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 2 – The 50’s

Prototype Boomers were gangly kids in the 50’s, and we learned current events from Movietone News at the Saturday afternoon serials of Lash LaRue, Roy Rogers and the Durango Kid (my favorite). How current could the Movietone News be, I wonder?

By the time it got produced and distributed, it was downright historic by today’s real time standards. Nevertheless, from that media I learned that Joseph Stalin had died. When I told my mother, she refused to believe me, and she bought a newspaper everyday for a nickel from the neighborhood drug store. I guess by 50’s standards, Movietone was about as current as it got. Or my mother bought really old newspapers at a discount.

The 50’s have always been remembered with disgusting nostalgia, at least by pre-Boomers. But I know the truth because my brother was a leather-jacketed, motorcycle-booted, high school greaser who firmly believed along with his peers that there was no place in civilized society for anyone with good grades. Today, those people wouldn’t miss a class reunion to save their lives. Curious. The 60’s generation of kids can’t even remember where they went to school.

Anyway, back to the 50’s where us grade schoolers were taught to survive a nuclear attack by sitting under our desks. Can you believe it? Granted, desks back then were more substantial pieces of furniture than those plastic tray contraptions kids have today. They were made of steel and you could actually store things in them, everything from Crayolas to Lucky Strike cigarettes, depending on how warped you had become between the second and eighth grades.

The desk tops were made of real wood with ink wells (pits full of black stuff sucked up into pens to make them write) that featured years of carved graffiti, a Rosetta Stone that enlightened our path with the accumulated wisdom of all those who had gone before.

But as marvelous as those desks were, could they really protect us when the Russians dropped an atomic bomb on our school? C’mon, I was born at night but it wasn’t last night. On second thought, maybe they could. The military used to have soldiers observe an atomic blast shielded only by their shirtsleeves and sunglasses. They didn’t even have desks with tops that could tilt up and down. (I liked mine in the middle setting.)

Nobody in our neighborhood could afford an honest-to-God bomb shelter, but I remember someone who buried cases of liquor in a dirt cellar to ride out the holocaust. clearly a brilliant chap who, unfortunately, died before he could prove the wisdom of his plan. Fortunately, another kid and I discovered this treasure during our Saturday part-time jobs to expand the cellar. Thus began my training for staying stoned throughout the 60’s, a daunting responsibility, let me tell you.

God moves in mysterious ways. Real mysterious.

We Will Win

All rights reserved