On Having Turned 80

 

It seemed odd, even to me, that after posts (or, let's face it, essays) on major and not so major birthdays for the past 20 years, I let turning 80 go by without a word.  The reason is that despite recognizing that this was a big deal, I had nothing in particular to say.  At my 79th birthday, I seemed to be searching for models of how to be 80.  But there are no models of how to be 80 now, for my generation.  We are it.  I think my reticence came from feeling that models were irrelevant.  I am myself at 80.  I have choices within that, but this is simply the reality I am living.  

I turned 80 in June.  Margaret turned 80 in September.  She is my partner in this reality we are living.  My friend Mike turned 80 in August.  He came out here to California from Pennsylvania for a week, returning on my birthday. We did my annual walk up Trinidad Head together. We'd been together around major birthdays since our 60th.  We're still here.  Everybody isn't.  Mike and I were also friends with Clayton, who died last year. We'd known each other since high school (I'd known Clayton since 3rd grade), and the three of us had played together in a musical group for a few years.  Mike and I sang some of our old songs, including some that Clayton and I wrote together.  

In September, someone from our high school class contacted Mike and invited him to a kind of group birthday party for members of our class who also turned 80.  It was in Greensburg, where our high school was and is.  He couldn't make it but afterwards she sent him photos.  He didn't recognize anyone.  She then sent him names, and matched some to the photos.  He forwarded them all to me.

 I recognized many of the names.  There was Carol C. who I saw a lot at the  Mountain View Hotel swimming pool one summer when my mother got me a membership.  There was Linda P. who I used to call up for awhile and talk to, the first step to dating.  I never took the next step.  I probably didn't know what it was.  I remember Mary Ann H. who provoked our English teacher Sister C. to flee the classroom when she quoted John Lennon in her oral presentation: "Women should be obscene and not heard."  And there were some guys there I knew as casual friends.  I have more or less fond memories of all of them, and it's interesting that there are at least this many of us still around.

But I didn't recognize any of them in the pictures either, and I tried.  Not even with their names.  We all just look like old people.  I also felt, staring at these pictures, that I wouldn't have fit in at this party, just as I barely fit in while in high school.  I was back in Greensburg for nearly ten years from the late 70s to the 80s, and all of them presumably were around, but I never saw any of them.  Except Carol D., the hostess of the party.  I was there when my book was published, and I had a couple of reasonably publicized book signings--an event admittedly alien to anyone in Greensburg then.  None of them showed up, nor did anyone else from high school.  Mostly friends of my mother (though they didn't go so far as to buy a book.)  But I did see Carol D. walk by me at one, without a glance in my direction. Kind of like high school.

But even so, I was more social in high school than I am now. And I was for most of my life, at least before moving here.  A lot of that was at least slightly forced, out of loneliness and longing.  But much of it was just human interaction and shared activities. Then when I came out here I stopped going to bars, first because of the smoking and then because I wasn't drinking.  Here my social time got taken up with transactional events and relationships as part of or derived from work, as often happens.  Then retirement, the pandemic, and the masks.  

It's kind of usual for relationships to drop away as we get old.  Friends and family members die, or are far away.  Transactional relationships end when the reasons for the transactions end, which is usually the job.  To younger people we become what we look like-- just anonymous old people, of no individual interest.  It's not entirely that we're treated as having the bad taste to not have died by now, but it's something like that.

Fortunately for me, I've always cultivated inner resources.  I'm an introvert, so becoming something of a hermit just means more peace and quiet.  I've recently replaced my flip-phone with a so-called smart phone, but I don't get any more calls or texts from real people than I did before.  The phone mostly stays in the drawer, or in a pocket when I go out.  I am very wary of what reliance on them has done to attention spans--I never would have believed it, but all the evidence and experience confirms it is true.  I want to keep reading long books, and slow poems.  

I am also very fortunate in that I still have a good memory for the past.  I've explored my past for years, so most of my memories are of memories I've already had, and in many cases written down.  But I occasionally get a new one, as when on a visit back to Greensburg my friend Joyce (from high school and many years after) told me one of her memories of me--of how I went out in a snowstorm to pick up medicine for her young daughter when she was sick.  This was in the 1980s.  I did not immediately remember it, but one day I just recalled it--her phone call, my walk through the beautiful falling snow in the night, down to Paul's Pharmacy and over to Joyce's house, because the roads were just too bad to drive and I knew I would love the walk anyway.  

It was the last thing Joyce said to me, face to face.  She died a few years later. But I have memories of her and many others as part of my everyday life. 

I usually have a book that I can associate with a particular birthday but I didn't have one for 80 until recently.  Once again (as it was for my 72nd) it is a book by Dorion Sagan (son of one of the most important scientists of the 20th century, Lynn Margulis, and the definition of a scientist icon, Carl Sagan.)  It's his deceptively dull-titled Notes From The Holocene published in 2008.  In terms of the breadth of its ideas, I see it further along the continuum of books like Ed Yong's An Immense World and James Bridle's Ways of Being (which I wrote about here), as well as the earlier work of James Lovelock and both his parents.

Yong and Bridle showed that we know very little about how animals and plants experience and influence the world, and Sagan takes that further to the level of microorganisms and chemicals, but back up to the idea of a living organism we call Earth.  Apart from expanding my purview, it reinforces the sense I got from those other books: a mandatory humility.  Here is Sagan:

"The vast complexity of Earth's environment, like the ultimate nature of the universe, eludes simple human minds; perhaps our cognitive lack, our finally coming up short, in trying to find the grand design or story, is a structural necessity.  We are only a miniscule part of the vast colossus we examine. To even begin to comprehend that which contains us, and so much more, we caricature, simplify, and distort."

Hubris is so human, and so silly. And yet, I am reminded in this regard as in so many others in my daily life, of something my grandmother often said in her 80s: "We do the best we can."  

Another book I'm reading (or actually re-reading) now is one in a series of police procedurals set in Venice starring Commissario Guido Brunetti and written by Donna Leon, that in the past few years have become my favorite comfort reading.   In A Sea of Troubles, Leon uncharacteristically steps back for a moment to sum up Brunetti's character.  "Incapable by both nature and inclination of worshipping at the altar of the bitch goddess, Success, Brunetti had more modest desires.  He was a man of short views, interested in the here, the now, the concrete.  He left larger goals and desires to others, contenting himself with smaller ones: a happy family, a decent life, the attempt to do his job as well as he could.  It seemed to him little enough to ask of life, and he settled for those hopes."

That's pretty much where I find myself.  I've written in earlier birthday accounts of my fixation on the future, and how frustrating that's become.  I maintain an interest, and I keep listening to people like Kim Stanley Robinson talk about it in practical terms (these days he's defining Utopia as getting to the end of this century without fully plunging into a mass extinction event.)  But I feel in concert with my age, for the future belongs to others, and though I offer what I can, it's up to them to consider it. What's left to me is a deeper present.  Even though my present has within it my memories, which emerge whether I want them to or not (Paul McCartney calls this "the ever-present past") and my concerns and imaginings for the future, including the lost futures of my youth, I feel more comfortable--and more appropriate-- foregrounding the here and now.

 "Life is what you do everyday," Jim Harrison wrote, and I find myself living more in that everyday.  I don't need a conceptual context in which to experience it.  I simply am living it.  Maybe a little more consciously, and a little more fully.  For instance, I am more aware of how much I like the feel of wool, and corduroy. I value in every way the moments I sit on our comfortable old leather couch next to Margaret, with our dog Howdy between us. 

We have our age-related problems, and spend more time and resources than we'd like in the bizarre corridors of the healthcare complex; and our days include news of people we know in deeper trouble, and falling away.  Of course we worry, we fret, we sadly see our devolving society, and I miss the birds that have already disappeared.  But we have a lot of good moments.  And we do the best we can. 

TV and Me: A Secret History of Cable TV

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

In 1973 or so I went back from Cambridge to Greensburg to visit my parents and family.  My old bedroom had been converted to a den a few years before, and the huge console television set there was now on its last legs, with an uncertain purchase on color (the picture tended to be dark pink and white.)  But there was new element to it: it was hooked up to something called cable.

 Cable was so new there that there wasn’t much on—it kept repeating the same movie, Stormy Weather with Lena Horne, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway and an all Black cast, including the fabulous dance team of the Nicholas Brothers. Evidently the cable was being tested with this apparently out-of-copyright film.  Lucky for me--I must have seen parts of it at least six times.

Cable came with a lot of publicity about its potential, but for Greensburg, cable had one major appeal: reception.  Television had always been prey to the vagaries of rooftop antennas and rabbit ears wrapped in tinfoil on top of the set, and their interactions with weather, geography, electrical disturbances and interference.  Some distant stations drifted in and out, but for us even the Pittsburgh stations weren’t entirely reliable, especially the educational (or now public) TV station WQED on channel 13.

 But the perils of broadcasting over the air disappeared when the signal reached the TV set directly through wires and cables.  A few additional stations were more of a bonus at that point.

 Later in the 70s, there were more channels on cable, though few of them were actually new.  For the major beneficiary of this technology turned out to be the small UHF stations.  The VHF (Very High Frequency)  signals were stronger.  They occupied the first 13 channel positions, though two adjacent channels were often considered too close to allow stations to broadcast successfully on both.  The rest of the channels (14 to 83) were for UHF (Ultra High Frequency) stations—that signal was innately weaker, so these stations had problems transmitting across the topography of hills and valleys, especially in a place like Pittsburgh that had plenty of both.   Nationally UHF stations struggled to survive.

 But then came cable, which presented the UHF stations with a level playing field—their signal was just as strong as the bigger VHF stations when it went directly through the cable. The UHF stations could now be seen—but could their programs compete?  They didn’t have much money for production, nor were many network affiliates.  What they had however was syndication. 

Usually a station could make money on a syndicated network series if it had at least five years of episodes.  But there was a show just coming onto the syndication market that had only three years of shows before being cancelled by NBC in 1969.  Some UHF channels took a chance on it, perhaps noticing that since 1972 enthusiastic crowds had been showing up for conventions honoring it, even when it was no longer on the air. 

That show of course was Star Trek.  By programming it every day (opposite the six p.m. news was a favorite time) syndication gave viewers an opportunity to immerse in the particular Star Trek universe, and see its characters every day, like friends or family.  It became an immense hit and a national phenomenon, often playing on multiple channels in the bigger cities (including some VHS channels), and definitely competing for audience share.  By 1976, Star Trek was being seen in 148 television markets in the U.S., and on 54 stations in other countries.

 Star Trek became a joyful sensation and an immediate part of the culture.  In 1975 I was the arts section editor of an alternative weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C. (and later its editor.)  The staff was mostly young and the office could get chaotic.  I was somehow seen as a voice of reason, and a calm presence—so my office nickname became Spock.  Once when two staff members were arguing heatedly in the center of the room I walked up behind them, applied the Vulcan neck pinch, and they both immediately fell to the ground.  That was the Star Trek effect in the 1970s.

 More than a half century after it first aired, Star Trek has several live action and animated TV series on the Paramount streaming network, several decades after three live action series ran for seven years and another for four years on cable TV in the 80s and 90s. The original Star Trek cast made six feature films beginning in 1979, and other casts have so far made seven more.  Star Trek had the intrinsic qualities that has supported its popularity and longevity, but this ongoing empire really began because of the technical coincidence that the original series went into syndication at pretty much the precise moment that UHF stations got onto cable TV systems. 

Cable’s potential was vast, partly because transmissions through the cable system weren’t restricted to the limited number of channels that could come over the air, using the available frequencies.  Cable could deliver an almost unlimited number of channels, eventually with an additional device that also freed you from being tethered to your set if you wanted to switch: it was called the remote. 

 But even if your main reason for hooking up to cable was to improve your reception, the primary change cable brought about was this: you had to pay to watch television.  Not just to buy the TV set, which until then was all you ever had to pay for to watch TV. (Well, the antenna cost a few bucks.)  But to get the programs, including everything you used to get free, you now had to pay a fee, every month, to the company that hooked you up. And it’s been like that ever since.

 It’s probably long been forgotten that, in addition to the promise of better reception for on-air stations, the argument used to lure users was that cable would provide lots of new channels unique to cable—and since you were paying a monthly free, the programs on those stations would be without commercials.  Advertising was only necessary to pay for programs when they were free.

 Commercials!  This far into this series on early television and this singular phenomenon of the TV commercial is only now appearing.  Yet the commercials are what television viewers are likely to recall (whether they want to or not), even more than the programs. 

 For me, growing up with television meant watching on Howdy Doody the simple drawings of Happy Tooth being threatened by Mr. Tooth Decay, before the application of Colgate Dental Crème (It cleans your breath—what a toothpaste—while it cleans your teeth!) or hearing the Halo jingle (Halo, everybody, halo! Halo is the shampoo that glorifies your hair) sung in its entirety by Frank Sinatra on the Jimmy Durante Show.

 My contemporaries may not recall Playhouse 90 but start the jingle You’ll wonder where the yellow went, and they’ll finish it: when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.  Even Winky Dink or Soupy Sales may have faded from memory before the quartet in the bathtub singing Ajax, the foaming cleanser (baba baba ba ba bom) floats the dirt right down the drain!  Or Speedy Alka-Seltzer crooning Plop plop fizz fizz oh what a relief it is!

 The repetition of commercial phrases burns into the brain (You never outgrow your need for milk, Only you can prevent forest fires, that’s a speesy spicy meatball, where’s the beef?)  We saw live pitches by the stars of the show (Commander Corey of the Space Patrol leaving the Terra V in jeopardy to join Cadet Happy in extolling the merits of Nestles Crunch or cocoa) evolve into shorter special effects fantasies, and then even shorter ones.  There might a cascade of four, five or six frenetic, intense, boldly absurd and insistent messages in a row.  

 So by the 70s there were so many commercials bunched together in the breaks that it was more than possible to lose the thread of the show—or to lose interest in it.  From their 1950s beginnings, when they either presented serious arguments for why this product is better, or appealing little fantasies like Speedy Alka-Seltzer. But all too soon they became boldly false hyperactive scenarios championing the trivial--they set the template of disingenuous television lying that's been followed ever since, by infomercials, certain cable news channels and certain politicians.

The experience of being subjected to commercials became more than distraction—this loud, relentless grinning assault was demoralizing.  (Although there were—and are—aficionados who care more about commercials than what they sponsor.  Witness the immense attention to the TV ads on the Super Bowl, often eclipsing the ink on the game itself.)

Sure enough, once viewers were hooked, commercials began to creep onto cable shows, as indeed they began to appear on public broadcasting.  The template for what happened later on the Internet (with YouTube, for example) and streaming was set: create a market, establish market share with ad-free programs or sites, and quickly buy up the competition. Then when alternatives have faded and the customers are hooked into the habit, start up the ad machines. 

 Another promise of cable was that it could—no, that it would—bring very different kinds of programs into the American home.  There were so many potential cable channels that they didn’t all have to be used for common denominator programs—they could bring true variety and specialized programs that didn’t require a mass audience.  There could be a channel for classical music, and for plays, and for more in-depth documentaries and discussions of public issues than the networks could find time to broadcast.  There could be a channel for every sport, channels for hobbies and games—a chess channel!  A knitting  channel!

 Each new communications medium arrived with the same promise of bringing culture, information and education to the public. That included television itself, and to some extent, the networks tried. NBC had its own orchestra (though a holdover from radio days), and there was more opera, classical music and dance on early TV than there was by the 1970s, especially outside PBS.  Even in the 60s and 70s, talk shows routinely had prominent writers and a few artists and scientists as guests. 

 In the beginning, cable seemed like it might even succeed where network TV had failed.  One of the first production companies for cable, an outfit called Home Box Office, showed at least its New York audience a series of complex lectures on a Jungian approach to myth by Joseph Campbell. Needless to say, HBO moved on from there. (A decade later Bill Moyers would provide better context and production values to his PBS version of The Powers of Myth with Joseph Campbell.)  

 Cable saw innovations that changed culture, such as Ted Turner’s news channels and MTV. But instead of expanding choice to include arts and intelligence, these subjects were blithely labeled as elitist, and television expanded on its previous path.  

An early national cable channel called itself Arts and Entertainment, and for awhile the arts actually were represented.  When A&E faltered, a new channel called Bravo! took up the slack to focus on performances.  The Discovery channel was to focus on science, the History Channel on history, the American Movie Channel showed old movies, and so on.

 By now they have all largely succumbed to the same lowest common denominator competition as the broadcast networks, especially the latest form of crass "reality"shows.  A&E and Bravo became mere corporate names without identity, Discovery began to specialize in sharks and the pseudo-science equivalents of conspiracy theories, and the History Channel became better known as the Hitler Channel.  Eventually most became either amorphous holdings of larger conglomerates, or the sponsoring conglomerate itself.

 Some specialized channels and programs did result, especially in areas of sports and recreation.  The great dream of competitive skydiving and skateboarding on TV was realized.  But even this was mostly more of the same.  Thus the Bruce Springsteen song: 57 Channels (and Nothin’ On.)  (He has since increased the number of channels in performance.) 

Yet another potential of cable hyped at the beginning was the possibility of two-way communication on television through the cable.  In the late 70s, the corporate entity then known as Warner Communications wired the city of Columbus, Ohio with a two-way system they called Qube.   I researched and wrote an article about this experiment, which involved spending a week or so in Columbus observing the system and how it was used.  I also reviewed another two-way system and delved into the history and politics of cable up to that point.

 The Columbus experiment centered on the Qube console, precursor to the remote, though more the size of a Star Trek tricorder.  Its buttons were color-coded: blue for regular broadcast television channels, red for premium channels (concerts, movies and the world’s first but not last 24 hour channel of softcore porn),  and green for so-called Community programming, all produced by Warner just for this experiment.  But the innovative attractions were the five buttons on the far right: the response buttons, used for the green channels.

 When a response is requested by somebody on the screen for a yes/no question or something more like multiple choice, with the magic words “Touch now!”  the viewer makes a selection and within six seconds that response is received, then tabulated with others and the results instantly appeared. 

 The questions could be from town planners asking if there is enough small-unit housing (Strongly agree/ Agree/ Neutral/ Disagree/Strongly disagree) or a publishing survey asking which face you’d like to see on the cover of Us Magazine, with five choices.

 But mostly they were the kind of questions I witnessed during the afternoon teen show, in which five female high school students at a local swimming pool peeled back a bit of their swimsuits, and the host asked viewers at home to vote on who had the best tan line.  As well as what kind of bathing suit female viewers wore (the result: one piece 54%, two piece 46%.)  I also watched the Columbus equivalent of the Gong Show, with viewers at home anonymously—and liberally-- wielding the gong.

 And a talk show with an insurance agent as guest, who viewers could contact through their Qube box.  But unlike guests on normal TV talk shows who were paid a fee or appeared for free, it turned out that unbeknownst to viewers the insurance man was paying to be on the show.  He was his own secret commercial. This stealth precursor to the “infomercial” turned out to be a routine Qube practice. When I mentioned the paying “guest” to a viewing couple they weren’t really surprised.  A lot of products were being named. When I questioned Qube officials about this subterfuge, they were puzzled that anybody might object, but suggested corporate might reconsider the practice.

 Qube did construct an Electronic Town Meeting for one municipality in the Columbus area, but it was more sterile gloss than substance, heavily controlled by the regular evening talk show duo, whose questions to viewers normally were on the level of naming the studio cat.

 Meanwhile, another experiment was ongoing in Reading and Berks County, Pennsylvania in a different kind of participatory television, organized by the Alternative Media Center at New York University. It started by linking senior centers and grew to encompass the entire system.  Programs were generated by the users themselves.  I read the NYU report and spoke with Eileen Connell, who worked with participants, training them on how to use the equipment and listening to what they wanted the system to do, which determined how the system was designed.

  It was a long and apparently fascinating process, and eventually yielded surprising results. For example, a  participant in one program mentioned labor troubles in Reading fifty years before, and it struck a chord—seemingly for the first time, many people shared their recollections, and teachers and younger people got in touch, because this was local history that had never been written down.  Contrast this with Qube’s attempt at a pre-fab nostalgia program about Columbus, which became one of its first programs to be cancelled. 

The Qube system demanded what has come to be regarded as professional television, and though it decried the mediocrity of broadcast TV, it replicated it. The Reading system set out to prove that effective use of television—and specifically interactive TV--didn’t have to be all that professional.

 I watched a tape of one such program, a community meeting from Reading: there was sweat, fits of temper, tears, boring monologues, fierce debates, ambushes of humor, and large dollops of something rare on polished TV: sincerity.  The program wasn’t about a process—it was the process.   

 “It’s a very down-home system,” Connell told me. “It’s not snappy but it’s remarkably effective.  It had an extraordinary effect on how people saw themselves.”  The Reading system did silly entertainment programs and programs with a very local character (“Tell It To Eben and Herb”) but their interactive programs were serious, yet no more technically sophisticated than someone asking a question on a split screen with someone answering it: “The noun and the verb of the system,” Connell called it. 

 That was the key, and the major problem with the Qube response system and all subsequent iterations everywhere: “People in the Qube system can answer what’s asked of them, but they aren’t in control of the questions,” Eileen Connell observed. “It’s even more important who asks the questions than who answers.”

  When I visited Qube in Columbus, the executives there expressed the desire for “a bigger universe,” a bigger city or cities in which to demonstrate Qube’s capabilities.  One such city about to make a decision on a cable system was Pittsburgh, and Warner wanted it. 

But Pittsburgh had a number of suitors, and there was a process. This is another feature of cable that has slipped into history: local control.  From the beginning, each municipality had to decide on one cable company to provide service.  There couldn’t be competing cable providers in the same area, the argument went, because having more than one was technically difficult, expensive and confusing, as supposedly discovered in the days of competing telephone systems, each with its own wires. 

 In the early days of cable, I learned in my research, the awarding of cable contracts was sometimes, perhaps often, accomplished by the tried and true system of bribery and graft.  There were so-called “whiskey franchises,” in which officials got a case of Canadian Club in exchange for the sole right to wire their municipality.  Others were reputedly more expensive—like a cool million.  Some local officials went to jail for graft, others learned to have themselves hired as “consultants” for hefty fees.  

 Local professional reporters told me that as far as they could determine, the Pittsburgh process was clean. Pittsburgh had a cable ordinance and a committee to evaluate suitors.  I spoke to the chair of that committee who was suspicious of Qube, its expense and its insistence on control.  “But this is Pittsburgh—our neighborhoods, our hills, our winters,” he said. “We know our city better than any company does.  I think we know what we need.”

 A sticking point was the public access channels.  Cable systems were required to have them, since they were considered “common carriers” under the law, owned by everyone. (That same NYU Alternative Media Center was largely behind the adoption of this practice.)  But Qube didn’t want to cede control of any of its channels.

That negotiation went on past the time I finished my story and I’m not sure how it turned out. But in a way it didn't matter--soon the Supreme Court decided that cable systems weren’t common carriers after all--they were corporate persons who could do what they liked.  Congress hurriedly passed a new telecommunications law which said that municipalities “may” require public access channels, with public control of them.  

 In the years since, increasingly large cable companies have managed to convince some municipalities that pubic access isn’t necessary.  Where they exist, these channels aren’t often lively or creative, and certainly not interactive.  They cablecast city council meetings and other official events open to the public, which public officials tend to like, partly for the same reason that the only truly public television nationally are C-Span channels that mostly give air time to Senators and Representatives: politicians love to be on TV. 

 While there used to be debates in some municipalities before franchises were awarded and even when they were up for renewal in 10 or 12 years (when companies can be held accountable for not living up to their promises), I haven’t noticed any public discussion of renewal requirements for years.   Renewals seem depressingly automatic. 

Though Warner succeeded in wiring larger cities with the Qube promise in subsequent years—including Pittsburgh—Qube itself never quite caught on.  There were privacy concerns (people were quaintly resistant to their two-way responses being stored in the Qubemasters’ computer) and continuing high costs.  Its system of two-way television faded away.

 Meanwhile, the Alternative Media Center’s Reading experiment yielded what is now called Berks Community Television, thriving in the 21^st century.

  Aspects of Qube did influence cable television. It refined how pay-per-view might work, and it developed programs—especially the shows for children-- that later cable channels adapted. It also presaged commerce-driven shopping channels and program-length commercials styled as talk shows.  But in several ways it was more of a dress rehearsal for the Internet. 

For example, shopping from home.  A few years after my visit to Columbus I was in Las Vegas covering an International Council of Shopping Centers convention, where I attended a session on electronic shopping.  Qube was mentioned but the presentation focused on an experimental system in France that used a device hooked up to the telephone system.

 These retailers knew that electronic shopping was coming, they just didn’t know when or how.  A few years later there were home computers, and over the next decade or so the question was answered.  By showing how home shopping might work, Qube was a kind of proof of concept for Internet commerce.

 The public access interactive part of the Reading experiment didn’t influence subsequent cable television much, but it did produce one dry run for Internet systems like Zoom. That Berks experiment modeled the possibility of local, small scale, face-to-face participation, if not participatory democracy, which may have mitigated the vicious incivility that became the norm in anonymous and faceless Facebook and other online venues. 

 In any case, cable television’s potential to be much more than centralized, corporate television has largely failed.  Its fading legacy in this regard seems bequeathed to the corporate giants battling for streaming market share. The small screen (which is not so small anymore) is one big Marvel movie.    

By the 1980s, cable assumed the shape it maintained for decades. The local cable system—more and more part of a conglomerate—offered packages of local broadcast channels (UHF and VHF) and a few from afar, the growing number of cable channels, and the premium channels like HBO that ran recent movies and the occasional big name pop concert.  There might be a public access channel, often with little programming on it.  There were a few cable news channels—mostly just CNN Headline News at first (Lynn Russell was mesmerizing) and a couple of channels that told you what was on the other channels.

   The premium channels became known for softcore porn and for surprising Hollywood by making some of its theatrical rejects into hits. I discovered a few myself (for example, the lovely Jane Seymour/ Christopher Reeve Somewhere In Time, and the paradigm of this category, Eddie and the Cruisers), and was glad for the opportunity.  However, my most enduring cable memory of this early period is falling asleep one night to a movie I’d turned on halfway through, until I was awakened by a familiar voice: it was an old friend and actor from college, Ric Newman. By the time the voice registered, he was gone from the screen.  I had to stay awake for the credits to make sure I hadn’t been hallucinating. (I hadn’t.)  

 I had cable when I moved to Pittsburgh, and it enabled me to watch Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls games on a Chicago channel.  I watched C-Span, especially the heroic Brian Lamb and Book TV.  I think it was a public access channel that showed a lengthy and enlightening discussion on adult children of alcoholics by a couple of those adult children.   I didn’t have premium channels but didn’t miss them. 

 In our corner of California, corporate cable became more and more expensive and oppressive, and like many others, I cut the cable.  So I didn’t see the run of “viral” HBO series around 2007, though I wasn’t really interested.  I saw a few episodes of AMC’s Mad Men, and that was enough—I could see it was going to be an endless soap opera.  I even passed on The Sopranos—it seemed an extension of The Godfather, and by then I was angrily tired of seeing Italians portrayed only as Mafia gangsters.  Mostly what I missed were new Doctor Who episodes, by then on BBC America.

  Eventually the cable company got its vengeance, as Internet providers folded or were bought up, and there were only two left: our old friends The Phone Company ( AT&T) and The Cable Company (itself bought up and its name changed twice.) 

 Then once the cable company—eventually called Suddenlink for awhile, now Optimum—dominated Internet market share as well as the waning cable monopoly, it boosted prices into the stratosphere, and its customer service is nonexistent.  No one can get them on the phone (not that this is too unusual in dealing with today’s corporate barons.) It deals with customers with sarcastic arrogance.

  For most viewers, cable is the source for streaming, which at the moment is undergoing a shakeout that has the potential of reducing its offerings dramatically.  Monopoly cable could well be the future. 

 Despite all this, television in the 70s and beyond helped me through some dubious times, which is the subject of the next and last episodes. 

All History Is Local

 I'd been thinking about events and place, about how much happened in the downtown area of Greensburg, PA in my life, my family's and in history.  Did Stephen Foster and Andrew Carnegie meet, just where I used to sit as a boy watching for trains coming through the station?  I was trying to piece together bits of local history I incompletely remembered, and asked my sisters if a history of Greensburg I'd used for writing The Malling of America was still around.

It couldn't be found but my sister Kathy found another one for sale through Amazon, which came from Oregon with a note from the sellers about how much they enjoyed visiting Arcata, where I live now.  So there's a thread.

I've been reading this history of Greensburg, written in 1999, as the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy passed.  I noted one strange thing: though local response to the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 was noted, and there was a passing mention of RFK's assassination that year, there was not a word about JFK's assassination.  That's hard to figure.  Like most places in America, it was a major event: that dark Friday, then the ceremonies in Washington, culminating in the funeral on that Monday in November 1963.

I've recorded on some of my other sites my recollections of that Friday: hearing that the President had been shot from Father Sheridan's voice over the high school p.a., going outside to gym class--I think we ran 50 yard dashes--and almost forgetting about it, until I was showered and dressed and walking up the narrow steps from the locker room as the next class of boys was walking down.  From one of them I learned that President Kennedy was dead.

I walked home with three friends, including my debate partner who normally would have taken the school bus eight miles home but we'd arranged to work on our debate cases that evening.  We tried for awhile but wound up talking about the assassination and what it might mean for the future.

For the next several days I was in front of the TV. All regular programs on the three networks were cancelled for four days and nights. Apart from the news about Lee Harvey Oswald, the new President, etc. there was the arrival of the President's body in Washington, the lying in state in the White House on Saturday, the public viewing in the Capitol rotunda that drew a constant line of citizens on Sunday, the funeral procession through the streets of Washington and the funeral on Monday.  While my family was at church on Sunday I stayed home to watch, and saw the live pictures of Oswald being taken through the Dallas police station.  At one point I jumped--I saw what I thought was a gun.  But it turned out to be a hand-held microphone.  A moment later I heard the shots, and saw Oswald killed.

The only time I recall leaving the house and the TV was probably on Saturday, when I went with my father to Main Street in Greensburg,  He was the manager of the Singer Store and I helped him decorate the storefront window with black crepe and a photo.  It was one of mine. I had the official presidential portrait framed, and a larger poster of President and Mrs. Kennedy.  We probably used the portrait.

All the stores on Main Street took down their normal window displays and put up a commemorative display.  My recollection is that no retail stores there were open at all that weekend, or probably even on Monday.  It was very quiet.  I remember some snow--I wonder if that memory is accurate.

Later I learned that students from my high school chartered a bus and went to Washington to walk through the rotunda to pass the casket.  It never occurred to me to do that.  I was very sensitive about what I thought was appropriate, at least for me.  I wanted to honor his life.

Still, I watched it all.  The funeral procession made the greatest impression--the caisson, the rebellious riderless black horse, the Kennedy family.  The funeral was at St. Mathews in Georgetown.  I was in Washington for JFK's inaugural and knew that when he was a senator he went to St. Mathews so I got the relatives I was visiting to take me there for Mass that Sunday.  As we were leaving we saw the cordons and the Secret Service, so we turned around and went back in.  After our second Mass of the morning, as JFK strode down the side aisle he shook hands with as many people as he could, and one of them was me.  It took a particular effort, he was reaching back a little.  I was astonished of course.  Now his funeral was in that same church, those few years later.

Somewhere in storage here I have items relating to that week.  The Four Days pictorial book.  A reply to my letter joining with thousands of others requesting that the new national arts center be named the Kennedy Center.  The embossed reply from Jacqueline Kennedy to letters of condolence she received (some of them now in a book published this year.)

But one memento I know I don't have. The next week my high school, Greensburg Central Catholic, organized its own memorial assembly.  As a known Kennedy aficionado I was asked to participate by writing something and delivering it from the stage, as several other students would.  I felt strongly at that moment that I didn't want to talk about my thoughts, but I would select and read excerpts from JFK speeches and writings.  The nun who asked me got testy and refused.

I was permitted to briefly play a few lines from JFK's Inaugural Address which my father had taped in front of the TV on his reel-to-reel while I was there in Washington. I played it on the same tape recorder at the beginning of the assembly, hunkering down backstage unseen.  Then my part was finished and I watched the rest of it from the audience. They had also asked to borrow my large poster of President and Mrs. Kennedy which was ultimately used as the centerpiece, affixed to the back curtain during the ceremony.  I believe there is a photo in my senior year high school yearbook of that stage with the poster in it.

My instinct about the event was justified as I recall one of my classmates sobbing from the stage about little John-John.  It was not a display JFK would have approved.

When the ceremony was over I had to ask for my poster back, but the nun in charge claimed not to have any idea what happened to it. She seemed completely unconcerned and no attempt was made to find it.  I never saw it again. And even today I've never seen that particular image again.

 Eventually I did write something for the school newspaper, which I reproduced recently here.

I may have Greensburg newspaper front pages from that weekend somewhere.  I find now that while the TV images and photos were universal, and many live on in cyberspace (at least for the moment), I look to a more local context to frame my memories.  This particular history of the city doesn't provide it.