TV and Me: Home Movies

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

In the early to mid 1970s I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at first freelance writing, then as the book review editor and finally managing editor of the arts section (half the weekly paper) for the Boston Phoenix, before I returned to freelancing, this time for national magazines.  For much of that time I was writing about new books, new records and concerts, new movies, new plays and only occasionally about television. (Although Mort Sahl read aloud from my piece on the Dick Cavett show, on the Dick Cavett show.)  So I wasn’t watching much.

 Most of my TV viewing in those years was late at night on a black and white set with a broken channel changer, and apart from news, PBS and Cavett I mainly watched movies.  There was a long tradition of movies on television, especially in the late hours.

 Movies were the easiest programs for television to broadcast when it began, but Hollywood resisted feeding this threatening upstart.  Movies appeared anyway in the early 1950s, mostly made in the 30s from hand-to-mouth studios like Republic and Monogram, plus British imports.  By 1955 or so, the major studios—now getting into television production themselves—released movies made as late as 1948.  Eventually there might be only a few years between theatrical release and a TV spot.

 As mentioned earlier in this series, movie cartoons, comedy shorts (included silent ones), faded western movies and serials like Flash Gordon were staples of Saturday morning TV for kids even in the early 50s. But in some ways, movies weren’t ideal. TV screens were small, picture resolution wasn’t good and reception was often iffy—this is one reason that most early TV shows were brightly lit and shot in medium and close-up.

 These viewing problems also prompted the TV editors of movies to discard darker scenes and wide shots first, as they looked for footage to snip and replace with commercials. But they weren’t consistent—I recall the Saturday morning boredom of trying to watch galloping cowboys chasing each other in the dark.  Murky viewing wasn’t caused only by television deficiencies—scratchy prints, inept editing and poor projection weren’t uncommon.

 Things had improved somewhat by the mid to late 1950s, when more than a thousand movies were available to appear at all times of the day and night, mostly presented by local stations but also from networks. One survey suggested that in 1955 alone, a quarter of television programming was comprised of old movies.

Carole Lombard in "To Be or Not To Be" (1942)
released to TV in 1955

 So I saw many old movies for the first time on television, including many I’ve never seen in any other way.  That I saw any movies at all before the age of 7 or so is due entirely to television. I couldn’t necessarily follow a complicated plot or dialogue at an early age, but I generally found something to like.

 Until I was 10 or so, I only saw a few movies on the big screen: Disney films at the theatre near my grandparents in Youngwood, and my father took me to see a few at the Manos or the Strand in Greensburg (I recall a Martin and Lewis comedy, and Killers From Space), before my classmates and I were bussed to Pittsburgh to see the latest Biblical epic (The Ten Commandments, etc.) at the big Cinerama theatre.  Eventually I walked every week with neighbor friends to Saturday matinees at the Manos, a faded movie palace just on the near side of Main Street in Greensburg.

 But thanks to television I could see dozens of old movies from the time I was 4, as long as they were broadcast before my bedtime. When they were made didn’t enter into my consciousness—for a kid, everything is either now, soon or in the indiscriminate past—but once again, I had an accidental, sideways education in movie history at an early age, partly because of the studio ban on newer films.

 The movies shown on television included major features with star actors, but most of them—especially at first—were serials (or compilations of serial episodes) and what were known as B movies.

 To tempt people back to theatres as the Depression seemed to ease in 1934, some exhibitors began showing two movies for the price of one.  In late 1935 the two largest theatre chains announced this would be the policy in all their venues across America.  The double feature was born, a movie institution that lasted for more than 30 years.  At first, however, the bonus movie was slightly different: almost always shorter, and shot on a smaller budget with lesser stars (some on the way up, and some on the way out.)  To contrast them with the big budget, big-star “A” films, they were known in the industry as “B” movies, to be shown before the main feature. 

"Bulldog Drummond's Bride" 1939

The B movies were among the first to populate television.  They were cheaper to acquire, and being shorter, they accommodated commercials more easily. Most were genre films—westerns (predominantly) and crime stories, plus war movies, romantic comedies, melodramas and musicals.  The often-strange Bulldog Drummond crime series was an early entry, and the Charlie Chan series. Perhaps even the Torchy Blaine movies (a 1930s woman reporter who became the prototype for Lois Lane.)  On a somewhat higher level, the Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce made its first appearances in 1954.  I remember seeing Rathbone as my first Holmes. 

 Drummond and other B movies had noticeably quick rhythms, and that must have appealed to me.  (As Superman in the series, George Reeves made the quick movements of serial and B movie heroes, though in those films they were probably augmented by speeding up the camera to enhance the effect—and shorten the movie’s length.)  I adopted quick movement in my play after TV, and I loved running.  There was lots of running in B movies.

 At Dumont, the network that at first scheduled the most movies, both B movies and a few A features were often grouped by genres under banners like Frontier Theatre (westerns) and Adventure Theatre (Tarzan, etc.)  Since the only Pittsburgh station in the early 1950s was Dumont’s cash cow, I could see a lot of these movies. While my attention to the westerns wavered, the Tarzan movies, with action in the relatively contained jungle, were fascinating. There seemed to be a lot of World War II movies on TV, though Hollywood was still making them for theatres in the 50s, along with Korean war films, which we sometimes saw at Saturday matinees later in my childhood. 

 I’m naming some movies and actors I recall for two reasons: they comprise part of my cultural life history, and they became part of the cultural literacy of my generation-- in both cases mostly because of television.

  I saw some film stars of the 1940s on television programs, and perhaps recognized others (like James Cagney, Peter Lorre, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson) from their cartoon parodies or variety show impressionists before I saw their movies. But eventually I would see many of those movies on television, if nowhere else.  I probably caught glimpses of their gangster films as a child. 

There are others however I knew directly from their movies, like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant (at least one of the films they did together, Bringing Up Baby, was televised in the mid-50s, and I seem to recall seeing Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace.)

 I knew Jimmy Stewart from Harvey and It’s A Wonderful Life, which television made into a Christmas movie.  I knew Spencer Tracy, perhaps from one of his films with Hepburn but more likely from his role as Father Flanagan in Boys Town, a portrayal extolled by the Sisters at school.  And I certainly got an indelible impression of Henry Fonda when I saw The Grapes of Wrath on TV, an unforgettable movie.

Glenn Miller (top left), sax/vocals Tex Beneke
(bottom right) with singer Marion Hutton and
the Modernaires

  I recognized Fred Astaire, so I must have caught a dance or two from the Astaire and Rogers RKO films or his other musicals that were broadcast.  I was likely to have watched parts of the movies featuring Glenn Miller (Orchestra Wives or Sun Valley Serenade) if I happened on one, since I knew my mother had a particular fondness for Glenn Miller’s music, which I knew from records.  I’d seen Shirley Temple movies at an early age, but as with all these films, my attention was inconsistent, especially when I couldn’t follow the story.  By third and fourth grade my attention span improved, along with the ability to follow a more talky plot.

 Among the many movies I likely saw on TV, there were classic films of American and English directors I wouldn’t recognize the names of until later.  Until I left for college, this was virtually the only way I could see them. 

"Mrs Miniver"

I saw my first Hitchcock films on TV.  An early entry to TV was the 1940 Hollywood production of Foreign Correspondent. I seem to recall one of his early British films, The Lady Vanishes, as well as other British films of the 30s and World War II era. I saw British actors in American films or coproductions--I distinctly recall seeing Mrs. Miniver on TV, starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon (who I recognized in Forbidden Planet on the silver screen.)  Perhaps I even saw Greer Garson play Elizabeth Bennet against Lawrence Olivier’s Darcy in the 1940 production of Pride and Prejudice. 

 I certainly saw Oliver on TV in Wuthering Heights and Hitchcock’s Rebecca, probably in high school.  And though it wasn’t until college, I saw Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and other 50s and 60s British films for the first time on television, when I knew to look for them. 

Sims in "A Christmas Carol"

At Christmastime as a child I remember seeing the Alistair Sims version of A Christmas Carol.  I remember my excitement at seeing an old Laurel and Hardy holiday movie in which human sized wooden soldiers come to life (Babes in Toyland, 1934.)

 
Apart from the genre groupings, the more important pictures (or at least the A features) with the biggest stars were seen on prime time or weekend afternoons under marquees like The Million Dollar Movie. I also recall the Sunday afternoon movie on KDKA, introduced by legendary Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie and entertainment columnist, Harold V. Cohen, who also provided background during commercial breaks.  (Later that function fell to probably Pittsburgh’s most famous radio voice of that era, Rege Cordic.) I don’t recall the movies or what Mr. Cohen said, but I did get the idea that movies could be taken seriously, and that real people made them. 

 So it’s entirely possible that I saw a Charlie Chaplin feature there (Cohen was a Chaplin buff), or even Orson Welles films like The Magnificent Ambersons.  (However, it was at the Orson Welles theatre that I saw Citizen Kane, and remember that as the first time.  Or the first several times.) 

So there were plenty for me to see, though the bulk of movies were shown late at night.  For years, they were just about the only programming past the eleven p.m. news.  They often went by the title—or were referred to colloquially as—the Late Show.  And then the Late Late Show.  At one point back in the Dumont days our Pittsburgh station showed movies all night on Swing Shift Theatre.

 In 1963 the third Pittsburgh station (Channel 11, NBC) premiered the local Chiller Theatre with “Chilly Billy” Cardille (the prototype for SCTV’s parody Monster Chiller Horror Theatre by Joe Flaherty, a Pittsburgh native), but shows featuring horror movies had been around for awhile by then. Though I first saw the Frankenstein and Dracula movies on TV, I wasn’t as fascinated with horror movies as many of my schoolmates (they were especially fashionable in 1957-58, or my sixth grade.)

 

But I loved science fiction.  Since I’ve now seen most of the 1950s s/f classics on the big screen, I’m not entirely sure which ones I first saw on television, or at a Saturday matinee, or at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge (I wrote about their first sci-fi festivals in the Boston Phoenix under the title “It Came From the Orson Welles.” My friends at the Welles turned the phrase into a t-shirt. This became an annual festival that outlived the Welles itself.)

 I’m guessing The Day The Earth Stood Still is one I did see on TV first.  But I’m sure about several classics made in the UK, especially since I’ve seen them only on small screens: The Day The Earth Caught Fire and Five Million Years to Earth remain two of the best of that era. 

 I also saw the original King Kong and Mighty Joe Young first on TV, enough times to notice, when I saw King Kong on the silver screen, that the first part of it (the preparation for the journey) was routinely cut on TV to fit the time slot and make room for more commercials.

 I saw Olivier’s Richard III on TV, but when I saw it again at a screening at the Westmoreland County Museum of Art, I was dazzled by the prologue that I didn’t remember. Possibly it, too, was cut, so on TV the movie began with Olivier’s “Now is the winter of our discontent…” speech. 

 Such cutting was a major flaw.  Apart from commercials disturbing the mood and narrative drive, missing or truncated scenes hurt the film and at times rendered it incomprehensible.  Seeing these old films whole could be a revelation.   

By the early 1960s, Hollywood studios loosened up on showing their 1950s movies, and their big hits from previous years. By this time some movies were being broadcast in color. The first showings of The Wizard of Oz (beginning in 1956) were big deals. However, most people still had black and white sets so the switch from sepia to Technicolor within that film didn’t have quite the same impact until most homes got color sets beginning in the mid 1960s.

 The networks responded to this new availability of more recent movies—especially color films-- with prime time movie slots: NBC had Saturday Night at the Movies, then adding the Monday Night Movie in 1963. By 1966 there was the ABC Wednesday Night Movie and the CBS Friday Night Movie, and so on.

 Movies became so popular that networks began to make their own, the so-called “made for television” movies, which constituted a genre of their own. With some conspicuous exceptions (like The Day After), I don’t count many of them as movies.  In any case, real movies and TV movies became a major part of prime time into the 70s and 80s. 

 I do have a few indelible memories of movies I first saw on TV at some point: The 1956 Edmund O’Brien version of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four which I saw in high school; the Ernest Borgnine movie version of Marty, which was one of those primetime network movies.  I recall that we happened to be at my grandmother’s when I saw it. 

Others include Go, Man, Go, the Harlem Globetrotters movie with a very young Sidney Poitier, and Poitier again with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll (as well as Louis Armstrong) in Paris Blues, directed by Martin Ritt.  Newman and Poitier played expatriate jazz musicians.  When the Newman and Woodward characters wanted to return to the states, the Poitier character didn’t: he felt free of American racism in Paris.  An eye-opener.

 I was probably in high school when I saw the 1959 Gregory Peck film about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Beloved Infidel, and in college when I was taken with the 1962 Jason Robards film of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night.  I recall being especially moved by seeing the 1959 film about the aftermath of a nuclear war, On the Beach on television, though it’s possible I saw it first at a theatre. It also starred Gregory Peck, with Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.

 I saw both the Glenn Miller Story (Jimmy Stewart, 1954) and the Benny Goodman Story (Steve Allen, 1956) on TV in the 60s, and later taped them from TV to see several times since.  Among the many other biographical films I saw on TV, the most powerful was probably The Life of Emile Zola (1937) starring Paul Muni, with its revelatory scenes exposing prejudice in the Dreyfus affair.

 By the 1970s I was in fact interested in old movies, learning about directors and cinematographers and so on. So at the Orson Welles and other repertory theatres in Cambridge I saw again (and this time, whole) movies I’d dimly encountered on TV. I also had learned enough about film history to know which movies I wanted to see when they appeared in the TV listings.

 So while I might watch whatever was on the late show after an exhausting day and evening at the Phoenix and some work-related outing afterwards, I also scheduled viewings of particular movies I hadn’t yet seen.  Watching movies on TV could be frustrating, broken up by blocks of commercials and often cut down to make time for even more ads. But you could also watch them from bed.

 Once when I was back freelancing, I decided to see how many movies I could watch in one day.  At that time, the Orson Welles Cinema had three screens, and on Saturdays they had a special film or two in the morning, then their regular rotation the rest of the day (usually a double feature per screen), and at least one midnight movie. For various reasons I could see movies for free there at the time, and so I spent one Saturday seeing eight films (though I might have snuck out to see one at another of the three other theatres within walking distance.)  After the midnight shows I went home and watched two more movies on television for a total of ten.  After which I was sick in bed for at least a week. 

There is nothing like seeing a great movie on the big screen of a movie theatre, and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to see many that way, either first run or later. In Cambridge especially, I had the additional experience of seeing directors and actors in person, along with their movies.  In Boston I saw an advance screening of what is now regarded as a masterpiece, A Woman Under the Influence, featuring an intense and heartrending performance by Gena Rowlands, and when the lights came up, there was Gena Rowlands standing in front of the screen, together with the director (and her husband) John Cassavettes. It was an amazing, almost ecstatic moment: the fulfillment of two fantasies--seeing someone step down from the screen into real life, and (a bit more prosaically) being able to talk to someone you've been watching immediately after the film is over (and I did get a chance, with a few others, to chat with them afterwards, in addition to asking questions in the public Q & A, with Gena Rowlands turning that full wattage sympathetic gaze directly on me.) 

 But seeing movies at home is also part of my history, and the small screen brought them to me early and often.  Though seeing films in the cinema is the ideal (I think of "Sullivan's Travels" in this regard),video also has its advantages, principally an intimacy with the screen and its images. Seeing these movies in childhood to adolescence, even if I didn’t follow the plot or notice the nuances, added a depth of feeling and experience when I saw them as an adult.

"The Grapes of Wrath" 1940

 It may be tempting to assume that in the first quarter of the 21^st century, the variety and availability of movies is so much greater, what with streaming to a home theatre or a computer screen or a phone, in addition to the residual technologies of cable, satellite and DVD/Blu-ray, with ever increasing resolution and augmented sound.  But I’m not so sure.

  There was a kind of sweet spot in the 1980s, with several premium cable channels showing year-old releases, while channels like Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Channel showed a catalog of old movies, as well as Bravo for a few foreign films.  Meanwhile abundant video stores provided individual choice (and catalogs of foreign language films.) One could buy movies on cassettes or tape them off the TV, and play a particular movie whenever you wanted.  All of this while repertory theatres showing classic foreign and American films still existed in cities and college towns. Those films form the basic cultural and visual vocabulary of movies. 

"Sullivan's Travels" 1941

But now those rep theatres like the Orson Welles are largely gone, as are the video stores.  Those are really big losses, in terms of the movie experience but also curation and availability.

 Meanwhile AMC and Bravo show fewer movies in favor of phony reality shows, and there are fewer choices on the fewer old generalized premium channels. Streaming is a hot mess, as the new and old titans duke it out, and whether you can see a certain movie depends on which services you’re paying for, and whether they are showing that movie that month. 

It's Alive! "Frankenstein" 1931

Even then you may wind up paying an additional fee to see a particular movie, and not just brand new ones.  And that’s if you can find it. It seems to be much harder to see classic films and foreign films just about anywhere than at any time since the 60s. 

 There are a few streaming services currently which show medium-old movies (roughly from the 60s onward) without an additional cover charge, but with commercials.  But how free is it, if you must pay a hefty monthly fee to get Internet streaming, then pay out for Amazon Fire or some such device? In addition to your viewing and listening hardware.  But back when there were four to eight channels on a television set, there were movies galore. And they were all free. 

TV and Me: Viewing the 60s

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

By the 1960s TV news was growing up, at least to some extent.  The Camel News Caravan disappeared in 1956, replaced by the Huntley-Brinkley Report, which became the dominant evening news broadcast on television (though for awhile, the sponsor’s name appeared prominently on the set.)

  With this competition, CBS replaced Douglas Edwards at the evening news desk in 1962 with Walter Cronkite, who had co-anchored the network’s 1960 political conventions coverage with Murrow.  About a year later it became the first half hour network news (fifteen minutes had been the norm), with NBC soon following, and fledgling ABC several years later.  Cronkite remained the CBS anchor until 1981, with his familiar closing: "And that's the way it is."  According to polls, he became the most trusted news voice in America, and his on-air analysis of why the Vietnam war was failing legitimized mainstream opposition; "losing Cronkite" and hence much of America allegedly became instrumental in President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision not to seek re-election.  

 The early 60s team of Huntley-Brinkley (Chet Huntley reporting from New York, David Brinkley from Washington) was famous for David Brinkley’s unconventional speech pattern and wry takes on the news, and for the “Goodnight Chet,” “Goodnight David” sign-offs.  The first Telstar communications satellite linking television transmissions from the US and Europe in 1962 led not only to an outstanding hit record by the Toranados, but a celebratory TV program with participants from all the networks—allowing Walter Cronkite to say for once, “Goodnight, David.”

 I was a big Huntley-Brinkley fan, and later when I did the late night news on our college radio station with an expected audience of near zero, I liked to amuse our station engineer by re-writing and reading wire service news stories with the cadence and inflections of David Brinkley.  Beginning with NBC’s coverage of the 1960 Democratic convention, NBC was my first choice network for news, the rest of that fateful decade.  

Grissom, Shepard, Glenn:
first 3 Americans in space

One continuing news story of the 1960s was the US manned space missions.  Launches of the first US manned spaceflights were covered live on television, and Americans learned to say "A-OK" and call the launch a "lift off" instead of the "blast off" of Saturday morning science fiction.  I watched Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom on their sub-orbital flights, and then John Glenn’s three orbits of the planet, all described and shown (within fairly primitive technical limits) on live television as they happened.  Later in the decade the Apollo missions were covered extensively, and the first human step upon ground not on Earth was seen (more or less) as it happened when Neil Armstrong stepped off the lander onto the Moon.  

The Kennedy presidency, it was said, was the first television presidency.  The first-ever televised debates of the 1960 campaign helped him get to the White House, and his televised press conferences became viewing sensations, demonstrating his knowledge of detail and his ready wit and ironic humor.  Kennedy sat for long, thoughtful televised interviews, with single reporters or groups of them in year-end retrospectives.  In these he talked about the institutional and practical limits of presidential power, and the challenges ahead—seminars in themselves.

 I absorbed every scrap and pixel of information I could about the Kennedy administration when I was in high school in the early 60s, and almost felt I was part of it. (I can still recite the members of the JFK cabinet, but not of any administration since.)  I had a world affairs column in the high school paper and maintained a world news bulletin board in a classroom. It soon became impossible to ignore that world anyway.

  Thanks to an official of the local political arm of the AFL-CIO who my friend Clayton’s father knew, we got to attend President Kennedy’s only speech in Pittsburgh in October 1962, officially as ushers.  Part of our responsibility was to alert Secret Service agents of anyone acting suspiciously. 

A few days later, President Kennedy saw surveillance photos of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba, and I was soon watching the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on television, along with the rest of the country.  In school one day I was reprimanded for being late to class, because I had stayed beside a radio to ascertain whether Russian ships were going to fire on American ships quarantining Cuba, giving us perhaps hours or even minutes before we would be engulfed in nuclear war.

 Months later in June 1963 I proudly watched coverage of JFK giving his American University speech, which proposed the first break in the escalation of nuclear weapons, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, with an eloquent case for the necessity of pursuing peace. Then the very next night I watched his powerful nationally televised  address from the Oval Office on racial justice (carried by all three networks), introducing the legislative ideas that would eventually become the law of the land in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

 And then one November Friday afternoon in 1963 we heard principal Father Sheridan’s voice announce over the public address that President Kennedy had been shot. After the next school period I was walking up the steps from gym class held outdoors, having almost forgotten about it, or convinced myself I would learn that he would be all right, when a student going down to the locker room told me that the President was dead.  That day I knew my life and the world around me would not be the same as it might have been, and I wasn’t wrong. 

To an extent it would be nearly unimaginable now, the entire nation was in shock.  There was nothing on television that weekend except coverage of the assassination, the capture of the suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, the preparations and then the funeral, with retrospective footage of JFK.  I watched it all, almost every waking moment.  I couldn’t even be pulled away on Sunday to go to church with my family, and so it happened that I was watching a live picture as Oswald was being transferred.  I jumped when I saw what I thought was a gun, but I saw then it was a microphone (you can see it in this screenshot.)  A moment later, a man rushed into the badly lit black and white picture, the crackling sound of gunshots, a glimpse perhaps of Oswald grimacing and crumpling, then rushed away, before I could be sure of what I saw.  What I’d seen, however obscurely, was a man murdered on live television.

 Until then I’d accepted television as a given part of my ordinary living.   But that weekend in November 1963 solidified it as a participant, wanted or not, in major moments of what turned out to be my life.

 By this time, I had served my short and tempestuous turn as the freshman editor of the monthly high school newspaper (at least Edward R. Murrow might have approved of me) and had joined speech club. After a couple of years doing my best JFK style ex temp speeches on various topics (lugging file folders of clippings and index cards down hallways of schools where we competed), I went on to debate, partnering with my friend Mike Krempasky. We won two district championships in our senior year.

  Because of all this, I was subscribing to and reading a lot of news and political issues magazines, and haunting the periodical room at the Greensburg library, with occasional forays to the college libraries at Seton Hill and St. Vincent.  As well as keeping up with TV news, commentaries and documentaries.

 I was reading in other areas, following my nose in areas of classic and contemporary literature. But these concerns with current events were regular activities. These interests and passions regarding the issues that TV news programs discussed to some degree, influenced some of the non-news television shows I watched in the early to mid 1960s.

 Once I started high school my viewing was more sporadic and limited—I had more homework, debate research and preparation and other extracurricular activities, and the semblance of a so-called social life (mostly related to school—football and basketball games, school dances, band concerts.) The speculative and melancholy mooning over girls took up their own infinities of time. So there were shows I watched when I found myself with the time and inclination, but there were others that I made sure to watch. 

There were two courtroom shows that featured characters that would become all but unknown in television thereafter: idealistic defense lawyers, fighting for justice. The Defenders is the better known, starring E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed, and written by Reginald Rose, a veteran of live drama anthologies.  It ran from 1961 to 1965.

 The other is more forgotten now as it was obscure even then: The Law and Mr. Jones managed just two seasons (1960-62) starring James Whitmore as a modest fighter for the rights of the little guy, espousing principles he quoted from Lincoln, Olivier Wendell Holmes and other greats.  I didn’t know anyone else who watched this series, and so it was my personal nurturance.

 For a year or so, The Defenders and The Law and Mr. Jones were both on, along with an early evening commentary show by Howard K. Smith, one of Edward R. Murrow’s protégés at CBS who was fired for expressing outrage at the conspiracy he’d uncovered between Birmingham, Alabama police chief Bull Connors and the KKK to beat up Black civil rights protestors. He moved over to ABC, where this commentary program was broadcast.  I made sure to see it, and its tenor seemed to fit into the same context as those two courtroom shows.

 

Beyond the courtroom, the struggle for social justice was waged by social worker Neil Brock, played by George C. Scott in East Side /West Side.  It ran for only one season, beginning in the fall of 1963, but I saw every episode every Monday night.   I was not only inspired and excited by the passion that Brock/Scott brought to injustices and inequities behind the tragic consequences he had to deal with as a social worker, but I learned a lot as well. His partners in these efforts were played by Elizabeth Wilson and the very young Cicely Tyson (the first Black woman in a featured TV role, a few years before Nichelle Nichols.) James Earl Jones was among the guest stars.

 Late in the series, Brock caught the eye of an ambitious liberal Member of Congress in the JFK mold (played by Linden Chiles), and Brock is persuaded he could do more good if he worked in his legislative office.  But the process is full of compromise and too slow.

Cicely Tyson, Scott, Elizabeth Wilson

  As far as I can recall, things were unresolved until CBS cancelled the show, sending the real life Scott on an epic drunk (according to someone who had worked on the show I met years later.)  I met Elizabeth Wilson in the 1980s and told her of my admiration for the show.  Also in the 80s, I saw George C. Scott in a production he also directed of a Noel Coward play, Design for Living at the Circle on the Square theatre in New York.  I was seated on the aisle in the top row of the steeply raked auditorium, and Scott made his entrance from just behind me—before I saw him, he shouted his first line directly in my ear. I was so stunned I missed most of the first act.

 The coincidence of these three shows in particular (The Defenders, East Side/West Side and The Law and Mr. Jones) during my junior and senior years of high school, when I was engaged daily with some of the same issues in interscholastic debate, were important to who I was becoming.  Shows like those, that explore real issues and model responses to them, are always rare.  The later years of Boston Legal came the closest to the approach of those lawyer shows, and to my knowledge there’s never again been anything like East Side/West Side.  One series much later that dealt with social issues but from the perspective of reporters was Lou Grant, which also renewed that Monday at 10 p.m. appointment.

 Viewing this combination of news, documentary and these shows concerning the law and social justice, together with whatever impressions I’d absorbed from those topical dramas from the Golden Age 50s, all informed the scripts I wrote that won National Scholastic Magazine awards, the ones that got me my college scholarship.  One of those scripts may have been a courtroom drama but the one I more specifically recall involved Senate hearings.  (Of course, of all the nonsense I saved from those years, these scripts are absent.)   

Nancy Ames

A somewhat related show came soon after. I had already assembled some friends to enact my own audio scripts of topical satire into a tape recorder when suddenly (in January 1964, when I was still in high school) there was a television show that did it all in a big way: That Was the Week That Was, a weekly satire on the news and culture, introduced by a song about that week’s events to the theme tune, sung by Nancy Ames, on occasion her blond hair swinging as she gently propelled her rotating office chair. 

 David Frost was the host, bringing a British edge to the satire by a group of regulars, which included Buck Henry and Phyllis Newman.  Burr Tillstrom (Kukla, Fran and Ollie) provided Emmy-winning puppetry, guest comedians included Nichols and May, Woody Allen and Mort Sahl; Comden and Green provided their music, and Tom Lehrer sang his subversive songs—so wildly popular later on campuses and record albums—such as “The Dance of the Liberal Republicans” and of course my favorite, “The Vatican Rag:” Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect.  Other guests included Roscoe Lee Brown, Steve Allen, Elliot Gould, Ann Bancroft, Alan Alda and Kim Hunter.   

Mostly my viewing was catch as catch can: watching Perry Mason and The Fugitive with the family, or a western (my favorites were Have Gun, Will Travel and Maverick, but only when James Garner was appearing.)  The family watched the Dick Van Dyke Show sitcom, which I liked when I saw it occasionally, and even more in syndicated reruns every afternoon in the summer.  Though I appreciated some of its formal deadpan humor, I never took to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Bob Denver's Maynard G. Krebs was funny, but I didn't dig him as a representative beatnik. I liked Tuesday Weld and Zelda.  I just really didn't like the character of Dobie.

  

 The one sitcom I made sure to see was Hennesey, staring Jackie Cooper as a peacetime Navy doctor at a San Diego base (1959-1962.)  It was gentle, human and humane humor, with a sweetly jaunty opening theme (which I can still reproduce.)  My old Dumont favorite Roscoe Karns was Hennesey’s irascible superior officer, and I had a crush on Abby Dalton, who played his nurse and love interest, and in the last season, his wife.

 These were my teenage years, so in addition to everything else I was listening to the latest music on the radio, following the top ten and the “Wax to Watch” on KQV.  I watched American Bandstand after school, and Dick Clark’s Saturday night show, as well as a local Pittsburgh version, “Dance Party” on Saturday afternoons hosted by disc jockey Clark Race. I once saw him so apparently enthused by the Marvellettes dancing and lip-synching to their new record, “Please Mr. Postman,” that he had them repeat it twice more. (These scenes take on a question mark with the revelations a few years later of payola.) 

By now - after 1957-- television had videotape, and programs were often, as they said, “pre-recorded.”  In addition to live interviews with kids and guests, and live dancing, the music shows of Dick Clark and imitators featured singers and bands miming to their records, before and after which teenagers danced to other records, and some of them were selected to rate a new record.  Their responses were almost always so much the same—“It has a good beat.  You can dance to it.  I give it an A”—that they might as well have been separately pre-recorded and inserted.  TV was moving farther and farther from live performance.   

 In the later 50s I had watched Your Hit Parade with my family, in which a half dozen regularly appearing singers did versions of that week’s hits.  It had been an important radio show, at one time featuring Frank Sinatra.  But after 1956 or so, half the fascination was noting the struggles that regulars like Dorothy Collins, Snooky Lanson and Giselle Mackenzie were having with rock and roll tunes, until the program, like an old soldier, finally faded away.

  The early 60s made a few attempts at live pop music programs but I wasn’t grabbed by any of them.  For a year or so there was Hootenanny to feature the folk music boom, but it never had very prominent acts.  Years later I learned the reason: the show was incredibly still obeying the Blacklist fears of folk performers like Pete Seeger, and because of that, the stars of the day like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary refused to appear. 

There were a few shows that everyone I knew at school watched and would talk about.  One was The Twilight Zone, especially its first few years. I can recall several of those shows even now, as probably others who saw them can.  Nuclear apocalypse was a frequent theme.

  Later there was 77 Sunset Strip, with its finger-snapping theme song, Kookie the hip parking lot attendant, and some decent detective stories with stars Efrem Zimbalist, Jr and Roger Smith.

 But in my high school there was one show that was wildly popular, at least among the students I knew, even though watching it would seem imprudent if not impossible, because it didn’t end until one in the morning.  

 It was the latest iteration of the Steve Allen late night show. No one disputes any longer that Steve Allen created the template for late night shows with the program he refined for local New York City audiences that NBC broadcast nationally as The Tonight Show in 1954.  At the same time he hosted a Sunday prime time variety show, which by the early 60s had moved to Monday and then Wednesday nights.  When that show ended, he immediately returned to late night. 

This show was produced through Westinghouse Broadcasting, and it so happened that its flagship station was KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh (the former Dumont affiliate as WDTV), so we had the opportunity to see it.  It was broadcast from an old vaudeville theatre in Los Angeles, rededicated as the Steve Allen Playhouse.

 I was too young for the Steve Allen Tonight Show (or for his successor Jack Paar), but I was a big fan of his Sunday show.  The Westinghouse late night show was even wilder.  Allen was a bundle of intellectual energy with a surrealistic edge. Sitting at his desk sipping orange juice, he theorized that some words were innately funny, because of their sound.  Three of his candidates were “smock,” “fern” and “creel.” Thereafter he might punctuate whatever he was doing by suddenly shouting “Schmock! Schmock” like wild bird cries, or seriously ask a guest, “How’s your fern?”  His fascination with words led him to play Mad Libs (filling in the blanks of a narrative with random words, and then reading the result) with his audience.

  Jay Leno later called Steve Allen the first modern comedian without vaudeville ties and schtick, but as this show proved he was also adept at creative and outrageous physical comedy as well as satirical skits and wisecracking commentary befitting the best vaudevillians.  One of his regular offbeat guests was the health food advocate Gypsy Boots, who entered by swinging across the stage on a vine.  

What Steve Allen could do that no other late night host did was play piano with his band and musical guests (mostly jazz)--and he did this frequently.  He was also a composer, and would challenge audience members to give him three or four numbers corresponding to notes on the keyboard, and he would use them to compose a song on the spot.

 When I interviewed him in the early 1990s in Los Angeles I referred to this game, though I suggested he used letters.  He corrected me, saying he used numbers. Until we were backstage at the 40^th anniversary Tonight Show (his last appearance, as it turned out) when he was chatting with comedian Phil Hartman who referred to the same bit, and also thought it was letters—so a thoroughly confused Allen mumbled, sometimes numbers, sometimes letters.  But much later I realized the source of my mistake—I had borrowed the bit in high school to dazzle female classmates, substituting letters in their names that matched keys for numbers to compose a rudimentary tune on the piano. 

The show was so popular with my contemporaries who really shouldn’t have been up that late that the class ahead of mine selected the Steve Allen Show as the theme of their class variety show, with Jerry Celia at a desk wearing his Steve Allen glasses, orchestrating the music and mayhem, including the patented Gypsy Boots entrance. 

This iteration of Steve Allen’s show—and a late 60s revival—were often cited as inspirations for the next generation of late night comics, including David Letterman, who shamelessly stole many of Steve Allen’s bits—that is, the ones Johnny Carson wasn’t already doing on the Tonight Show. I  remember as well that late 60s revival, being home from college in the summers and waiting all day to watch it in the silence of late night. 

 In the fall of 1964 I went off to Knox College in Illinois (carrying with me the Kenyon Hopkins album of his jazz compositions for East Side/West Side, and an LP of Steve Allen leading a jazz band, Steve Allen at the Roundtable.)  

While there I won a national college writing prize, again with a television script, but I never had a TV set.  I occasionally watched something on the big console in the student union (Star Trek, the Monkees) and caught some reruns in the summers (those same shows plus Get Smart, The Man From U.N.C.L.E), but during the school year there was far too much else to do, and other claims on my attention.

 Ironically perhaps, this was also when I became besotted with the writing of Marshall McLuhan, who proclaimed that television heralded an entirely different view of reality.  His insistence that the importance was not in the programs but in the medium itself was new to me, and pretty much everyone else.

 The only television show I associate with college was a few months of gatherings at a student apartment (either James Campbell’s or Bob Mizerowski’s) to watch the campy Adam West Batman series, after which we went out on the lawn to toss around a Frisbie (then also new and hip.)  Most of network television seemed dismal: the vast wasteland.

 Television’s potential power began to be felt immediately in the 1950s, but as television grew, it was the decade of the 1960s that opened more eyes to its still unfathomed cultural, societal and political influences and impacts.  John F. Kennedy was said even at the time to be the first television President, and Vietnam was the first television war (or “living room war” as it came to be called.) 

 But the profound and even shocking effects on political life and power became more striking and more ominous in 1980 when Ronald Reagan, known nationally as the genial host of television’s General Electric Theatre and Death Valley Days (brought to you by Twenty Mule Team Boraxo) was elected President.  Before that, Reagan at least had two terms of government experience as governor of California. But in 2016, a man with no governing experience on any level was elected President, his self-created caricature of an image having been burnished and elaborated on a nationally popular television reality show.  There’s a detailed study to be made comparing his campaign and presidency played on television, with the radio rise and reign of Adolf Hitler.

 Before the decade was out, television would make me witness to Vietnam and the antiwar demonstrations I didn’t attend personally, student uprisings on other campuses, and the out-of-body moment when we heard LBJ announce he would not run for President again (which at the time seemed to promise an antiwar candidate.)  

And more than a witness to horrors of Martin Luther King’s assassination aftermath, and especially Robert Kennedy—the speech in Los Angeles after he won the last and biggest primary of all, and hours later the news of his being shot, then many hours, days and nights, of the deathwatch, then the funeral and the funeral train. The coverage became surreal as reporters tried to find interviewees and so on to fill the time while Robert Kennedy's life was still in question, and one of the remaining unknowns was the alleged assassin Sirhan's first name.  I watched NBC's Sander Vanocur, on the brink of physical and emotional exhaustion, try to report the breaking news answer with objective gravity: his first name was Sirhan.  He was Sirhan Sirhan.

Then that summer the Democratic Convention and televised police riot in Chicago, cops smashing clubs on protesters, with witnessing crowds then chanting (for the first time): The whole world is watching!

 Even without these associations, I was more repelled than attracted by television in those years.  In the later 60s, as countercultural pursuits emerged to absorb my attention and alter my focus, television programs seemed even more out of it.  Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour were of some interest, but at least for a time, it seemed that while I’d grown up with television, I’d now outgrown it.  But there would be more to it than that. 

TV and Me: Early 1960s Growing Up With the News

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

Even the idea of 1960 was exciting.  It was the first turn to a new decade I’d consciously experienced.  Plus the newspapers and television were making it a big deal.  I saw a long TV documentary with a solemn-voiced narrator called “The Fabulous Fifties” that I taped with my father’s audio reel-to-reel tape recorder, and listened to several times after seeing it.

But it was the coming decade that promoted excitement.  Even the number itself—“60” being a pretty fast speed for an automobile.  There was a sense that it was a real change, the beginning of the future.

It was in some sense the beginning of mine—by the fall I would enter high school.  But in a larger (if related) way, it was associated with the rise of Senator John F. Kennedy and his campaign for President, at least for me and many others.  Kennedy represented youth (at 43 the youngest presidential candidate in history), new ideas, and the energy he called vigor (or “vigah” in his New Englandish accent.)  Republicans may have felt the same way about their likely candidate, Richard Nixon, who was himself only 46.  Both were contrasts to the 70 year old incumbent, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the victorious General of World War II, a generation in the past.

All through the year I followed the tense primary campaigns of Kennedy and Senator Hubert Humphrey, his closet rival for the Democratic nomination, especially in Wisconsin and West Virginia. I had first taken notice of national politics during the 1956 conventions, especially when I saw my mother watching the voting for a vice-presidential nominee.  The presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, had left it up to the convention, and Senator Kennedy was in the running.  That interested my mother because he was Catholic, and no Catholics since Al Smith lost in 1928 had gotten this far.  Once it was clear he would lose, I watched Kennedy give a gracious speech in favor of the eventual nominee, Estes Kefauver.  I remembered him thereafter.

So I avidly watched the Democratic convention in July 1960, the floor demonstrations for candidates and the last minute push to nominate Stevenson for the third time, before Kennedy won on the first ballot.  Then his acceptance speech outdoors in the Memorial Coliseum in LA, where he first talked about the New Frontier—not a set of promises, he said, “but a set of challenges.”  That was intensely inspiring and exciting. I tape-recorded that speech with the microphone in front of the TV and listened to it many times.

 That fall I organized some classmates into a Teens for Kennedy club, and we did some minor work for Citizens for Kennedy at their office, handed out some leaflets, once in the pouring rain with my two friends Clayton and Mike, who were also with me whooping it up during the election eve torchlight parade—possibly the last in a long tradition in Greensburg.

I was in high school for his November election day victory (staying up nearly all night with the returns on TV, catching the official victory in mid-morning), and in January 1961 I took a bus through a snowstorm to visit relatives in Washington for his Inauguration.  I knew what church Kennedy went to, and with some luck and pluck, attended the same Mass as the new President two days after the Inaugural, becoming one of the first ordinary American citizens to shake his hand as President.

 All of this meant I had more incentive to be reading the newspapers regularly (the Greensburg Tribune Review, which I had been delivering on several paper routes between 6^th grade and the summer before high school) and the Sunday Pittsburgh Press.  I was reading more closely the weekly magazines we got: Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Time and Newsweek. Most of all, I was watching television news programs and documentaries.

But then, I had always watched the news—why not? In the beginning the news was just another program to me, all fascinating to some degree. 

 And at Pittsburgh’s only station WDTV, the news was literally just another program—one of many 15, 10 and even 5 minute shows done live in the same studio for hours of each day when the networks weren't sending their limited menu of shows.  Programs set up on each of the studio’s four walls, and the camera moved from one to the next.  They all employed simple backdrops—even the news reporter stood at a podium with just a curtain behind him.

 And like any other program of the time, the sponsor was prominently identified, so these reporters—Dave Murray, Carl Ide, Ray Scott etc.—stood behind a podium signed by Duquesne Light (an electric company) or Fort Pitt Beer. And “the weather girl” wore a negligee because the sponsor sold mattresses.

 Like everything in local TV, how newscast operated was improvised on the fly, and if it worked, institutionalized.  I interviewed one of Pittsburgh most iconic news names, Bill Burns, when he was still on the air in 1980.  He began in 1953. For his first news shows, he went out to get the stories, came back and edited the film, wrote the script, and delivered the news.  For years I watched him do the noon news; when I interviewed him he was co-anchoring the local evening news with his daughter, Patti Burns.

 Another Pittsburgh TV reporter I watched do the noon news (for Town Talk Bread), was Bob Tracey, otherwise a radio announcer with an education in acting.  I met him in the early 90s, when he’d returned to acting for local theatres, one of which was doing a reading of a play I wrote. He was part of the cast--playing the news coming from the TV. In my play the television was a kind of character, with increasingly bizarre news reports inflecting the action. Besides hearing stories about the wild days of early TV news, I had the singular experience of hearing Bob Tracey's voice that had spoken to me through the TV when I was a child, reading these surreal reports I’d written in that same news cadence. (He went on to appear in several Hollywood films.) 

The biggest name in daily national news for much of the 1950s was John Cameron Swayze, who did NBC’s evening news.  (Even on this level, the sponsor was prominent—the name of the show was the Camel News Caravan, sponsored by Camel cigarettes.) His opening remains indelible: Ladies and gentlemen, and good evening to you—this is John Cameron Swayze, downtown. On the other hand, absent from my memory is his reported closing: “That’s the story, folks—glad we could get together.” That might be followed by a mention of his sponsor.

 Even though he wasn’t identified with a daily newscast, the biggest name in television news programs in the 1950s was Edward R. Murrow.  By most accounts, he essentially invented national television news and imbued it with disciplines and ethics, encouraging its practice as independent professional journalism (so there was soon no more Camel News Caravan or reporters pitching products.) 

 Literally born in a log cabin at Polecat Creek, North Carolina, and saddled with the name of Egbert Roscoe by parents who were Quakers and farmers, Murrow had a rural upbringing.  The family moved to a homestead in Washington state, where he participated in high school debate, played for the county champions basketball team and worked in a logging camp.  A student leader, he attended Washington State College where he became “Edward,” and came under the tutelage of the most significant mentor of his life, Ida Lou Anderson, his speech teacher.  His speech in favor of students learning more about world affairs won him the presidency of a national student organization.

 After graduation he held a series of administrative jobs with educational nonprofits in New York City before being hired by CBS radio as director of talks and education in 1935.  He joined CBS news also as an administrator, and as political crisis grew in Europe he was sent there to urge Europeans of note to broadcast to America on the network.  So as Hitler began making his first moves towards war, Edward R. Murrow had no formal journalism education or experience, and apparently hadn’t yet been near a microphone.

 But CBS had few correspondents in Europe, and responding to an emergency situation, Murrow had nobody to put on the air but himself. Broadcast news would never be the same. 

Murrow achieved his first sustained fame with his London broadcasts during the Blitz.  He was known for his vivid descriptions of what he observed.  His words were sent to America by shortwave radio, augmented for broadcast by CBS.  He began each broadcast with the words “This is London,” and ended them with something Londoners said to each other in hope of surviving the next bombardment: “Goodnight, and good luck.”  His former speech teacher suggested the opening, and encouraged him to continue the sign-off phrase—which he did for every radio and TV broadcast thereafter.

 Murrow's broadcasts from Europe earlier, and then from London were the first real time reports from overseas that Americans had ever heard. They were immensely popular. Still later, Murrow went on bombing runs from London to Germany, describing them as they happened, the bombs bursting below like “sunflowers gone mad.”  In 1945 He and his colleagues were the first American reporters to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp. In a voice of restrained anguish and anger, he was the first to describe the visible consequences of the Holocaust there. 

Back in the US in the early 1950s, Murrow eventually made the reluctant transition to television with the See It Now program. As was happening in early local TV, Murrow and his CBS colleagues were inventing the form of the news program as they did them.  Such experiments as interviewing ordinary people about race or ground soldiers in Korea during that ugly war in the early 1950s became standards by which later news reporting was measured.

 This pioneering program was the first to film the eye of a hurricane from inside a B-52 (with Murrow likening the sea below to an unseen giant ruffling a rug), and covered ordinary midwestern citizens, white and black, working to hold back a raging river.

 See It Now had a vast viewership, as did a lighter interview program Murrow did called Person to Person, in which he sat in the studio while CBS cameras were in the celebrity subject’s home, sometimes showing them moving from room to room.  It also was very popular, and innovative in its way.

 The climax of Murrow’s TV career is usually described to be the See It Now broadcasts in which he took on Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Communist witchhunt which together with the related blacklists had a stranglehold on American life.  It helped to end McCarthy’s career, if not McCarthyism itself. 

 I was too young in 1954 to understand the McCarthy situation, but I do remember watching See It Now (probably after the sudden prominence of quiz shows forced it out of weekday prime time to 5 p.m. on Sundays in 1956.) I also remember Person to Person, and the unique figure of Edward R. Murrow.

 In 1959 and the sixties, I was an avid viewer of CBS Reports, an hour long program that was See It Now’s direct successor, with some hours in the first two years featuring Edward R. Murrow.  And I specifically remember seeing the last one he did, broadcast in November 1960, called “Harvest of Shame,” witnessing and detailing the tragic lives of migrant farmworkers.  (CBS Reports also had that great theme music, a bit of Aaron Copland's reworking of "Simple Gifts" for "Appalachian Spring.")

 Migrant farmworkers in 1960 looked different than today’s.  There were some Mexicans legally brought in to work in West Coast orchards and fields, but the documentary mainly followed the migrants who began in Florida, were herded into trucks and buses to follow the crops north as they ripened ending in the summer in New Jersey.  These migrants were Black and White American citizens.  The documentary showed their poverty, horrific living conditions and poor diets, and contrasted their transport with the refrigerated trucks that carried the produce they picked, and the trucks that carried livestock, obeying stringent regulations of how often the animals were fed and rested. 

Migrants who got to New Jersey for a longer harvest season might enroll their children in (segregated) schools for the summer.  The documentary interviewed two or three children: one boy wanted to be a dentist, a girl wanted to be a teacher.  But Murrow informs us, neither will likely come close to these goals.

 Migrant children were as trapped as their parents in this treadmill of deprivation, forced to work in the fields at an early age.  Perhaps one in five hundred would finish grade school, Murrow said, and one in five thousand high school.  And there was no documented case, he said, of a child of a migrant worker graduating college.

  I have always remembered that one moment from this program: Murrow saying that no migrant child was known to have gone through college.  In my memory this assertion was accompanied by footage of a flight of birds.  That part of the memory didn’t make sense, but when I watched the program again recently, I saw that the flight of birds indeed did appear but a few moments later, when Murrow noted that the federal government spends more on migratory wildlife than on the education of migrant children.

  But I can understand why I conflated this image with the words about no migrant child ever completing college. I was looking forward to the possibility of going to college, which I viewed as being my first flight upwards to the possibilities for my own life. That migrant children were doomed never to have this opportunity frightened and saddened me deeply, and opened my eyes anew to the evils of injustice.

 It was documentaries like this one, plus coverage of the Kennedy campaign in the West Virginia primary, as well as my own observations on my paper routes in my own home town, that sensitized me to the presence of poverty. They led me a few years later to read Michael Harrington’s book on poverty, The Other America, which also deeply affected JFK. (Even before reading the book, I read Dwight MacDonald's long review in the New Yorker, which suggested that Harrington had even underestimated the percentage of the poor.)  In 1963 Kennedy reputedly told aides that the themes of his 1964 reelection campaign would be further steps beyond the limited nuclear test ban treaty, and addressing poverty.  This was the initial impetus for what became the War on Poverty in the LBJ years.

 Similarly, TV news and documentaries of the Civil Rights movement (I remember watching live coverage of the confrontation between Justice Department officials and Alabama governor George Wallace at “the schoolhouse door,” in which Wallace made his speech and backed away, allowing the first Black students to be enrolled in the university) merged with reading (especially James Baldwin essays) and personal experience, all resolved me to take the freedom train down to Washington and participate in the now famous (but then controversial) March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, where I heard Martin Luther King deliver his famous "I have a dream" speech.

 So television (along with reading and actual experience) contributed to both my fascination with politics and political issues on an intellectual level, as well as to my emotional response and motivation to confront injustice and make it right, make a better future. 

Time has shown that it takes more than televised exposure and political good intentions to right these insidious and recurrent wrongs.  Though the migrant children of today are more likely to be from Latin America and in the US on their own, they are no less caught in the treadmill of low-paying work and no time, money or energy for education.  The Dickensian violation of child labor laws in the US is apparently rampant, with thousands of children in the consumer supply chain.  And after some decades of incremental progress, the current and continuing rise of racism is obvious in any day's news.   

 In the early 60s I watched other documentary programs inspired by Murrow’s example, including the occasional NBC White Paper. There were many reasons that more news documentaries began airing then.  One of the more indirect factors was the quiz show scandal.

 In the mid-1950s a series of big money quiz shows dominated ratings and national attention: The $64,000 Question and its spinoffs on CBS, and Twenty-One on NBC were the most prominent.  But a few years later, rumors and charges that the outcomes had been fixed emerged.  A grand jury was impaneled in New York County, and took testimony.  When a judge sealed the jury’s findings, a congressional investigation eventually revealed widespread cheating and manipulation, resulting in public outcry and cancellations.

 The most dramatic case was that of Charles van Doren, whose run on Twenty-One was extremely popular.  As a result of his quiz show victories he was widely considered an intellectual giant.  I remember him being interviewed on a news program about the International Geophysical Year in 1957 (which I knew about from the little magazine we got in school), and asked if he thought the Russians could launch a space satellite before the scheduled U.S. launches in 1958. No satellite had ever been launched, and no rocket had reached space at that time.  He smiled indulgently and reassured the reporter that the Russian were far behind. Month later, in October 1957, the Soviet satellite Sputnik was circling the globe, well before the US was ready.  He’d been given the wrong answer.

  In 1959 van Doren finally admitted his part in the quiz show cheating.  Twenty-One, looking to increase ratings, chose him as their big winner, mostly for his looks and star quality as well as academic qualifications.  The quiz shows not only provided answers to him and certain other contestants, but told contestants when they were going to lose (so they didn't accidentally give the right answer.) They planned entire arcs or stories for viewers to follow, which they did.

 In September 1960 President Eisenhower signed a law making cheating on quiz shows illegal.  By that time the TV networks made a number of changes, including taking control of programs away from their sponsors, in part leading to fewer shows being sponsored by a single company, with many companies buying bits of commercial time.  Another change was an increase in network-created public service programs, including news documentaries.  

 Another reason for the number of news documentaries was the sense that networks as well as individual stations using the public airways had a responsibility to air public service programs. By our time now in the first quarter of the 21^st century, the idea of news as public service has all but disappeared. It's much more about ratings and money.  Similarly, big money quiz shows, absent for decades, are back.  Meanwhile, the so-called reality shows are as shaped and manipulated as any quiz show was in the 50s, with arcs and stories for viewers to follow, which they do.

 The manipulation of reality shows is public knowledge, though I don’t know how many of their fans know.  I also doubt that they’d care. For these shows exist in a media environment in which facts are routinely manipulated and falsified, and it appears that fact and fiction even in so-called news are no longer contradictory terms.  While opinion and ideology rule cable news channels, MSNBC for example may express a point of view in selection of issue and sometimes selectivity of information (though arguably this selection is based on importance rather than ideology), by and large it respects actual facts. That is not the case with FOX and its ilk—making up and selling "facts" while ignoring actual facts are essentially what they do.  This is the information chaos that infects television and the culture, further accelerated and normalized by social media, so the kind of public outrage over quiz show cheating that erupted in the 1950s seems pretty unlikely today.

TV in the 60s continued and concluded next time...