TV and Me: Serials to Cereals

 

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Second of a series.

They were called television channels.  Programs flowed down them from broadcast stations into our eager eyes.  But for the producers of those programs they were river channels of time—of hours to be filled, from early morning to increasingly late at night.

 As it geared up to produce original programs, early television often relied on the ready-made: the stories already on film.  But the motion picture studios were not going to feed the competition if they could help it.  Major studies kept the movies that they owned under lock and key, until at least the middle years of the 1950s. 

 That left the old stock of lesser studios and independent productions, plus the expendable properties that nobody was going to pay to see in theatres: old short subjects and one-reelers, silent era comedy shorts, cartoons from the 1930s and 40s, old serials and some B movies—notably, westerns. 

 They all appeared on early TV. Even the most popular serial of all—the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon—was reedited for 1950s TV.  But western serials and B features were particularly adaptable.  There were no old cars or obsolete technology or fashions of an earlier era, to tell viewers this was yesterday’s news.  

Westerns existed in their own time—a time created by Hollywood, beginning in the silent era of the 1920s.  By the 30s and 40s, mostly smaller studios specialized in them, turning them out by the hundreds.  They were rarely more than an hour in length, and were often shown at Saturday matinees. And they were popular. So they were perfect for filling those channels of TV time.

 We watched them all, after school and especially on Saturday morning: Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, Tex Ritter, Gene Autry (and other “singing cowboys”), Whip Wilson and Lash LaRue, Tim McCoy and Tom Mix, an occasional Roy Rogers or an early John Wayne.  My mother marveled that through breakneck gallops and barroom brawls, the cowboys’ hats never fell off. That was by design: all the main characters wore hats so their stunt doubles could pass for them—their hats were essentially glued to their heads so you couldn’t see their faces.

 How these serials and movies were shown—sliced into half-hours or fifteen minute segments, surrounded by commercials, etc.—was mostly up to local stations that ran them.  So it happened that a silver-haired gentleman named William Boyd approached a local station in Los Angeles, offering them some western movies he owned.  He also happened to be the star of these movies.  He played Hopalong Cassidy.

 Bill Boyd was a lead actor in silent films in the 1920s, but as he approached 40 years old—and with his hair turning prematurely white—he wasn’t getting prime roles.  He heard about an independent producer planning a series of westerns, and lobbied hard for the lead role. In 1935, he became Hopalong Cassidy—in more ways that one.

 The character by that name in series of pulp novels by Clarence E. Mulford was a hard-drinking troublemaker, but Boyd pitched a new concept for him in the movies: he was clean-living, noble and heroic, and won the day with his intelligence as much as his fists and his six-gun.  This transformation of the character was the first of Boyd’s amazingly good decisions. Another was realizing that he needed to support the character’s image by toning down the wilder side of his own nature.  He made himself into a role model, on and off screen. 

The classic Hoppy is pretty much there—maybe a little meaner-- from the beginning of what turned into a series of 66 films. No attempt is made to hide his silver hair.  In fact, it was accentuated by his black outfit and hat.  This was against the Hollywood western cliche—the bad guy wore the black hat.  But Hoppy didn’t go too far: his horse (Topper) was white.

 The Hoppy films were a cut above the usual serial or B movie western.  Movie theatre owners noticed and began playing some as features.  Boyd cajoled studios into spending more, and took pay cuts to finance better quality stories and production.  These movies excelled in cinematography and the scenery where they were typically shot, at Lone Pine, California, in the foothills of Mt. Whitney.  It all seemed to pay off: in surveys of the most popular western stars in the late 30s and early 40s, Hopalong was in the top three, along with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

 But in 1943 the film series producer decided the Hoppy series was played out. Then Bill Boyd made his next brilliant decision.  He spent everything he had and could raise to buy both the rights to the character and the old films.  He made twelve more Hoppy features for theatres between 1946 and 1948, with smaller budgets.  That’s when he offered his old films to an NBC affiliate in Los Angeles, to run on TV.

 The Hopalong films quickly became popular, but Bill Boyd and NBC had another idea: Hopalong Cassidy would be the first western hero to make the transition to a television series.  It began airing on June 24, 1949, just days before my third birthday. 

 By the time I was four, Hopalong Cassidy was a national sensation, and I was hooked. William Boyd became the first national television star. Hopalong was on the cover of Life Magazine, Look and Time. 

That following Christmas, when I was four and a half, my most prized gifts were an authentic Hopalong gun and holster set, plus a less than authentic Hopalong suit and hat. (That's me in the top photo, defending my almost one year old sister Kathy.) Eventually I would have a Hopalong toy chest, a Hopalong record, and probably other items. In total there would be some 2600 different Hopalong-themed or endorsed products. (Hoppy lunch boxes started a lasting trend.)  Radio and film heroes and perhaps one or two other TV heroes at that time generated products and “premiums,” but nothing like this.  This started it all. 

So I wasn’t the only one with a Hopalong Christmas.  It was so common that the classic song, “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas,” written by Meredith Wilson in 1951 and originally recorded by Perry Como and Bing Crosby, includes the lyrics: “A pair of Hopalong boots and a pistol that shoots/ is the wish of Barney and Ben...” 

 Hoppy was so ubiquitous that he was the subject of my grandfather’s Italian/English pun.  A common greeting among my grandfather and his friends was, “Che si dice?” pronounced K-sa-deech. It’s the equivalent of, “what do you say?”   When I was in my Hoppy phase as a child, my grandfather would greet me: “Hey, Hopalong Che si dice!” 

Contradictory sources make the actual broadcast history of Hopalong Cassidy a little hazy.  But there seem to have been only 52 half hour episodes made, though they likely ran repeatedly until at least the mid-1950s.  Twelve of these were edited down from the  last dozen theatrical films Boyd made.  Then he added 40 new half hour television episodes.

 By the time the first 12 shows had aired, Boyd knew exactly who his audience was: me, and children more or less my age. So to the new episodes he appended a brief coda.  Arrayed in his Hoppy outfit, appearing to be reading a book or writing at his desk, he offered brief homilies to his “little partners.”  Judging from the subjects—wash your ears, go to bed when you’re told to, and above all listen to your mummy and daddy—he judged the majority to be at the lower end of the four to twelve years age group.  (Hoppy also promised parents that he only endorsed quality, safe products, and this has been reported to be true—Bill Boyd personally reviewed all offers.  He also refused to make very popular personal appearances if children were charged admission.)   

Hoppy appearance in Denver 1954

Watching these episodes now, digitally cleaned up for DVD, it isn’t entirely clear why we loved them at such a young age.  Their stories were often fairly complex.  Hoppy was mostly more of a detective using his brain than a gunslinger. He might casually deck a bad guy with his fists, and he sometimes shot one, though that became increasingly rare as the series progressed. 

 There were always action sequences—but action in the 1950s sense: horseback chases, runaway buckboards and stage coaches, frequent gunfights with cowboys shooting at each other from a distance—and Hoppy arriving in the nick of time.  I’m sure we found these exciting.

 Mostly I think it was Hoppy himself.  There was something magical about the tall lanky man in black, and the way he carried himself.  Seeing these again, I recalled the neckerchief he wore with the steer head clasp (I probably had one.)  But above all I remembered his voice and his laugh.  I remember trying to imitate the Hoppy chuckle.

 His age never registered (Boyd was in fact almost as old as my grandfather.)  But something paternal probably did.  He could look mean (Boyd’s sneer was more prominent in the movies) and he could be sarcastic with his sidekicks, but he could also be gentle and generous.  He smiled a lot.  From the start of the new episodes, Hoppy was often coming to the rescue of an adolescent or child.

 How much of these stories could I understand at four or five?  In cutting down movies from more than 60 minutes to under 30, Boyd used extensive voice-overs to summarize missing elements of the story.  He refined this technique for the television episodes, so that Hoppy was often shown merely looking, or thinking, while that silvery voice talked only to us. This allowed for more complex stories in the allotted time, so they hold up pretty well.  But I wonder how much we understood.

 The stories often involved Hoppy coming to the aid of victims of the unscrupulous.  As often as not, the bad guys were bankers and men of position.  Hoppy championed the unprotected, and even if I couldn’t follow financial details and so on, I probably got that much.

Duncan Rinaldo and Bill Boyd

 Hopalong Cassidy was the first film to television western series, and also the first made for television western.  Seeing its success, other networks got interested.  Very quickly, ABC aired The Lone Ranger (1949), starring Clayton Moore, and The Cisco Kid, starring Duncan Renaldo, went into syndication (1950.) They were the epics of our early childhood. (Moore, Renaldo and Boyd were all friends. Moore even dropped the mask to appear in several Hoppy episodes, once as a villain.)

 The Cisco Kid was based on an O. Henry character, and called the Robin Hood of the West.  Pancho (played by Leo Carrillo, who unlike Boyd and others was actually an accomplished rider) was Cisco’s comical sidekick (“Let’s went!”) and they eventually had a conversation at the end of their brief adventure which they ritually ended by saying, “O Pancho!”  “O Cisco!” and laughing. 

The Lone Ranger was very popular on radio, and Clayton Moore as the masked rider of the plains deepened his voice accordingly.  Jay Silverheels as his Indian companion Tonto played the part with unfailing dignity—he was just about the only sidekick who wasn’t comical.  They also championed the weak and oppressed.  

(What everyone of a certain age remembers is the opening narration to The Lone Ranger.  Oddly, none of the available episodes use the whole thing. It didn't appear until after the first season or two, and apparently later syndicated episodes cut it back.)

 While it’s true that among the Western movies that made it to TV were enough “cowboys and Indians” scenes to make that a cliche of the form, but it seems less recognized that Hopalong Cassidy and other early television westerns mostly did not take the same attitude.  In every Hoppy episode featuring American Indians, they are the victims of unscrupulous whites.  The same is true of The Long Ranger.  In fact, that’s the theme of both of the original Lone Ranger feature films. 

Guy Madison as Wild Bill

Other western movie stars also got themselves television shows, notably Gene Autry (1950) and Roy Rogers (1951.).  And the floodgates opened for new TV westerns, such as two of my favorites, The Range Rider and The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (I especially liked their fringe jackets) both in 1951.  Most of them wound up being sponsored by breakfast cereal companies, and so memories of Guy Madison’s Wild Bill Hickok arrive flavored with Sugar Pops.

 Non-Western movie serials also made the transition to TV cereal (Buck Rogers, for example, and a weird postwar German-made Flash Gordon with an American actor as Flash and Germans as the villains.) One that featured the same lead actor in both film and TV was Dick Tracy, starring Ralph Byrd in 1950-51. 

Watching a specific episode of this series is actually one of my early memories, at five years old or so. In the story, the bad guys got the drop on Tracy and took away his gun.  But he outsmarted them because he had a second gun they didn’t find.  I remember leaving the room, thinking about this clever ploy.

 But stories that already existed on film alone could not completely fill up those channels of time. Most of that time in early television was taken up by something that made it unique, and yet also related to past forms.  It is an element that television rarely relied on again, and today’s viewers almost never see.  Because most of early television was live.

 Hey kids, what time is it?  Next time.

TV and Me: The Million Year Journey to Johnny Jupiter

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story. First of a series.

Once upon a time, television began.  It was before wall-sized flat screens, streaming, HD, 3D, 4k, 5D...

 Actually, the story starts earlier.  Maybe a million years earlier.  Or at least several hundred thousand...

 Once upon a time, people talked.  Occasionally one person talked to a group of others.  They gathered in front of the fire in winter to hear a storyteller tell them the history of the world and their people, the adventures and fatal mistakes of their hunters. Or children gathered around an elder, or heard bedtime stories from their mother. They heard tales of animals and humans, and how they changed into each other.  They heard how the leopard got its spots and how the coyote lost its tail.  They heard stories about children lost in the forest, and people who were way too greedy. 

Listening to stories—and watching the storyteller-- around the fire must have been a part of life for a very long time.  When people were alone, they might stare into their own small fire, and think about the stories, and daydream their own...

 Eventually a number of people acted out such stories as moral tales and histories.  They might include music of the drums and flutes, and interludes of jugglers, tumblers and clowns, as well as painted masks and regalia.

 
Often these stories, told or acted out, were repeated.  Some were ceremonial, but others were teaching stories.  Some were scary, some made you laugh.  People might hear or see the same story told many times, and they might notice that one storyteller was better than another.  In this way, they distinguished between the teller and the tale.

 Other stories were told in pictures.  You might need special credentials to look at the ones on the walls deep in caves, but others were scratched into rocks for everyone to see.  Later other kinds of pictures told a story, in paint, in stone, and in stained glass.

 Eventually these elements combined in theatre.  They all had one thing in common: in order to experience the story, you had to be at the place and at the time they were told. 

There was one exception.  Somewhere in this history, years after writing developed and spread, years after books were copied out and stored in libraries, the invention of the printing press quickly made it possible for almost everyone who could read to acquire and read books.  Books told stories to you alone, anywhere you were, including your home. 

 Even before that, writing had changed things.  When the priest and the rabbi read from sacred texts, they clearly weren’t making up the stories.  Somebody else was the author, divine or otherwise.  There was another step between the story and you.  So in a way the story came from far away.

 Print led not only to books but to shorter packages of stories that were different every few months, or every month, week, or every day.  They were periodicals: chiefly magazines and newspapers.  Some were topical, some political. Some publications serialized the fictions known as novels. As more people became literate, especially from the early 19^th century well into the 20^th century, periodicals of various kinds gained almost universal readership, at least in cities and towns.   

 Daily newspapers carried stories (news, sports, weather) about a reader’s town or city, and stories that everybody in the country was following.  Immigrants learned English by following the stories told with crude drawings and brief words on “the funny pages.”  Some cartoon strips told a single story each day, usually humorous.  Others spread out a dramatic story over days or weeks or months: tales of adventure in exotic places, detective stories, science fiction, romance—every kind of story that books or periodicals told, and a few more.  Soon the comic strips spawned their own periodicals called comic books. 

People were learning all the ways stories could come to them.

 In the midst of this hubbub of storytelling, along came moving pictures.  Audiences by now knew about stories (maybe true, maybe not; not actually happening now, but on the other hand, actually happening now) and the conventions of theatre (with actors who weren’t really the characters but on the other hand, they were; and that the living room on the stage wasn’t really the living room of those people, but in a way, it was.) Now they had to learn how to see stories in motion: that the train coming at you is not actually coming at you, but then again, it is.  And that the music someone is playing on piano or organ over in the dark corner is related to what’s happening on the screen.

 Then moving pictures began to talk and sing, scream and explode.  The organ in the corner became a symphony you couldn’t see.  But what all these forms of storytelling had in common, together with other entertainment like the circus and the ballet, concerts and vaudeville, not to mention sporting events and public speeches, was one thing: you had to be there.  Even though, for the stories, you weren’t there: you didn’t have to be in Rome for a story about Rome, but you did have to be in the place the story is told, such as the theatre or the movie palace. 

No sooner had movies become the chief means of entertainment (with most Americans in 1930 going to the movies at least once a week) than there was something new, called radio.  Now voices told you stories from far away, when you were in your own living room.   They were like books that talked and sang and made funny noises to remind you of doors slamming, cars careening and guns firing.  They were the opposite of the old silent movies you could see but not hear; they were movies you could hear but not see: movies for the ear.

 At first it was called “the wireless” because it carried sound like a telephone but without telephone wires.  It had its technical problems, and remained a novelty through the 1920s. But the broadcasting of news, music, sporting events and a growing number of other kinds of stories began to fill the day in the 1930s.  Radio exploded.  Only two out of five American homes had a radio in 1931.  A year later, the proportion was one out of three.  By 1938 the conquest was nearly complete, as four out of five homes had a radio, usually in a prominent place in the living room.

 Radio presented actual stage plays or more often, plays meant to sound like stage plays, beginning with an announcer whispering that the curtain is going up, followed by applause. 

It told all the stories that movies told, and sometimes featured the same actors. You could go to the movies and see Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, and come home to listen to Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. Radio presented the entertainers of vaudeville and Broadway musicals, as the movies did.  Somehow radio even transcended its own limitations: for awhile its biggest star was a ventriloquist and his dummies (Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.)  A man whose gimmick was that he could make dummies talk without moving his lips was a sensation with audiences who couldn’t see him.

 And radio soon learned to tailor its storytelling to its main advantage: it was in the home, every minute of the day.  It took the kind of stories that appeared in romance novels and especially romance comic strips (sometimes with the same characters), crossed them with the movie serial, and told them incrementally in fifteen-minute segments, sometimes at a pace that would make a snail impatient.  These were the daytime dramas, the daytime serials, otherwise known as soap operas.

 Pepper Young’s Family, Hilltop House, Stella Dallas, Mary Noble, Backstage Wife...Soap operas were designed for women who were at home during the day and could listen with less than full attention while doing their domestic chores.  They became very popular.  The ten of them on the air in 1934 more than tripled to 31 by 1936, and then nearly doubled again to 61 by 1939.  Radio had invented a storytelling form.

 The next step seemed inevitable: a storytelling device in the home like radio but that told stories with the moving pictures and sounds so far available only in movie theatres.  America was introduced to television with a broadcast and on-site demonstrations at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, called The World of Tomorrow.

 That broadcast was of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s opening remarks, but almost no one had the equipment within range to see it.  For most people, television remained the world of tomorrow through World War II, though TV sets began appearing in bars and other public places, especially in New York, which was to be the early center of television broadcasting.

Some television stations started broadcasting in 1947, but really it was 1948 before there was anything like a menu of regularly scheduled programs for at least part of the day. 

 By 1949, television was becoming part of everyday life.  People had once again gathered around the hearth to listen to stories on the radio.  Now they were again looking into flickering light, but not into the hearth fire: they gathered in front of the flickering images telling them stories on the TV set. 

 The first programs included boxing and wrestling matches: motion that a single fixed camera could capture in a confined space with good lighting.  Religious services and other ceremonies were also broadcast, partly for the same reasons.

 But soon television was producing versions of every kind of story told in every previous form.  Tales of heroes and heroines from books and comic strips and movie serials were told in 15 and 30 minute chunks. Stage plays or stories pretending to be plays got the same sort of treatment as radio, with the whispering announcer and the shot of the audience applauding. (One of these reached back beyond radio to the beginning of storytelling with its title, Fireside Theatre.)  

Soon the full panoply was on view: musicals, vaudeville, song and dance, detectives, cowboys, space ships, cops and robbers, classic drama, melodrama and soap opera, movie cartoons, news broadcasts, interviews and documentaries.

The arrival of movies, radio and television as storytelling media came so close together in time that there were many performers who had begun on stage but then proceeded through all three.  Jimmy Durante went from vaudeville to Broadway musicals and New York nightclubs to movies and radio before becoming an early television star—and he was far from the exception. 

 Almost all the television program forms began elsewhere, often coming directly from radio or the movies, and this became part of the story of early television as I experienced it, beginning in the late 40s and mostly the early 1950s.   

 But before I begin at the beginning of that part of the story, I want to remember Johnny Jupiter. 

I lived more than thirty miles from the nearest television stations, though the primary one at this time  happened to be located in an unlikely pioneer city for both radio and television: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Other stations were broadcasting from farther away.

 In those circumstances, television in the late 40s and early 50s was a sometime thing.  At first it wasn’t on at all most of the time, as new stations tested their equipment. I recall being restless while accompanying my mother on a visit to the home of a family friend, and persuaded to calm down because a program was scheduled to start on their television set.  Although we were “early adopters,” we didn’t have a set yet; almost no one did.  So I was excited.  I waited, with decreasing patience.  And finally the little television set came to life-- with a program on how to freeze ice cubes in a new refrigerator.  It was likely a filmed segment of a late 1940s program, “In the Kelvinator Kitchen.”  Pre-Betty Furness. 

But even when real programs were on for some part of the day, reception was dicey at best.  I'm guessing we got our first television set by 1949 (maybe a year later or earlier.) We had one when we lived in the “foundation,” the basement of our house not yet built. By 1953, we had a television set in the living room of that house, hooked up to an antenna that lay across the top of the chimney.  On most channels what I saw was the sight and sound we knew as “snow,” a cacophony of dots in shades of gray and black accompanied by a brash hissing noise.  Or if not snow, then a picture jumping up and down, appearing and disappearing among bouncing and waving lines (which the “horizontal” and “vertical” controls on the set were supposed to fix, but seldom did.)

 Eventually we got two or three channels clearly enough to watch, at least at the TV’s less temperamental moments.  One of them was more reliably clear: WDTV Channel 3 in Pittsburgh (channel 2 after 1952), the Dumont network channel.  The Dumont network, begun by an early television technology pioneer and maker of TV sets like the one pictured, was one of the major networks (though it didn't make it beyond the 1950s), along with NBC and CBS, both powerhouses in radio. ABC soon got in the game. 

In those earliest days, relationships of individual stations to networks were more fluid.  WDTV was Pittsburgh's only station for a long while, and it broadcast shows from basically everybody.  But it was primarily a Dumont station, so among my earliest TV memories are Dumont programs.   The most poignant for me now is Johnny Jupiter. 

The premise of Johnny Jupiter was that an earnest old janitor at a television station (played by Vaughn Taylor) turns the dials on a television looking for something to watch, and accidentally tunes into the planet Jupiter, and two of its inhabitants, Johnny Jupiter and the robot B-12.  But he doesn’t just see and hear them.  He talks to them, and they talk to him.

 Johnny Jupiter and B-12 were hand puppets with the voices of the program’s writers, Jerome Coopersmith and Carl Harms.  They were two figures with the proscenium of a television screen around them, with the janitor, Ernest P. Duckweather, standing beside them on the other side of the screen.  But they were all inside my television proscenium screen.

 As far as I recall, mostly what they did for a half hour was talk.  Duckweather described Earth customs and behavior, which sounded ridiculous even to Earthlings, and Johnny Jupiter described the alternatives on Jupiter.  This for me was a very early initiation into societal satire.  Most of it was beyond me at age 6 going on 7, but not all of it. It wasn’t long before I was engaging in it myself. 

But the reason I start this series with Johnny Jupiter, which is not the first television show I remember, is the strange magic of it, and its premise.  Here was this barely believable medium of stories come to life in my living room, though my access to them was always a bit uncertain, according to the moods of weather and whatever else affected television signals. When it worked, it was like magic.

 And here was Ernest P. Duckweather, like me hoping for something to watch he’s never seen before, tuning into not just another city or state, but another planet. Not only that, but he interacts with the beings there.  If television was possible, it seemed to me, something like that might also be possible. Who knows what this magic box could really do? After all, you could talk to people on some radios.  And wouldn’t it be wonderful if someday I turned the TV on and found Jupiter myself? 

Johnny Jupiter was broadcast weekly on the Dumont network for only four months in 1953.  The next year it was on ABC, with a different, younger Ernest P. Duckweather (played by Wright King), and the program was transformed into more of a situation comedy. (A few episodes of the ABC series which ran from September 1953 to May 1954 have survived (mislabeled) on You Tube and elsewhere. As far as I know, nothing of the first series is available to see.)

 But WDTV in Pittsburgh didn’t broadcast it after it went to ABC.  It wasn’t on the only other station we got reliably in 1953 and 1954, Channel 6 in Johnstown.

 Still, clacking through the stations one day I discovered it was broadcast on one of the fainter and more distant stations, possibly channel 7 (Wheeling, West Virginia) or channel 9 (Steubenville, Ohio), both of which broadcast ABC shows, among others.  But try as I might, every week at that hour, I couldn’t bring it in for more than a few minutes at a time.  Occasionally the snow would slightly clear, the horizontal and vertical stop jumping long enough for me to see the outlines of the new Duckweather and Johnny Jupiter, and to hear some distorted lines of dialogue.  But soon it would fade away.

  And that became part of television, too: the elusive promise unkept, and the potential unfulfilled. But there were also more wonders along the way.    

Rhyme For This Past Weekend Plus

Buy, buy, said the sign in the shop window,

Why, why said the junk in the yard.

Paul McCartney

"Junk" 

Soul of the Future: Secret Progress Report II

 

More than three years ago now I reported on my plan to post a Soul of the Future series (over at Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily) as a way to complete this writing project, which had already gone on for some 20 years and counting.

 I recently posted the last chapter in this series.  It’s been a long road, but this experiment was successful in that I completed a “draft” that could stand as a whole.  The question now is what if anything to do next on this project.

 As I noted in the earlier report, this project goes back to when I was living in Pittsburgh in the mid-1990s.  It started with my observation that there were plenty of scenarios about an apocalyptic future, especially in popular culture forms (movies, TV.)  But I could think of only one scenario of a better future, and that was Star Trek—which happened at that time to be the most popular story about the future just about everywhere in the world.  Star Trek: The Next Generation was still making new episodes, though it was probably coming to an end. 

 The other scenario for a better and much different future was, in a strange way, the Ghost Dance.  Native American ideas were in the air in 1992 because it was the 500^th anniversary of Columbus “discovering America.”  I’d done an article on American Indians in Pittsburgh, and started becoming familiar with contemporary Native literature.  Two scholars at the University of Pittsburgh had a public forum where one of them read the chapter of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead, in which there were a few sentences about the Ghost Dance coming true—the West emptying out of people, the buffalo returning, etc.  That idea caught my imagination as a larger metaphor. 

 I did a piece for the Smithsonian Magazine on two contemporary Native artists in Canada, and a few other pieces, while reading a lot of American Indian writing. I saw a way of being in the world that added spiritual dimension to contemporary ecology and related concerns.

 So for awhile the working title of my project was “Star Trek/Ghost Dance.”  I’d been interested in the future through popular science fiction in my boyhood, and as a subject through articles I’d researched on the futures studies and related movements of the 1970s. And I’d written on Star Trek before, seen it all and knew it well.  So I had a good grasp of that end of it.

 In the fall of 1996, I moved with my partner Margaret to far northern California.  I worked for awhile for a Native grassroots organization called the Seventh Generation Fund, and I wrote the script for a video on forest issues.  All of that was contributing, but the idea was still growing.

 One of the major perks of being the partner of a tenure track professor was access to the university library, and the ability to take out lots of books.  I don’t recall why I focused in on H.G. Wells for this project, but the library had a couple of shelves of books by and about him, and as I worked through these, Wells became a bigger part of this project. His focus on the future, his apocalyptic and utopian writings, and as a forerunner of many ideas physically realized in Star Trek, all became relevant.

 For awhile the parallels between Wells and Star Trek's Gene Roddenberry fascinated me, to the extent that I tried to write a double biography.  But both of them led to other science fiction writers and movies, relevant to my project.

 Wells led into other areas as well.  He was a student of T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s friend and defender, and Darwinian evolution was central to his approach to the future, especially in his first novel, The Time Machine. So I read more deeply into contemporary thought on evolution and Darwin.  At this point I was also reviewing books for the San Francisco Chronicle and the North Coast Journal, and so I got access to new books on the subject.

 At the same time as all this started in Pittsburgh, I began reading the American Jungian psychologist James Hillman.  In Arcata I added Jung himself, beginning with the library’s shelves, and ending up with a few shelves of my own, thanks mostly to used bookstores.   

One day I was musing about combining these two obsessions of Wells and Jung, and mused about writing a play in which they meet, only to find that they had known each other.  This led me to writing a play about a conversation they could have had in the U.S., which also involved the Ghost Dance.  But I also realized that a number of Jungian concepts were useful in my futures project.

 That’s partly because, by this time, I’d broadened the idea to “soul of the future.” (Jung pointed out that a translation of "psyche" is "soul.") I read Hillman and other contemporaries on soul, when that was a hot subject in the 1990s and early 2000s.  The subject of soul involved the subject of imagination, and the emphasis on scenario or story in futures studies also involved reading in these areas.

 Running parallel in time was the growing crisis of climate disruption.  I’d been reading and writing about it since 1990.  I wrote about it incessantly online, in book reviews and essays in the SF Chronicle and elsewhere.  So I was well informed on the nature and extent of this crisis that threatened civilization and the planet’s life as we know it.

In Pittsburgh I had acquainted myself with the work of pioneer ecologist--and human ecologist-- Paul Shepard, whose first book I'd known since college.  He had taught at my college until the year I arrived, but we had a mutual friend, and we exchanged letters before his untimely death.  When I got to Arcata his widow Florence Shepard contacted me about writing something for a special issue of an environmental magazine about Paul, and after that, at Flo Shepard's request and with her participation, I wrote and gathered material and created a Paul Shepard website.  His work was a profound influence, including on the futures project.

 I’d begun drafts for this future project in the late 90s, and continued through the decade of 2000 and into the next decade.  I created separate files for drafts of each year.  Some of those files are fat, and some are thin.  I started each draft with enthusiasm but wound up exhausted and discouraged.  There was too much stuff.  I had lots of problems with scale.  Chapters that were exhausting to write were also exhausting to read. They didn’t lead anywhere.

 I was writing a lot of other stuff, of course.  Some elements of this project got into essays I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, for example.  And I did a New York Times article on Star Trek.  Then I found myself writing about local plays and (for the university departments), press releases about university plays and music events, that wound up in local papers which pretty shamelessly printed press releases verbatim.  There were weeks when I was writing most of the performing arts articles that appeared in the 4 local papers (three weeklies and the weekly arts section of the daily, or briefly, the dailies.)  There wasn’t a lot of time to pursue other projects—and I had more than this one.  

But I managed to read a lot that helped shape the futures project, including books by W.I. Thompson, Lynn Margulis, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin.

 Since my “retirement” and the collapse of the freelance market, I’ve concentrated on my own work, including these projects.  My last progress report was about my realization that “serializing” this futures project as blog essays might center it.  Perhaps from habit, I found it easier to write in this form than in facing all the white space on the digital page. I’d found something like a voice (a blue voice?) and that’s essential.

 Getting past individual topics led to finding themes to unify the series, which alone is a good guide to another draft.

 But by the time I completed the series in 2021, something else had happened—not so much to me as to the future.  The future had contracted. Largely because not nearly enough had been done to address the climate crisis, it was now all but certain that it was going to dominate the future, as it already had begun to dominate the present, along with the parallel eco-crisis expressed in mass extinction.  It had become highly probable that humanity no longer could make choices that would ensure a smooth path to a better future And the deteriorating political consensus especially in the US made the outlook especially bleak.  There is probably going to be an apocalyptic period to some meaningful degree.  And suddenly all my words seemed beside the point.

 Yet in my last posts I found reasons why centering on the future was still important, was in fact crucial.  This project was always meant to be a book, and while the chances of my book being at all influential seem to have diminished, it still might be worthwhile.

  I would still need to work up the faith that it might, and though I was fairly pleased with what I had written in the past three years on this subject, I didn’t ever get much positive comment.  It was seldom the feature of my blog that anyone mentioned.  If I wasn’t connecting, what is the point?

 When I was completing the last posts, realizing I’d left so much out from my original plan, I considered that at best these posts constituted a decent first draft.  But that was their purpose.  A complete first draft is what I never had.  And now I do.

 Still, by the time I finished, I thought I was really finished with it, that this would be the end of this project. Especially after the massive silence that greeted the end of it.  And it may well be.

 On the other hand…Over the years, especially before the Internet was the chief repository of information, I compiled file cabinet drawers full of files. Recently I began looking to get rid of those files, but in leafing through them, I’ve found things that could enhance the material I have as organized in my blog posts.  So I may make digital notes from those files before they end up in the recycling bin.  And that in turn could lead to a second draft. 

 So maybe the project isn’t over.  Maybe there’s a book called Soul of the Future with my name on it, sometime, in the future… 

Busby Berkeley, Historian

 Busby Berkeley is both famous and notorious for his extravagant dance numbers in movies from the 1930s through the 1950s.  But at least in one instance, two of his musical numbers reflected the times and now attest to their history, though audiences today may not fully understand what they are about.

 “If you want to understand the key to Busby Berkeley’s choreography,” said Berkeley biographer Terry Thomas in a TCM documentary, “you have to consider the military.”

 In 1917, the 22 year-old Berkeley was drafted into the U.S. Army.  By the time he arrived in France as a field artillery lieutenant, the fighting was nearly over and American troops had little to do.  So he was tasked with marching and drilling them, and in the course of inventing new formations and maneuvers, he essentially invented the style that was to characterize the work of his career.  Except instead of just male soldiers, he had armies of beautiful young women, and a camera that found both large geometric patterns and the intimacies of faces and other elements of anatomy.

 After successfully bringing this style to Broadway (minus the camera), Berkeley was drafted by Hollywood.  He soon wound up at Warner Brothers for a series of movies that would revive both musical films and the studio’s fortunes.  He started with two of his most famous, back to back, both made and released in the depths of the Great Depression.

 The first was 42^nd Street, released in 1933.  Warners organized a big publicity campaign involving a train loaded with studio stars touring cities, culminating in the film’s premiere in Washington, D.C.  Jack Warner, head of the studio, was a fervent FDR backer, and he timed the 42^nd Street opening to Roosevelt’s Inauguration. 

42^nd Street was a big hit and a critical success.  It set the template for the series of Warners musicals that starred Berkeley’s choreography: a backstage story about mounting a show, then the featured numbers presented as the opening night.  The music by Harry Warren (with Al Dubin’s lyrics) was innovative in that it included a mix of styles, especially jazz influences.  But it wasn’t a complete break: there were plenty of soporific love melodies.

 Back in Hollywood immediately afterward, Berkeley worked on musical number for the next Warners musical, Gold Diggers of 1933. The story had been the basis for a play and a couple of movies with “Gold Diggers” in the title (and there would be more.)  Directed by Melvyn Le Roy, it was released later that year, and again, it was a major hit.

 Apart from the insipid and cringe-worthy numbers were two that spoke directly to the audience about elements of the Great Depression they had just experienced, and that would continue to affect their lives.

 We’re In The Money

 

The first was the now iconic presentation of the song, “We’re in the Money,” featuring a very young Ginger Rogers belting the tune (and singing part of it in Pig Latin crossed with jive) while seemingly wearing nothing but strategically placed coins (although some shots reveal she was wearing a body stocking.)

 The song is usually interpreted as wishful thinking about post-Depression prosperity, but it has a much more specific meaning that audiences in 1933 would understand.

 Upon taking office in March 1933, FDR first of all had to deal with the banking crisis, to keep money in circulation.  Deposits were guaranteed for the first time. Besides new jobs and relief programs, his administration bolstered the economy with price supports for farmers, a minimum wage for workers and uniform rules for businesses. 

But money was still too tight for economic growth, so FDR essentially took the country off dependence on gold as the backing for currency: the so-called Gold Standard.  Everyone knew about this because everyone in the country was required to turn in their gold coins (which came in various denominations) in exchange for paper money or silver, including silver dollars.  Going off the gold standard meant that the federal government could increase the money supply, and it did.  And that’s what “We’re In the Money” is about.

 It’s right there in the first verse:

 Gone are my blues and gone are my tears/

I've got good news to shout in your ears/

The long lost Dollar has come back to the fold/
With silver you can turn your dreams to gold, oh/

We're in the money/
We're in the money/
We've got a lot of what it takes to get along...

It’s been suggested that in this black and white movie, Ginger Rogers and the chorus girls, as well as the set itself, featured gold coins.  But the point is that they aren’t: the coins feature a caricature of the face on the silver dollar.  Those are the silver coins that represent the new flow of money resulting from FDR’s policies (“with silver you can turn your dreams to gold.”)  All of this would have been instantly clear to the 1933 audience.

 Remember My Forgotten Man

 A more poignant and equally specific reference is made in the last big production number, “Remember My Forgotten Man.”  The Depression is not a subtext: it is the text, and is dramatized.  There’s the obvious reference to FDR’s  “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” from a 1932 radio address.  But as Joan Blondell continues to sing about her specific forgotten man, he turns out to be a veteran of World War I. 

  The number features a solo by Etta Moten (who also dubbed part of Blondell’s singing), a distinguished Black singer whose Gospel background emphases the bluesy spiritual feel of this elegy.  

Again, the feeling was even more specific to the times, for the plight of World War I vets had been dramatized for all the country to see just the previous spring and summer of 1932.

 In the spring, thousands of American World War I veterans gathered in Washington, D.C. to petition Congress to pay them the war bonus they’d been promised for 1945, because they were in desperate straits.  They remained there in makeshift encampments, many with their families, through the summer, continuing to lobby Congress.  The press covered the story extensively, dubbing them the Bonus Army.

 The veterans organized themselves into units, led by officers.  In contrast to the armed forces in both world wars, their units and their camps were racially integrated.

 Things were at an impasse in late July, with Congress failing to provide the bonus and with President Hoover opposed to it. It was then that a police officer trying to clear away a crowd from the entrance to the Treasury Department panicked and shot a veteran dead.  Hoover called out the Army to settle things down.  Instead, General Douglas MacArthur decided to make war on the Bonus Army.

 MacArthur, with his officers including Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major George Patton, deployed tanks and tear gas, routing the veterans and burning down their camps with gasoline. (This was probably the first time tear gas was used by Americans on other Americans.)

  Patton led a cavalry charge with drawn sabers against unarmed men, women and children.  In a deadly irony pointed out by historian William Manchester, among those that Patton’s forces attacked was a World War I veteran decorated for saving the life of Patton himself. 

 Many of the veterans were literally run out of town, in trucks that took them west to Ohio and beyond.  Though newspaper stories of the day tended to support the government line that the Army had thwarted dangerous criminals and radicals, many Americans knew men who were there. Hoover never recovered his political reputation.  If he’d had any chance of winning the election that fall, it probably ended with his administration’s treatment of the Bonus Army. 

All of this could not have escaped the attention of that era’s veterans, like Busby Berkeley.  But the Bonus Army had also inspired a great deal of sympathy and support among the people who would be watching this movie. When they saw and heard “Remember My Forgotten Man,” they would likely remember the Bonus Army.  Even in this dubious context, this song was as close to a memorial that it would get.

Choosing

Choosing

Was it home or foreign

 that city without color

 where I once lived for a time

 that often seemed long

 thinking there was no choice 

and all night I heard the captive

 lions roaring

 now I look back

 from when the rain is falling

 in the bright day

 a friend and I

 talked back then about a tree

 whose branches were the choice that we

 had not taken

 then she chose not to be

 never was there any such tree

 better

 the sound of the rain

 better the brightness falling

 better the day

 choosing to be morning

--W.S. Merwin

photo: Henri Cartier Bresson

What Dreams Are For

What are dreams for?  It seems to me the overlooked function of dreams is to keep us asleep.  A rested body I imagine has survival value, and an absorbing story can divert attention away from possible outside and even internal distractions that might cause us to wake ourselves up.  (This could also be a reason we don't remember all our dreams.  They served their function in sleep.)

Dreams tell us stories.  They can be weird stories, with the gaps in easily followed narrative logic of the stories spun by a young child,  leaping around through time and space, with characters that appear and disappear, transform and wander away, with no obvious beginning or end, not to mention a middle.  But they are stories, and often have the power to evoke powerful emotions within the sleeping state, some of which are stronger than those we usually can access awake.

Which suggests the question: which came first?  The dream story or the waking story?  Stories are a way to structure information.  It's generally suspected that their function in life in the world is that they organize memories and help us remember things it is useful or even vital to remember.  A good story makes things vivid.  Or the way it is told (in song for instance) is catchy.  If the story is about a place where a dangerous predator hangs out, or where there's a source of water, we're more likely to remember it and benefit thereby.

But was this way of structuring information suggested first by dreams?  If so, how did the brain become a storyteller?  It could be that in the interest of keeping us asleep, it invented the story.  Then the story migrated to daydreams and then to an entertaining way of bragging about a successful hunt.  

Another function of story, as athletes in particular use, is as an imaginative rehearsal.  Through the story you tell yourself, consciously or in a daydream or even a night dream, you imagine situations and what you do.  These may be rehearsals for facing these situations in life.  Athletes have found that the body as well as the brain learns from these rehearsals.

Of course this is all massively overdetermined--dreams likely have a number of contributing causes and functions, like stories do.  And dreams probably have all kinds of effects, including psychological, symbolic, maybe even precognition and so on.

Some scientists believe that in dreams the brain is sorting through information gathered in the past--the previous day, or in childhood---and using it for stories.  It may also be a way of bringing perceptions that never quite made it into consciousness or awareness beyond the momentary that got sorted into the background, into awareness.    

But why don't we always remember the information in dreams?  Why are dreams often such weird stories?  There may be good reasons we don't understand.  But then again, maybe dreams are stories that haven't quite gotten their act together.

  One reason we don't remember much, or why dreams are so weird (and sometimes wake us up instead of keeping us asleep) could be that dreaming as a brain function is a work in progress.  Unlike, say, vision, the brain hasn't yet coordinated such a complicated process to work smoothly, all the time.  The very complicated human organism hasn't worked out the kinks.  Maybe in a few million years, though.