Television

It was about that time (the late 1940's) we were first exposed to television. I had been listening to radio for years but, although many considered television a fad, it would soon change all of our lives.

My favorite radio shows had been "The Lone Ranger", "Superman"*, "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon" (I can still hear the theme music), and "Treasury Men In Action" as well as comedies like "Ozzie and Harriet" (with actors playing David and Ricky) and "Fibber McGee and Molly" ("don't open that closet, McGee!"), most of which later made the jump to TV.

Most of the great radio stars, with the notable exception of Fred Allen, would make a successful transition to television. And television would create new stars as well, like Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason and Sid Caesar. But the great thing about radio was that your imagination was still engaged, more like reading a book than watching movies or television. They called it "theater of the mind".

Jack Benny is supposed to hold the record for 'the longest laugh in radio', something like forty seconds (an eternity in any broadcast sense). His tightwad persona (although not at all the man himself) was already well established when we hear him walking down a dark alley when a thug sticks a gun in his ribs and says, "Your money or your life". Silence. (He's thinking it over.) The laugh builds... and builds... and still he says nothing and the audience roars. Still funny seventy years later.

But at Christmas 1948, the Wagner's, our neighbors across the hall in our apartment in Jackson Heights, bought a television set. It was a big wooden box with a round picture tube. The picture was (naturally) black & white and required a good deal of fiddling with the 'rabbit ears' to get decent reception even though we were in direct line-of-sight with the transmitter atop the Empire State Building.

Living in New York, we had television from its infancy, before most of the country and therefore most of the world. Rooftop antennas were beginning to sprout in our neighborhood as early as 1947.

Our neighbors were incredibly generous with their television. Each weekday afternoon they would let me watch "Uncle Fred's" cartoon show on channel 13 which consisted of crude 1930's animations of some poor bastard named Farmer Gray being tormented by armies of sadistic mice. I realized years later that I was among the first commercial television viewers in history.

* Did you know that Bud Collier, the natty, bow-tied original host of "To Tell The Truth" was the radio voice of Superman?