TV as I Remember it and Other Associations
Through a convoluted series of events Kevin Fahey who teaches Classic Television at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the UNLV asked me to speak about early TV and movies, leaving it open to me as to what theme(s) I might select. It got me to reminiscing and thinking about what that “clothesline”might be. And as I meander in this essay it is in the meanderings that I might find some commonality. In psychology we call it secondary gain, deriving some psychic pleasure from a primary effort. So a secondary gain from reading a great deal is to enrich your vocabulary, although this is not primary to your reading. It is an unconscious result, you are unaware.
Imagine with me as a little boy, perhaps 7 or eight, sitting on steps, as I remember it, playing with a cap gun. It was a short 45mm made of some metal and in its grip as I moved the cover away, there were spools to insert a roll of caps. I remember well what caps were. A roll of papered “explosives,” each cap had a bulls-eye to it, black, on red paper. When the cap roll was inserted and the paper lead moved through flanges to the trigger, one could fire it. They always gave off a slightly acrid smell of sulfur, not unpleasantly to my child’s mind. The same caps could be used in an arrowed dart in which you placed a singular cap and threw it high into the air hoping that it would land directly to the sidewalk with its minimalist blast. I will label this. It is called fun. When was the last time you experienced fun as an adult?
What I am sharing here is the personal solitude I experienced at that time, although I was unaware of it, did not register it. It was an aspect of personal daily play free from TV, the first visual assault upon young minds, much like smartphones. At that time radio existed but I was not absorbed by it. I recall openings of the Canadian Sgt. Preston and Yukon King, his dog. I recall Up, Up and Away of Superman, the rescue fantasy of two Jewish cartoonists; there was Mr.Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons; Sanctuary which opened up with a creaking door; Gangbusters and a few fragments of a Tom Mix serial. Obviously radio did not grip me. It just licked my outside self, no more. The outside world of play was my world, for in it I was the master of the world — I roamed lanes, alleys, streets; I played with a penknife, a game called “Land”; I turned shoeboxes into a game of marbles, cutting out holes in one side; I clambered up a tree felled by a hurricane; I crawled with a childhood chum into the basement of his home, unknown to his parents.
When TV entered my life it was tangential. I remember as a child sitting in with a group of other children with a lucky family that had a small TV set on Brighton Second Street, where my Grandma Flo lived in her basement apartment with her spinster daughter, Gussie. The first show I saw was a desert foreign legion movie starring Larry “Buster” Crabbe, who later I would discover also played Flash Gordon, that peerless Art Deco serial. Only one sliver exists, of a group of legionnaires riding down a steep sand slope — a dim Rosebud.
Notice the verb here – I was never “glued” to the TV set; some of that came later as I grew older and the infection and disease settled in. In the late forties and early fifties I had already, gratefully, been conditioned to act in some way on life and not to be conditioned indirectly by anonymous TV programmers. As I grew older, alas, TV had shows that I dimly recall. Christopher Walken, at my age, does a very telling and wicked impression of the Continental from very early TV. (You Tube probably has one of his riffs.)At that time shows were fifteen minutes, I don’t know why. Perry Como did a fifteen minute musical show. I believe they needed to fill in air time and this was just the beginning. Two stations were it. NBC and CBS in New York; channel 7 was mocked. Channel 5, Dumont,was in its infancy.The Continental was a handsome Italian man, curly hair, who sat before a piano and candelabra and spoke directly to the audience, directly appealing to the American housewife and providing through a heavily inflected Italian accent the fantasy of what it might be to have sex with this Lothario. ( Think of Hepburn in Summertime as experienced through dementia.) All so apparently latent. Often the Continental suavely would offer her a glass of wine and raise it to the camera. And all this was live and Walken and Freese remembered it. He in Jackson Heights, Queens, and me in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Oh, Ron, his real name is Ronald, what fun we could have with this — What larks, Pip! What larks.
I cannot give chronology, why order it? for it all is simultaneous in my mind and it saturates my memory. Before the genius of Sid Caesar appeared on TV in the mid-fifties, I was impacted on Saturday mornings as TV filled the stations with films from the thirties and forties, most often B flics, since programming was in its infancy and air time had to be filled. I saw early oaters with a wide variety of cowboy stars. Ken and Kermit Maynard, one thin and one becoming fat. Ken Maynard had a tragic life ending up in a trailer and suffering from malnutrition; however he was vigorous and handsome in a quirky way, with his white horse, Tarzan, in early westerns. He had the charisma his brother did not have, for Kermit played later on in his life as an extra in westerns, Bonanza, and so on. Still thin.
Buster Crabbe had a way about him, an Olympic swimmer, I believe; he had a muscular body , but a swimmer’s body and he had a graceful lope to how he moved, which was charming to my sensibilities. He became a better actor as the years went on and spent his later years as a director of water sports in the Catskills. He had his own show on TV for a while, often bringing on his old cowboy sidekicks Gabby Hayes, for one. And he was indelible in Flash Gordon, but more of that later on. I still hear him calling out in moments of high expectancy or peril, “Dale.”
I find that a decline in the personal life of a western hero has something to it that evokes pathos. The image has taken on its own life, an indirect aspect of TV itself, for good or bad, but there it is. I feel that film bespeaks death, think on that for a moment, as I catch my own breath.
And stalwart Tim Holt would walk down a western street, snazzy in that black hat and outfit, taking out a stick of gum and unwrapping it, chewing it, signaling to the bad guy that he was now transforming into something lethal. He had an interesting life in the military and had earned being called a colonel. An intimate account of these western stars is in They Went Thataway by James Horwitz, who went out to find these heroes of his own childhood before they passed on. Some gave him a hard time, or were reticent or not forthcoming; some like Holt divulged openly and it all makes for rich and fascinating reading. Eat a Jujy Fruit as you read it.
Others come to mind –Tex Ritter, Fuzzy Knight, the sidekick, and there was Gabby Hayes who had his own TV show in the fifties. Reruns brought him back to the collective mind. The classy and smooth silent motion picture actor, William Boyd, reran all his Hopalong Cassidy movies from the thirties and forties. (Robert Mitchum had parts in some of his movies.) They were well-plotted. And in the early fifties I got to meet with him with other young children and he was mobbed by them. Shoving their hands in front of him as he handed out some trinkets. Boyd was one smart marketer. It was as if he was covered with the moss of live children. He hit a second popularity with TV and he used it well. I do remember observing his long black and chauffeured Cadillac waiting for him
Chubby Tex Ritter and the very lean Bob Steele, small-statured and fast fighting, whose father was a good director as well come to mind. Years later Steele played in Of Mice and Men and in a Bogie picture in which he was a heavy and he was terrific in both; underused by Hollywood, much like Jack Palance who was superlative, given the right roles. So what was to become personal memorabilia in this essay had its origin in this early exposure, how TV appropriate, to these oaters who had interesting personalities populating them. But there is another movie that deserves special attention and it was not a western.
I will pass on discussing Caesar, a comic genius, or Strike it Rich and Queen for a Day or Bud Collyer, who played Superman on radio, and later on a TV game host. It is trivia that clings to me. Quite delightfully useless, like the tie saved from your prom decades ago.
The indelible Flash Gordon left an imprint, a good one. It was art deco in design and the cheesy sets and rocket ships were irrelevant to my eye. There were winged men, don’t ask, who could fly and their leader had a burly look to him. There was Dr. Zharkov, the good scientist, as opposed to the creep-outs in the thirty horror movies, Lugosi and Karloff. And the women, Dale, blond, and the evil Ming the Merciless’ daughter, dark haired and experiencing the hots for Flash. Good and evil, black and white. Ming, portrayed the evil eastern emperor in a stilted fashion but he got across; if he was only honest with himself, he would have incested his own daughter, but he like Dale. But that is an evil only known to us today. I liked the dark-haired “damsel.” Dale was too wimpy as I look back, spending most of her film time as a clinger to Flash. I don’t think they every kissed.
The sets had forerunners of television to them and the rocket ships were a delight to behold, as if designed by Erte. And the sound they made, a kind of whoosh when they started I found very appealing to the ear, especially as they slowed down for a planetary landing. But most of all — The Clay People. What was fascinating to these muddy creatures and their clayey looks — terrific costumery — especially the leader who spoke English as it was filtered through clay, is that they emerge out of cavern walls and return to them so as to conceal their presence. What I still remember was the entrancing and fascinating music played as they walked into the walls and walked out of them. What one remembers? A box of Non-pareils to the person who can help me find that music!
Do you need a conclusion? TV had a hand in destroying play, and play is now pretty much destroyed. See any kids in the street playing? Do you hear a mother calling out her kid’s name to come home for dinner? I think not. Are there answers? No. Enough. I am tendentious.
