When I was young, we had three channels and PBS, which we never watched because, of course, it was educational. We had one of the first televisions of anyone I knew, certainly in the neighborhood, if you could call it that — we certainly never did. We had neighbors, but we all lived along dusty, unpaved but graveled, West Holland Street, a name that very falsely conjured up a European ambiance. A neighborhood should consist of neat little white houses with sidewalks set on city blocks. This was not how West Holland Street was arranged. The houses were haphazard constructions of wood with asbestos shingles and tin roofs. There were no sidewalks, but rather ditches that were quite fascinating, really, after it rained, teeming with ditch-type wildlife, and there was generally a field of some kind, if only dirt, separating us from one another.
Our television was an RCA, a cabinet model, because that is all there was in those days. It was more vertical than horizontal, and it had cloth modestly covering the speakers on the bottom. Two large indentations, exactly the size of Mike’s two feet, were imprinted on the cloth which covered the speakers. Mike got into trouble a lot for laying in front of the tv and putting his feet there (and thereby causing the indentations), but Genna and I never did because even though we did the same thing, our feet were always smaller than his and fit within the imprints he had already made. Our family was fond of saying that Mike wore a size 14 shoe when he was 14.
The tv was in our den, which was very Leave it to Beaver of us — we were the only people I knew of outside of the television shows who had a room we called a den. It was an addition to the house that Daddy had built, and it was quite functional and efficient, being laid out as a rectangle. Our brown vinyl couch fit along one side, Daddy’s recliner sat to the back, and Mom’s chair was next to his, separated by a maple side table. Daddy’s and Mom’s chairs were exclusive, and woe to the child found sitting in one of them when Daddy and Mom wanted to sit there. We kids fought over who got to lie on the couch and who had to lie on the floor (which was uncomfortable when Daddy and Momma were there because you couldn’t put your feet up on the tv speaker cover).
Windows of louvered slats surrounded the two exterior walls of this room, and there was also an exterior door of the same type of window. These were notoriously energy inefficient, and in the winters, generally mild but with the occasional cold snap, you had to practically sit on the gas stove under these windows to get any warmth at all. It is a miracle that we did not catch fire ourselves and burn the house down years before it actually burned up all by itself.
There was a door to our only bathroom at the narrow end of the den near the tv, and Mom, who was embarrassed to admit to bodily functions, put up a homemade wooden screen so we could modestly disappear around there and no one would know for sure whether we were going into the bathroom or into their bedroom. It was, however, quite difficult to pee quietly enough in the bathroom to avoid being found out where we really were and what we were really doing, so it wasn’t uncommon to surreptitiously twist the volume up a tad on the television as we slipped by the tv on the way disappearing behind the screen.
When I was young, Daddy liked to watch the fights and Friday Night at the Movies and Walt Disney if there was a nature documentary on. We watched what Daddy watched. Fighting over what to see was never an option; the only thing we fought about was who had to get up to change the channel when Daddy decreed it was time to do so. We watched the news without fail every night. We watched the Real McCoys, the Rifleman, Jackie Gleason, the Dick Van Dyke show, the Andy Griffith Show, Gunsmoke, and the Twilight Zone, and would occasionally get to see the Ed Sullivan Show, especially if the guys were on that balanced the spinning plates on poles or the guy was on who painted lips on his hand and threw his voice (“Sallight? Sallight”) or if Victor Borges was scheduled. Daddy usually would go to bed early, thankfully, where he would read Western magazines until he fell asleep, and as soon as he left the room, we could watch other things. Momma would sometimes get her way to watch the Art Linkletter show. Genna would sometimes get her way to watch the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Bonanza, and the Lawrence Welk show (she was an expert at imitating Lawrence’s accent and not only could tell the Lennon sisters apart but could sing all their songs). Mike, by this time, had lost interest in the television. I never counted in the votes cast on what television shows we would see in the evenings, but in the mornings, the tv belonged exclusively to me, and I was a huge fan of Captain Kangaroo and his sidekick Mr. Greenjeans. I also had Saturday morning rights, which I sometimes shared with Mike, when we would watch the Lone Ranger, although Genna would claim title to the tv on Saturday afternoon when American Bandstand came on, and even Daddy had no control if the Miss America Pageant was on. The only time Mom got really insistent about what to watch on tv was at Thanksgiving when the Rose Parade came on.
By the time I became a teenager, Mike and Genna had left, and Daddy had started to “work late” on a regular basis, leaving channel surfing to me. We had, by this time, acquired a color television, again, the first family of anyone I knew who had upgraded to this latest wonder. Mike was gone, and anyway, the speakers were located in a different position on this model, so there were no footprint indentations anymore. My favorite shows by then were the Man from U.N.C.L.E. (David McCallum was the cutest guy ever), Hogan’s Heroes (which I could only watch in secret because Daddy did not believe that anything at all about World War II was funny), Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, and I Dream of Jeannie (the latter three Mom looked down her nose upon because they were, in a word, “silly”). But more than anything, I loved Batman, a show I nearly always missed or only got to see the end of because of its unfortunate time slot: 6:30 p.m. on Wednesdays. If you grew up in the weekly newspaper business, you know immediately the significance. That is the time when the paper is being put to bed. Our house was a 20-minute drive from the shop, and I’d start my weekly whining with Mom at about 5:30, but it was rare the evenings we would leave the shop by 6 o’clock. Watching Batman was my holy Grail, and it was often denied me. I was a disadvantaged child.
The biggest television-related event in our history, though, was when Channel 7 built its tower near Redfield. Before that time, we had received Channel 7 in a snowy fashion. Afterward, not only did our reception clear up, but our relatives clear down in El Dorado could pick it up. The tower, for at least 15 minutes or so, was the biggest structure in the world after it was built, and Daddy would sometimes drive Mom and me up there on Sunday afternoons to see it in the midst of construction. He would point out that it was so high that you couldn’t see the tip of it in the clouds. I could imagine the mortal danger of the construction workers as they moved higher and higher on the tower to add one row of supports and then another, and then yet another and another still, but we never went up there on weekdays when they were actually building it because Momma and Daddy also had to work. (I do not recall Mom or Daddy ever taking a day off work for any reason, except Mom would take a couple of weeks off every other summer to take us kids — later, just me — to California to visit her family.)
Richmond Narratives 