My Television Life

My Television Life May 22, 2017

TV Dinners in the 1950's  	 NSAPTV Eating in front of the television set became a way of life for many Americans in the 1950's. These children eat and watch on June 28, 1951. Photo by Arthur Brower / The New York Times Photo Archives
TV Dinners in the 1950’s NSAPTV
Eating in front of the television set became a way of life for many Americans in the 1950’s. These children eat and watch on June 28, 1951.
Photo by Arthur Brower / The New York Times Photo Archives

I am in some genuine ways a product of the dawn of television. I know this is generally considered a bad thing. And there is no doubt it brought with it a bucketful of difficulties. It was also something magical. I believe television was critical in knitting the country together. And, I guess, later in helping to unravel any false sense of ours being any kind of mono-cultural nation.

We were poor people so we weren’t the first to get television sets. But, also as poor people we didn’t budget particularly well and so TVs entered our lives earlier than perhaps they should have. I remember them as large boxes with small screens. More items that clearly be called furniture than what we have today. My childhood spanned the nineteen fifties, and television loomed large in my memories of that time. I’m sure my mother thought of it as a godsend for babysitting when there was no money to hire someone. Not even something to think about.

I don’t recall with certainty, but as we lived on the coasts mostly, I’m pretty sure we always had a bit larger selection than the three national broadcast networks. Maybe up to ten channels.

I recall my brother and I turning the television on Saturday morning and watching static turn to a station identification card, and then the programming. I recall seeing a series of shorts from World War II, although in later years looking I’ve been unable to find any reference to them.

My earliest memories of television were Saturday morning cartoons. At first a great deal of the programming was simply replaying broadcasts of theatrical cartoons – so a lot were actually pretty high quality. But they were quickly mixed up with made for television shows. I recall in no particular order the Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, Superman, Andy’s Gang, Captain Kangaroo, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, Circus Boy, the Gene Autry Show, Howdy Doody, the Lone Ranger, the Mickey Mouse Club, and Mr Wizard.

My favorite of all of the earliest shows was Crusader Rabbit and his sidekick Ragland T. Tiger. It was developed by Jay Ward would later produce Rocky and Bulwinkle. My memory was of fully developed cartoons. So it was surprising when I found episodes on Youtube and discovered not only were they five minute shorts, but that as often as not the action was simply dancing a story board in front of the camera. With the advent of Rocky and Bulwinkle I think I found the culmination of my delight in Saturday morning cartoons before growing out of them.

In an era before one could own a movie and play it as much as one liked, I recall some of those films that played seasonally. The Wizard of Oz, Miracle on 34th Street, a Christmas Carol, A Wonderful Life and Yankee Doodle Dandy stick out in my mind.

My favorite evening programming included I Love Lucy, the Honeymooners, which I didn’t really like because the sparse set felt too much like home, but which we watched because my parents liked it, the Phil Silvers Show, I think his Sergeant Bilko was my father’s favorite sit com character, Our Miss Brooks, Gunsmoke, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, and the most haunting show in my memory, the Twilight Zone. The variety shows featured prominently in the family television calendar, including Your Show of Shows and the Ed Sullivan Show.

The nightly news was a feature in our house. I don’t recall the personalities of the 1950s. Walter Cronkite joined CBS in 1962. And he became a familiar face to me. In 1960 we watched the televised debates between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. That’s when national politics began to seep into my consciousness, and it was very much because of television.


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