Two and a Half Channels

(Mr. Peabody's Way Back Machine)

Blogging has given people something else to obsess over and worry about, I think.  I read a blog entry by a talented photographer who is having a blogging crisis.  He refers to another famous photographer who blogged about his own blogging crisis.  I think they worry too much.  Nobody comes to a blog expecting to see a finished product, I think but rather, some junked up process that might have something funny or creative or useful in it amongst all the other stuff.  I'm glad they blog so I can see the bucket of snakes wiggle around.  I can see why I like what one of them does and why I don't like what the other one does.  It makes for a great day.  

A blog is a process, not a product.  For instance, I know I have written one too many boys fight scenes without an intermission.  And here it is.  

We got two and a half channels on our T.V.  I say half because one came from a town sixty miles away and so it was weak reception and always very snowy.  There were three networks, of course--The American Broadcast Company, The National Broadcasting Company, and The Columbia Broadcast System.  The snowy channel was a marvel to me, for I still believed in mysteries.  Many did.  Nobody, for instance, had yet given up on finding real evidence of the Loch Ness Monster, and almost everybody admitted to having seen "something strange" appearing in some night sky.  Yes, there were mysteries and half-seen stations were one of them.  There was an even stranger station that came in on a second dial that had to do with the first.  If you set the channel selector knob to "U", you could spin another dial that didn't click and sometimes faint images would emerge.  Some days I would fool around trying to pick up something odd, perhaps the transmission of some alien culture trying to communicate with the home planet. 

That is how my mind still worked in the midst of all the craziness, the girls pulling up their nightgowns while standing on chairs, the alcohol and drugs that were part of the underculture, the beatings given by boys both black and white, and, ultimately, the disintegration of the happy family life I had grown up with.  The mysteries of television were great.  

In memory, it seems that Johnny Weismueller was always swinging from tree to tree and that Charlie Chan and Sherlock Holmes were always solving mysteries.  These were things one could count on, just like the annual airing of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Moby Dick" and for some reason "Pork Chop Hill."  And I was still escaping into the Saturday morning worlds of "Sky King" and "Roy Rogers" and "Hopalong Cassidy" and "The Lone Ranger." I spent hours watching Wile E. Cyote trying to catch the Road Runner, and Elmer Fudd trying to catch that "cwazy wabbit."  At night, there was "Sea Hunt." 

All this mingling with the seemingly hopeless romance of love.  How does one hold it all together?  

Two and a half channels and one T.V.  We all watched it together.  We watched Walter Cronkite for our news and tuned in with everyone else for "Bonanza."  T.V. was a shared experience in many ways, for whatever we watched in the evening was replayed with friends the next day.  Two and a half channels.  

I remember the day we got the color T.V.  It was a big decision and my aunt and uncle went with my parents to pick it up.  But something went wrong, totally haywire, and before we could turn it on, my mother was screaming at my father and swinging her fists wildly.  Then she sat on the floor and cried.  My father walked my aunt and uncle to the car and I headed for the hills.  I guess I never liked the new T.V.  

It seemed that suddenly all the shows had changed.  Pow!  Kaboom!  It was Adam West's "Batman" in every color.  There was "The Wild, Wild West," with the evil little dwarf and his giant companion.  And then "The Smothers Brothers" changed everything.  It was more shocking than Johnny Cash's drug-induced performance of "Ring of Fire" on "Hootenanny"  (the vision of that performance remains vivid in my memory even today) and a hell of a lot smarter than the slapstick "Laugh-In."  It was 1968, and Bobbie Kennedy and Martin Luther King died on that TV.  Later that summer, Hippies were beaten in front of our eyes at the Chicago Democratic Convention.  And the half channel increased its wattage so that we now had clear reception on all three stations, two, six, and nine.  

And for the first time, I saw "Oz" in shocking color.