Television II: "Uncle Miltie"

We bought our first television set in 1949, a 12" Pilot set with an analog sliding dial like a radio. To this day, I tend to visualize the channels 2 through 13 in the positions in which they appeared on that dial in two vertical rows, 2,4 & 5 in the first, 7, 9 11 and 13 in the second.

One of my earliest and most vivid memories of television was "Uncle Miltie". I usually went to bed after listening to "The Lone Ranger" but it became clear that something odd was happening on Tuesday nights. It seemed as though adults just stopped what they were doing to watch the Texaco Star Theater starring Milton Berle*.

It seemed that everyone we knew (who didn't have their own TV) would gather in our living room to watch Berle, trying to laugh softly so as not to wake the kids. I would sneak down the hall to watch, where they would find me an hour or so later, still chuckling in my sleep.

Milton Berle's impact cannot be overstated. It was a common sight for crowds of people to stand on the sidewalk outside appliance stores to watch the show through their windows. He is undoubtedly responsible for thousands of people buying their first television sets and bringing popularity to the new medium.

It's one of the first instances in which something heard on television became a conversational fad, like pitchman Sid Stone's "I'll tell you what I'm gonna do". Or Berle's "I live to laugh and laugh to live". Or "a committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours".

About that same time we bought our first car, a used 1937 Buick that was both built like and resembled a tank. It gave us additional mobility around Queens and Long Island, but wasn't a practical way of going into Manhattan. Parking in town was simply too difficult and expensive. The train was quicker and cheaper and, for me, a lot more fun.

I had several landmarks along the way, but my favorite was always the neon Goodman's Egg Noodle man. Manhattan was always the center of my universe; when I saw the Goodman's Noodle man, I knew I was halfway there.


* Milton Berle was reputed to have the biggest cock in show business, a fact widely attested to by those who knew him in vaudeville. But when television made him its biggest star, a rivalry developed between east and west coasts, between television and the movies.

The west coast champ was said to be Forrest Tucker, whose cock was known as the 'Super Chief'. A contest was proposed to settle the matter, but Berle was reluctant given his new fame and that it might embarrass his beloved mother. Buddy Hackett is attributed the best line about the matter. He told Berle that he completely understood, suggesting that he "just take out enough to win".