, who I would soon see in the classic s/f film Forbidden Planet) owning some curious devices, including a vacuum cleaner that runs itself, a “sonic broom” or 1950s roomba.  He finally reveals (in the guise of telling a story he’s writing) that he and his wife are time-traveling fugitives from an oppressive future. 

Marie Windsor, Warren Stevens, Don DeFore

It turns out that this episode was the second in the series, titled “Time is Just A Place,” and has quite a pedigree: the story it adapted was written by Jack Finney, who also wrote the novel upon which The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is based, and the best-seller Time and Again (he was also a Knox College grad). The episode is directed by Jack Arnold, a sacred name in 1950s sci-fi movies (he directed the first two Creature of the Black Lagoon features, as well as It Came From Outer Space, The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Space Children.) 

 Many other now familiar faces appeared in the series, including DeForrest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), who even played a doctor. This series was one of my favorites of the 1950s.  It looms large in my legend. 

Loretta Young

 But by far the dominant dramas of the early and mid- 1950s were the anthologies that presented a different story with different actors every show. Some were introduced by a famous host who sometimes (or often) took part in the drama.  I most clearly remember that I watched Four Star Playhouse, probably because in its first seasons it was on from 8:30 to 9.  The “four stars” from the movies were David Niven, Charles Boyer, Ida Lupino, and the one who appeared most often, Dick Powell.  I don’t remember specific stories but I remember those names, especially Dick Powell. 

 Similarly, I remember the Loretta Young anthology mostly for her dramatic entrances to introduce the story in a sweeping 1950s dress, and Jane Wyman’s intros on what was first called Fireside Theatre.  I also enjoyed spotting them in various makeup in the plays.  General Electric Theater was hosted by actor and pitchman Ronald Reagan, who also showed up in some of the stories.  

 

Some half hour drama anthologies specialized in crime stories, or romances (Starlight Theatre, Silver Theatre),  mystery and suspense (the most famous of these was Alfred Hitchcock Presents, hosted by the master himself, with wicked introductions often wittier than the story.)  There were so many of these half-hour anthologies in the mid 1950s (Showcase Theatre, Startime Playhouse, Short Short Dramas, Nine Thirty Curtain, etc.) that other summer series cherrypicked from among their offerings to present repackaged reruns.

 Most of the aforementioned (with the certain exception of Rocky King) were filmed dramas, many of them originating in Hollywood.  To reiterate, video tape had not been perfected or in use before 1956 or 1957.  TV shows before then were either filmed (often by Hollywood film studios quietly exploring the TV market) or were seen at least in part of the country on kinescope recordings, which basically were made by movie cameras aimed at TV monitors, and therefore with degraded picture.

 The other and first method was live: the show transmitted at the same time as it happened. And it was the live drama anthologies, mostly staged in New York for often a full hour or more, that gave this era the name of the Golden Age of Television. Even more than the sitcoms, these shows displayed the full range of talents that New York could muster, from the Broadway stage and Group Theatre veterans to the brash young Actors Studio actors and associated writers and directors.

 These shows were also made possible by the tradition of sole sponsorship inherited from radio: a single sponsor with a direct relationship to the show, not just buying commercial time but attaching its name to the program. 

 Most of the anthologies were sponsored by large corporations that wanted the prestige associated with them, and could pay for it.   Large corporations were becoming larger and more numerous in the 1950s, with more employees and more visibility in American life.  They wanted to put a human face on their otherwise faceless business.  

They also wanted their place in the expanding consumer economy.  Some of these companies sold products: Westinghouse Studio One—one of the best and longest running of the anthology shows—featured commercials by Betty Furness, who over a decade became a star for opening up refrigerator doors, and imprinting the slogan on the American mind: “You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse.” Armstrong Circle Theatre sold tile, Ford Theatre cars, Lux Video Theatre soap, Kraft Television Theatre cheese, Goodyear TV Playhouse tires and Philip Morris Playhouse cigarettes.

 Some companies sold services: natural gas companies sponsored shows to highlight the benefits of gas appliances (sponsoring and getting endorsement from Ozzie and Harriet at one point), while General Electric sold not only its own products but the benefits of electrical appliances and the overall benefits of electric power plus science and research, leading up to their punchline slogan: “Progress is our most important product.”  U.S. Steel Hour and Alcoa Playhouse made sure the benefits of steel and aluminum to America and “the products you buy” were known, as well as associating themselves with this worthy enterprise of presenting quality drama, free, in the comfort of your living room.

 They weren’t kidding either. For the variety of original and classic stories they dramatized, and as displays of the dramatic storytelling talent then available, many of them were wonders. (Because most were recorded only on kinescope, even recordings that survive only hint at what they looked like when first broadcast.) 

Carolyn Jones, Wm. Shatner,
Raymond Massey

Among the young writers nurtured and produced by the Goodyear Television Playhouse, a live hour of new teleplays, were Gore Vidal, Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote and Tad Mosel.  Their young directors included Sidney Lumet, Delbert Mann and Arthur Penn.  All of them had major careers in movies, stage and television over many succeeding decades, and each of them created at least one classic of our era.  Many of these same writers and directors worked for other anthologies, such as Playhouse 90.  These dramas featured veteran actors and newcomers: for example, Raymond Massey paired with William Shatner in his US network premiere.

 Sidney Lumet also directed for the Alcoa Hour, which presented live original plays and adaptations.  The actors appearing ranged from Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Margaret Hamilton, Basil Rathbone (in a musical adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol) and Helen Hayes to young actors Jason Robards, Anne Bancroft, Walter Matthau and Lloyd Bridges.   

"Patterns": Rod Serling's examination of 
corporate culture

 I remember the Kraft Television Theatre on Wednesday nights for the most insidious of reason: announcer Dan Herlihy’s delicious voice doing the Kraft cheese commercials.  But it was a major and very popular one hour drama anthology, live from the NBC New York studio which now hosts Saturday Night Live.

 Kraft did elaborate productions—the hour about the sinking of the Titanic featured a cast of 101—and versions of classic stories by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Agatha Christie and one of the hottest playwrights at the time, Tennessee Williams.  There were contemporary stories by up and coming writers like Rod Sterling as well, some including music and even pop stars of the moment.  Young actors like Hope Lang, Paul Newman, Rod Steiger, Lee Grant, Colleen Dewhurst and Cloris Leachman were directed by up and coming talents like Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) and George Roy Hill (The Sting.)  In the late 50s the series specialized in mystery and suspense stories. 

Producers Showcase was a little different: a true anthology, featuring 90 minute live presentations of musical theatre and comedy as well as drama.  It was also an 8 p.m. show, meant for a family audience. It’s where we saw Mary Martin’s Peter Pan—saw it performed live twice, in fact, with Martin flying across the stage on wires in 1955 and 1956.

  Another highlight of its three year run was a new musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town.  Frank Sinatra played the stage manager character (the narrator), and sang most of the songs, including one that became a hit and a classic: “Love and Marriage.” The young Paul Newman was also in the cast—decades later, one of his last stage roles was the stage manager in this play revived on Broadway.

   A star-studded dramatic presentation was The Petrified Forest, with Humphrey Bogart in the role that had won his Broadway fame in the 1930s and introduced him in the movies.  This time his costars were Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda. It was Bogie and Bacall’s first appearance on TV.  Other performers included Louis Armstrong, Audrey Hepburn, dancer Margot Fonteyn (in Cinderella) and Claire Bloom (adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.)

 At the cutting edge of the spectrum was Star Tonight, a half hour live play featuring young unknowns from the New York stage and drama schools.  Several did go on to long careers, including Joanne Woodward and Robert Culp. This series ran for the 1955-56 season on the upstart ABC network.

Nancy Sheridan, James Dean

  One of the first drama anthologies was Robert Montgomery Presents which ran from 1950 to 1957. Montgomery, familiar as an actor but who also worked as a producer and director, introduced a one hour live presentation, including adaptations of movies, stage plays and books as well as original teleplays. The show is remembered for its high production values and general excellence.

   Such was Montgomery’s status that he got some big Hollywood stars to appear, including Grace Kelly, Claudette Colbert and James Cagney, alongside such newcomers as Jack Lemmon, John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands, Roger Moore and James Dean.  The series was nominated for the Best Drama Emmy three times, and won once.

 The Montgomery show staged the Gian-Carlo Menotti opera Amahl and the Night Visitors on Christmas Eve 1956, which became an annual event, outliving the series itself.  And my grandmother watched it every time, and insisted we did, too.    

 In the mid-50s, Armstrong Circle Theatre (produced by David Susskind, who once stole a handful of peanuts from my table at the Algonquin Hotel bar) began to specialize in teleplays about actual events, such as the sinking of the Andrea Doria—an episode I seem to recall. Actors appearing in this series included Ed Asner, Robert Duvall, Patty Duke, Peter Falk and Geraldine Fitzgerald. 

Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward

Probably the last of these drama anthologies to premiere was the one that is best remembered—and was the most rewarded with Emmys and accolades: Playhouse 90, which ran from 1956 to 1960.  Some of the productions I believe I saw at least part of—like “The Days of Wine and Roses”—were still over my head. I’m pretty sure I did see and comprehend “The Miracle Worker” with Patty McCormick as Helen Keller.  Others I don’t recall are tantalizing to think I might have seen: did I catch my first glimpse of a Scott Fitzgerald story in the adaptation of “Winter Dreams?”  Or of a Faulkner story, in Horton Foote’s adaptation of his story in “Old Man”?  Or Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in two parts?

 These were ambitious ninety minute productions, emphasizing new writers like Rod Sterling, whose scripts took on topical concerns and moral issues, prefiguring the best of his later Twilight Zone series. I likely saw some of these, since in a few years I would write my own.  Film director John Frankenheimer honed his craft on this series, directing 25 teleplays. A highlight of the series was its version of Judgment at Nuremberg (written by Abby Mann, directed by George Roy Hill) broadcast a few years before the Spencer Tracy movie, bristling with relevance as America was slowly confronting the Holocaust.  This was only one of many scripts for these live dramas that became the basis for feature films. 

Maximillian Schell in Judgment at Nuremberg

Once again, this series featured established older (and sometimes elder) actors along with younger actors who would become stars of stage and screen, with some unique pairing it would be remarkable to see again: Charles Laughton and Robert Redford (playing a Nazi officer), Claude Rains and Maximillian Schell, Vincent Price and Charlton Heston.  Mike Nichols played a rare dramatic role in probably the first serious dramatic treatment of mental illness on US television. 

 One of the longest running of the drama anthologies was also close to the top in terms of quality and reputation: Studio One ran for the decade of 1948 to 1958, after a year’s head start on radio. It was known for its visual excellence and camera work, taking live TV to its height. Among its best known live dramatizations was “Twelve Angry Men,” later made into a feature film.  Among its adaptations were versions of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Of Human Bondage, and several Shakespeare plays, including The Taming of the Shrew and Julius Caesar.

 In fact, Studio One did live versions of the same one-hour script of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar three times, mostly in the summer when most of the staff was on vacation.  Theodore Bikel played Caesar in at least two of them, in 1950 and in 1955—which is apparently when I saw it.  This production of Julius Caesar is the first Shakespeare I remember seeing. I thought I was 11 but the schedule tells me I was 9. I remember it because I watched it sprawled on the floor alone while visiting my Aunt Toni and her family in Federalsburg, Maryland in the summer.  As it was getting late, she asked me if I was really watching it—that is, if I was getting it.  I recounted the plot as I understood it and she allowed me to see the end.  It’s probably Shakespeare’s simplest story, and I had a head start on anything Roman from Catholic schools, but I remember this because I understood it when I was not expected to. 

Growing up with TV may have meant that I did not read as much or as deeply. The bounty of TV stories fed my fantasy life in perhaps a more simplified way, as least consciously, and was at least a chief supplementary guide to how the world worked.  Esteemed writer Margaret Atwood is about six years older than me and so did not grow up with TV, and she is way better read than me.  I’ve noticed this about select others older than me or who otherwise grew up without TV.

 But TV is only one possible factor.  For one thing, Margaret Atwood is way smarter than me.  Her parents had university degrees and professions.  Neither of my parents went to college, nor did the parents of most of my friends. I grew up in a working class culture at the edge of a small town.  Also my parents generation—specifically my mother’s—had at least a later childhood and adolescence populated by radio stories, often audio versions of the same shows I watched on 1950s TV.  So radio shaped at least some, probably many, in her generation.

 At this age I feel the gap: unfamiliarity with many classics, particularly of the ancient world, and less comprehension of the depths of written fairy tales and myths that someone like Atwood has, for instance.  The current alarm over how digital devices and social media have radically altered perceptions and skills, including the ability to concentrate, reminds me that some of the same concerns were raised about television. To some extent those concerns were warranted.

 Still, I know that in my specific context, I read particular books and sought out authors because I knew of them from television.  Television gave me a window (however distorted) on a world of educated people and professionals, on political leaders, journalists, scientists, scholars and writers. I did not fear cities and could see myself in one.  And in a specific way, TV got me to college.

Ralph Bellamy, Wm Shatner, Steve McQueen:
"The Defender" on Studio One 1957

 My high school grades were made up of highs and lows, and so I was not at the top of my class.  What distinguished me most as "college material" was the ability to write.  It was encouraged by my mother, more quietly by my father, and nurtured by some of my teachers.  I absorbed forms from what I read (newspapers, magazines and books) but also from television.

 My junior and senior years of high school I won  national Scholastic Magazine Writing Awards with television scripts.  My junior year Second made me eligible for scholarships at two schools: the nearby University of Pittsburgh, and Knox College in unknown Galesburg, Illinois.  I applied for both, and I got scholarships at both schools.  But Pitt’s offer was partial and unrelated to the award; Knox College offered me their full four-year Writing Awards Scholarship, and after careful calculation and soul-searching, that’s where I went.

 I was 19 before I saw a stage play with professional actors in a real theatre, and it wasn’t in or near my home town. Until then, I'd only seen drama in the living room. Television, including the influence of these dramas--the structures and rhythms I absorbed-- were part of what shaped my writing and my life, for better and for worse.  

These 1950s dramas showed possibilities.  Probably I was more directly influenced and inspired by the early 60s dramas I saw when I was a bit older.  More on the 60s next time.

What Are Years?

What is our innocence,

    what is our guilt? All are

 naked, none is safe. And whence

 is courage: the unanswered question,

 the resolute doubt,--

dumbly calling, deafly listening—that

 in misfortune, even death,

      encourages others

      and in defeat, stirs

 the soul to be strong? He

 sees deep and is glad, who

 accedes to mortality

 and in his imprisonment rises

 upon himself as

 the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

 free and unable to be, 

     in its surrendering

     finds its continuing.

 So he who strongly feels,

 behaves. The very bird,

 grown taller as he sings, steels

 his form straight up. Though he is captive, 

his mighty singing

 says, satisfaction is a lowly

 thing, how pure a thing is joy. 

     This is mortality, 

      this is eternity.

---Marianne Moore

1941

TV and Me: Sitcom Evolution

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

 Most TV variety shows featured comedy skits—either the host interacting with guests (one improbable combination: Jimmy Durante and John Wayne) or a small company of regulars performing one-of-a-kind skits and parodies.  But the various Sid Caesar shows developed a repeated situation, with Sid and Imogene Coca (or later Nanette Fabray) as a married couple, with Carl Reiner and other friends.  Jackie Gleason took the next step with a segment featuring the same characters in the same basic situation, including its own title: The Honeymooners.  For one season, in 1955-56, it became a stand-alone half hour show: a situation comedy.

 By then there were lots of sitcoms on TV, many being direct copies of popular radio shows.  Radio is generally credited as the medium that invented the sitcom, where it had evolved in the same way: a segment repeated on variety shows that proved so popular that it became its own program. For example, characters from a play were imported to a Rudy Vallee variety, and soon after to a similar program starring Kate Smith.  It became the radio and early television sitcom series, The Aldridge Family.  (Curiously, I recall only Jimmy Lydon as teenage Henry Aldridge in a series of feature films that I must have seen on TV.)

 In a general way the theatrical roots of situation comedy television shows go back through radio, vaudeville and burlesque to Roman comedies, Shakespeare and twentieth century Broadway. Television made them more intimate, their weekly appearance on one of three networks became a rhythm for millions of viewers, and perhaps more than any other story form, they became barometers of American life.

 The key difference between situation comedy and other kinds of comedy on television was the situation—continuing characters, usually in some kind of family, in a stated social and cultural context which could be as vague as Centerville or Springfield USA, or as specific as 1038 East Tremont Avenue, the Bronx.

Grace Allen, Harry Von Zell, George Burns

 There were hybrid forms.  The Burns and Allen show was partly a variation on their vaudeville routine—Burns’ monologues and his zany dialogues with Gracie—but to fill the half hour required a sitcom setting, their home and neighborhood. (Even the commercials for Carnation Condensed Milk became part of the sitcom, with Harry Von Zell as both character and pitchman.)  The Jack Benny Show was somewhat similar.  The Danny Thomas show Make Room for Daddy was also a hybrid of sitcom and variety show.

 

The Goldbergs, starring and written by
Gertrude Berg

The family at home was the usual setting, though there were also workplace-centered sitcoms.  In both cases, the context was usually urban, often New York City, and working class.  Some very early sitcoms also emphasized urban ethnic characters, playing on the dangerous border of exaggerated familiar characteristics and stereotype:  The Goldbergs (Jewish, the Bronx), Duffy’s Tavern (Irish, Manhattan), the short-lived and controversial Life With Luigi (Italian immigrants, Chicago) and the very controversial Amos n Andy (Black, Harlem.)  

 Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners was a bus driver living with his wife in a shabby apartment in Brooklyn.  Chester A. Riley of The Life of Riley worked in an aircraft manufacturing plant in California.  My Friend Irma (Manhattan boardinghouse) and Gale Storms’ frenetic My Little Margie (5^th Avenue apartment) and the Danny Thomas Make Room for Daddy were set in New York.  And finally, I Love Lucy, the most popular early sitcom that more than any other set the template for those to come, was set in a modest apartment building in New York City. 

As the 1950s went on, this pattern began to shift, symbolized by the Ricardo and Mertz families of I Love Lucy moving out of New York City, first to a more middle class suburb in Connecticut, and finally west to California.  This reflects the ongoing reality of the 50s; new suburban housing was springing up as the growing (and increasingly child-bearing) middle class abandoned the cities, while in a companion postwar trend, New York City began losing its dominance.

 New York, the center of TV production in the early 50s,  has long been known as the preeminent center of the arts in America, particularly performing arts, but it’s not generally appreciated that one reason for this was because it had the largest potential audience, by far. In comparison to the population of the rest of the country, New York was very, very big, for a very long time.

 For example, in 1910, New York wasn’t just the biggest city in America—it was bigger than any single states in the Union except 3.  In 1930 and 1940, it was bigger than all the states except Illinois and Pennsylvania, which had the second and third largest cities (Chicago and Philadelphia.)  As late as 1940, the population of the entire state of California was under 7 million, and the entire state of Texas contained less than 6 and a half million.  The City of New York alone embraced seven and a half million.

 In 1910, Chicago had a population of 2 million, Philadelpha 1.5.  At 5 million, New York was larger than the two combined, and more than twice as large as Chicago.  No other U.S. city but these three topped a million people until 1930, when Detroit and Los Angeles joined the club. But even in 1940, New York City was larger than the next three cities combined, and almost the next four.

 But World War II industrial production had spread across the country, not only in the New York area, Detroit and Pittsburgh, but also to the aircraft industry in California and the Northwest, and to military bases and munitions factories in Texas and other states.  Veterans who'd left home for other states and overseas spread out, heading west in particular. The rest of the country was growing. Meanwhile, more prosperous New Yorkers were abandoning Brooklyn and the Bronx for Levittown and other suburbs on Long Island, where its counties of Nassau and Sussex were the fastest growing counties in America. 

For the first half of the 20^th century, almost all legitimate live theatre in America originated in New York—in hundreds of theatres, generating hundreds of traveling shows and stock companies fanning out to the rest of the country. So naturally, much of the acting, writing and directing talent was in New York as well.  This was possible because New York was so big that it could provide audiences all on its own.  Theatre was part of New York’s internal culture.

 This link between population and theatre was first pointed out to me by the great American actor Jason Robards, Jr. in an interview I did with him backstage at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway in the 1980s.

He described the quantitative decline of New York theatre since the 1920s when his father began as an actor, through the postwar period when he started out, to the 1980s present as his sons were starting their careers, and linked it to the flight to the suburbs and consequent decline of the New York City audience.  “Now,” he said, “I think theatre in New York is going to become like the opera, if it isn’t already: a small, specialized thing.”  And except for the Disneyfied Broadway blockbusters for tourists, that’s pretty much what has happened.

 Though New York had lost out to Hollywood as the film capital, it was the place that early television production was centered in the early 1950s, particularly live television.  The network headquarters and studios were there, as was the acting and directing talent from theatre and theatre training. Also Hollywood wasn’t yet fully competing: the studios were afraid of television eroding its audience, and hoped to starve the new medium. So they resisted devoting their talent and support to TV production.

 But another reason for TV being centered in and on New York was the size of the New York audience. And as in the best days of theatre, New York was large enough to provide an early TV audience, even if they were watching in bars and other public venues.  So a lot of those early programs were made to appeal to New Yorkers.

  However, that was when there weren’t a lot of TV sets in the rest of America. In 1950, 90% of American families didn't have a TV set. But by 1959, 90% of them did. Television became a national medium during the 1950s, and advertisers took notice.  They wanted to appeal to a larger public, and hopefully a more affluent audience.  Hollywood began to take another look, too.  More TV shows would be made in southern California studios.

 So when Lucy and Desi had a baby—thus joining the baby boom, and largely ending sitcoms about singles or childless couples—they also moved out of New York.  In fact the show had always been shot in California. Now it was admitting it.

 

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was a precursor to new sitcoms set in suburbia, or small town neighborhoods that were the suburban ideal, notably the hit shows Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver and the Donna Reed Show.  Later series in the 60s such as My Three Sons (set in a California suburb) would continue the pattern.

 The 1950s were becoming the Organization Man decade, and these sitcom families were generally more prosperous. The dads were more educated, with white collar jobs and professions.  They set a subtly high material standard that advertisers hoped would fuel aspirations at a time of upward mobility, but it was still out of reach for much of the audience.  In an era when the average family income was $12,000, it was estimated that the lifestyle of the Andersons, the Cleavers etc. would require $40,000 a year. 

Mama

The broad humor (and ethnic humor), outsized characters and extreme situations of early sitcoms gave way to more subtlety and an attempt at more ordinary problems and situations as the sitcoms became suburbanized. (Though not all of the early sitcoms were frenetic with extreme characters and crazy situations.  Mama--from the book and movie I Remember Mama-- was the story of a Norwegian immigrant family, but it was much quieter.  A plot might involve Nelse breaking his glasses playing basketball, and his father coming up with a solution by attaching an elastic band to them, to keep them on during the game.)

 But in general, the loud and/or confused fathers were replaced by wiser and more understanding fathers; the dizzy mothers gave way to calmer and-- especially with Donna Reed--somewhat more dimensional mothers.

  (In another demographic shift, a third of Americans lived on farms in 1920, down to 15% in 1950 and just over 8% in 1960, perhaps inspiring nostalgic sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres in that decade. Clowns were originally country bumpkins whose clodhoppers and lack of manners were deemed humorous. Fifties kids experienced the archetype in Disney’s Goofy and the puppet Mortimer Snerd.  Those 60s TV sitcoms were perhaps that archetype’s last obvious gasp, as the countryside was trampled by tract houses and shopping malls, and invisible and voracious agribusinesses took over the rest.)

 I remember seeing most of the early television sitcoms, like The Goldbergs and Duffy’s Tavern (at least as far as the opening when the barman answers the phone: “Duffy’s Tavern, where the elite meet to eat… Duffy ain’t here.  Oh, hi Duffy.”)  At the ages of four through seven or so, I couldn’t always follow stories, but I appreciated the same comic elements I liked in variety shows—the gestures, the slapstick, facial expressions (and double-takes) and repeated catchphrases, the eccentric characters from Phil Silvers to Our Miss Brooks, along with the physical humor prominent in sitcoms from Lucy to I Married Joan.

 By the time I was able to grasp the plots, sitcoms of the suburban era were doing less physical humor while dealing more with believable behavior. As a child I was keenly interested in what adults considered acceptable behavior, and so these shows became instructive.  

Donna Reed

What is acceptable and successful behavior is a matter of context and culture. The situations in situation comedy made them about behavior—and how actual behavior contrasts with standards of behavior is a lot of what makes it funny.  As a kid you are just learning those standards, and I learned a lot by what I was expected to laugh at in situation comedies.

 But there was another factor at work. These suburban sitcoms were becoming prominent just at the time that many from the working class were entering the middle class, with its different mores, culture and expectations, which were perhaps new to viewers from that working class cultural background as well.  That was my background, so through the suburban sitcoms I was getting suggestions about behaviors of all kinds in the world I was expected to enter. 

I vividly recall an early example from the sitcom-within one of Sid Caesar’s variety shows, The Caesar Hour. The segments of varying length (some took up nearly an entire show) were called “The Commuters,” with Caesar and Nanette Fabray as a new suburban couple. In one story they were out for dinner at a restaurant with another couple.  They were all sitting in a booth and talking. A waiter brought a salad bowl. Carl Reiner as his friend told Sid to “toss the salad, Bob.” Sid did one of his series of takes—he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do. Carl kept talking to someone, only to say again, more insistently, “toss the salad!” So Sid tossed it up in the air, lettuce leaves and tomato slices falling on everyone.

 This was a time in the 1950s when dining out in a restaurant was new to a lot of Americans, especially those from working class background.  Here was physical comedy as the payoff for a common problem—the uncertainty of etiquette in an unfamiliar middle class situation.  "Toss the salad” was a new concept to a city guy, probably from a poor immigrant family, as well as verbally a funny ambiguous expression. It was just another mystery of middle class suburban manners. 

But it also happened to be a new concept to me. I was vaguely aware that the people on television were richer and more sophisticated than anyone I actually knew. So I saw it perhaps as something “ritzy” people said and did. But it also seemed possible that it was something I would need to know, or something I should know—something that adults knew.

When you’re a kid just about everything “adult” is strange-- tossing a salad as much as foreign movies. Kids get told when they’re doing something “wrong,” and that covers a lot of ground.  So you have to spend some time trying to imagine why adults do and say things, and what they mean. Sid Caesar’s humor was often based on exaggeration, and on taking something literally that wasn’t meant to be taken that way. It’s exactly the kind of humor that appeals to children, because we often made those mistakes, and we also often thought adults were strange and didn’t make much sense. Sid Caesar represented us, as well as the urban working class trying to fit into white collar suburbia. 

Through sitcoms I learned about expectations and procedures of adults and children, including older kids.  I more or less grew up with Ricky Nelson. There was an idealization of family behavior among the Nelsons as well as the Andersons, the Cleavers and the Stones (Donna Reed Show.)  I sometimes wonder how my parents were responding on the sofa behind me as I lay sprawled in front of the TV set, as they saw these families solve problems without raised voices and threats, tears and tantrums.

 By the age of eight I apparently had grasped enough about stories to write one.  As the result of a classroom exercise in third grade, I went home and wrote my first play.  Its specific inspiration was the introduction to “White Christmas” I read in the sheet music on my Uncle Carl’s piano (it was a new song then) suggesting that it was possible to have Christmas without snow—something that hadn’t occurred to me.  But the play itself was all sitcom, with a sitcom family of father and mother, older children John and Mary, and the comic little brother, Bobby. My third grade class put it on (with John Glancy as John and Mary Jo Repasky as Mary.)

 By fourth grade, I had my own rep company in the form of my Cub Scout den, and the monthly skits I wrote for us to perform at the big pack meetings in the Cathedral basement were mostly inspired by TV shows: a pirate adventure was one, and another was the George Gobel variety show, including the sitcom within it.

 I remember those long-running suburban shows the best, probably because I was older and they were kept alive in reruns for another decade. But I had some favorites that aren’t so well remembered, like the two shows starring Wally Cox, Mr. Peepers (1952-55) and the Adventures of Hiram Holiday (1956-7.)  I remember Mr. Peepers especially, a live situation comedy set in a high school—the perpetually befuddled Mrs. Gurney, and the character played by Tony Randall.  I also liked Peter Lawford in Dear Phoebe and then in The Thin Man (combining mystery and comedy) with Phyllis Kirk.

  Another favorite was The People’s Choice starring Jackie Cooper, and Cleo, the sardonic basset hound who commented on the action, and though it belongs more to the 60s, Jackie Coopers’ Hennessy series, which started in 1959.  Though I still cherish skillful slapstick, these quieter comedies also appealed to me.  

But probably the 1950s situation comedy that to me fondly represents this era more than any other was The Life of Riley. I knew this fish out of water (working class guy in suburban California) series so well that I can still recall enough of the opening narration to tell you that Marjorie Reynolds played Peg, and Tom D’Andrea was Gillis.  I may not have cared much about the stories at times, and just waited for the closeup of the forlorn face of William Bendix as he spoke the magic words, “What a revoltin’ development this is!”

 The Life of Riley could remain in memory also because, at least for awhile, we watched it as a family. At our house we ate supper at 6 pm, so we finished in plenty of time for the news (network news was all of 15 minutes then) and Captain Video or some other kidcentric show at 7.  The evening shows could begin as early as 7:30.  It may be necessary to reiterate that like everyone we knew, we had but one television set, which sat immovably in the living room.  So family members might drift in and out, watching the screen in various combinations, depending in part on what was on.  My sisters as well as I usually sprawled on the floor, with a parent or two behind us on the sofa.

 There were times that our whole family watched, with variety shows and sitcoms as the more likely occasions.  But my one specific memory of a family viewing ritual must have occurred only in one TV season, of 1955-56, when I was 11, my sister Kathy was 5 and then 6, and sister Debbie was 2.  It was on Friday nights, when we watched Ozzie and Harriet together at 7:30, then Mama at 8, and The Life of Riley at 8:30. At some point we were all together on or around the sofa.  That’s because at some point my mother made us popcorn. 

Jay Hawkins (a cautionary tale)

Jay Hawkins

Jay walking! Reading the headlines!  Struck down

 By a fliver and killed while reading

 About the man-girl slayer!

  For years haunting the newstands, 

Waiting for the latest papers from Chicago,

 Cursed with the newspaper habit:

 Snuffing the powder of monstrous news

 Heralding shame and hate and murder:

What dive was raided, what rum was seized;

Who was indicted, and who was lynched;

Who got the rope at the end of the trial; 

What governor, officer was accused

 Of bribery, graft, or perculation. 

 Whose picture appeared divorced or caught--

(Were they never noble, did they never achieve,

 And so have their pictures printed?)

 All about hating, hunting, fighting, 

Lying, stealing, lusting, wasting,

Who has been killed, and who has been hanged. 

And I ask if life is full of beauty,

 And full of nobility and creating, 

Why don't they write about it?

--Edgar Lee Masters

  The Spoon River Anthology 1924