Epistle 11 – Test Patterns

Once upon a time doctors and TV repairmen made house calls. Now, neither do. TV repairmen are extinct and doctors think they will be if the government has its way. Of the two species, the TV guys were clearly the more critical in the early days of television. On average, they showed up about once a month with their medical bags filled with nifty little pliers and screwdrivers and an assortment of vacuum tubes to replace the mysterious, dusty ones that burned out just before your favorite program. We watched with baited breath to see if the picture tube had flat-lined, the kiss of death for months of entertainment.

The geeks of that era actually took their own tubes to the neighborhood drug store and soda fountain and tested them on a gadget that was converted from an old carnival fortune-telling machine. I tried it once, replacing two tubes at $3.95 each that the gypsy said were evil, and I still couldn’t remove the snow storm from the screen. After another panic call to Harold, our friendly repairman who was now treated as a member of the family, the snow and the vertical flickering were restored through alchemy.

Thanks to his video voodoo, we were all overjoyed to turn on the magic box in time for hours of the test pattern instead of I Love Lucy. The TV Guide said there was boxing on Fridays, Gunsmoke on Saturdays, and Ed Sullivan on Sundays, but they were just standbys in case the test pattern went off the air. We didn’t know why our local station preferred the test pattern instead of James Arness as Matt Dillon—maybe someone thought the test pattern was a better actor—but to its credit, the station occasionally displayed a bit of creativity by showing us a disconnected plug with an entertaining “oops”. No matter, we watched anyway. Can you imagine what the rest of life was like?

At our house, we were blessed with radio until I was 10, so I was forced to use my imagination (which became extinct with the TV repairman), to see Matt and Chester clean up Dodge instead of hanging around the Long Branch ogling Miss Kitty. Radio also saved me from a life of crime because The Shadow and Jack Webb convinced me it did not pay. But then TV sets with grand cabinets and tiny screens showed up at the local appliance store and I began living on the edge, watching Crusader Rabbit through the shop window until my father placed two fingers in his mouth and whistled loud enough to be heard across town. Since we didn’t have a dog, it was my job to race back home.

How do we cope today with our desolation, our lives bereft of test patterns, dusty tubes and trusted repairmen in our living rooms? Maybe government bureaucrats will make house calls. I’ll serve them coffee on a TV tray while they take my blood pressure.

We Will Win

Epistle 3 – Elvis

I don’t know if Elvis is in the building, but even if he’s gone, I’m surprised he lived as long as he did. Adults in the 50’s believed he was the anti-Christ, sent here to corrupt their fledgling Boomers with his long hair and swiveling hips that actually moved to the music. Can you imagine? Moving your hips to the music? Well, I never!

A guy named Ed Sullivan who had a live variety show for about fifty years on Sunday nights booked Elvis on the show. It was beamed out to millions on black and white TV’s (yes, children, black and white, it’s true!). Ed only televised Elvis from the waist up. Thank you, Ed. I’m a better person for it.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Elvis mumbled! After decades of teaching kids proper grammar and enunciation by whacking them on the head with a ruler, their hero mumbled! The youth of America was going straight to hell.

I’m not talking about the Las Vegas Elvis with the sequined white jumpsuits here. I’m talking about the real Hound Dog, side-burned, pre-army Elvis. The Elvis who deftly lead my brother’s crowd right down the drain, a rather short trip. The Elvis who challenged the Generation of Sacrifice with his rebellion . . . and WON! In a rout!

They could beat Hitler but they couldn’t beat Elvis. In short order they even started saying “I’m all shook up”, and wearing little belts on the back of their pants. I never understood the belts since they didn’t connect to anything—my first lesson that fashion doesn’t have to make sense.

In any event, Elvis was the first Boomer superhero. That’s why Boomers still park their overweight, high blood pressure bodies in overpriced seats to see some doofus impersonate him . . . sort of. You just can’t let your heroes die.

Need I now explain how pimply, awkward, prototype Boomers evolved into the bomb-throwing, revolutionary radicals or the flower power, long-hair, psychedelic hippies of the 60’s? Elvis taught us. If one man could stand up to our parents, surely the rest of us could reform the world, right?

Wrong. Nobody pointed out to us that Elvis also had charisma and talent. By the time we got to the 60’s, he had gone over to the dark side with his inane movies and Vegas act that met the establishment half way. We were forced to stumble forward on our own and tried to cover up our lack of talent, and good sense for that matter, with drugs.

For some reason that never seemed to quite work. I don’t understand how the world could fail to see our genius. Maybe we were just too far off the ground. My wife still has to yank me back out of the ozone now and then.

But the 60’s weren’t our fault. It was Elvis. And he’s still in the building . . . thank God.