Me TV

Delivered as a Toastmasters speech

I was born a poor black child. My mother died a year before I was born, and my father a year before that. If not for Captain Kangaroo, Speed Racer, Ultra Man, and Johnny Socko, my early development may have been severely stunted.

I watched television a lot when I was a kid. In the Cleveland broadcast market of the late sixties and early seventies, there were ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates. There was a PBS Station, and there were two independent UHF stations, 43 and 61, back when having a station number greater than 14 meant that you had to hit the little button and turn the big knob, which sounds dirty but it isn’t. There was also Channel 23 out of Akron, but nobody gave a good crap about Akron.

Channel 61 had near mythological status. On Saturday nights, they would show a scary, bad movie hosted by Ghoulardi. I never got to watch it because I was the little kid in the family, but, on Sunday morning, my older brothers would tell me about the bad, scary movie and Ghoulardi’s weird, commercial break antics.

After Ghoulardi went to Hollywood to make his fortune as an announcer for network television, he was replaced by “The Ghoul”, a cross between a late-night creep show host and a drugged-out clown.

Channel 43 dominated the after-school, latch-key market. There would be shows of Merrie-Melodies cartoons, the Three Stooges, and Hanna Barbera cartoons, sometimes hosted by The Ghoul, stolen from the enemy. I believe this catering to young minds was part of a conspicacy between parents and school administrators and Channel 43 to incentivize children into hurrying home. Then the main course: Gilligan’s Island, followed by either McHale’s Navy or F-Troop. To ease us into the period when parents might come home, there were alternating visions of family, with the Flintstones, Andy Griffith, or the Addams Family. Although it was the Flintstones that most accurately captured true human emotions and relationships.

But the competition from Channel 61 forced change and provided choices. Rocky and Bullwinkle was up against Yogi, Booboo, and Huckleberry Hound. We had Batman opposite Bewitched. All the Batmans were good, but those with Julie Newmar were the best. And Bewitched was only Bewitched when Dick York was Darren. We might have Flipper and Gentle Ben back-to-back on one station, offering the Florida connection, versus Gomer Pyle and I Dream of Genie with military maneuvers that only Hollywood could offer.

After dinner, Channel 43 owned the seven o’clock timeslot with alternating runs of Green Acres and Hogan’s Heroes. They didn’t mess around with just one, but would show two in a row, back to back, slamming through every episode in a matter of mere months. Hogan’s Heroes was my favorite—perhaps I was subconsciously drawn to the sexual deviance of Bob Crane and Richard Dawson, or maybe I simply couldn’t resist strudel—so that I eventually memorized the dialogue of every episode, and recited the lines along with the actors, much to the annoyance of my older brothers.

Saturday mornings were, of course, special, with a full hour of Bugs Bunny cartoons on CBS. But there was a real problem after that with Scooby-Doo, Hong-Kong Fooey, and Inch-High Private Eye, all of which stunk. They were beyond awful. There was a brief respite with H.R. Puffinstuff, but, not being int psychedelic drugs at the age of seven, it mostly just weirded me out. It did have the benefit of making Kookla, Fran, and Ollie seem reasonable during the late afternoon movie.

My oldest brother instilled in me a great love of military lore by watching Combat, Twelve O’Clock High, and Rat Patrol in succession mid-day Saturday. My father, a former Air Force pilot, encouraged this by buying us military outfits and gear at the Army-Navy store in downtown Cleveland, and my brother would change uniforms for each show.

Late Saturday afternoons, I would fall into a western fantasy of Maverick followed by the Wild Wild West. The joy I found was short lived, as this was followed by Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw, shows that my parents liked to watch. Watching Saturday evening television became a bad habit of mine as later I was trapped into watching The Love Boat and Fantasy Island with them as well. However, this explains my love of accordion music, bad jokes, and Charo.

Sunday mornings were a living hell for a kid like me. We had the Popeye Hour at seven a.m., but then it was Davey and Goliath, those boring, moralizing clay things. It almost made me look forward to Sunday School and church.

Television contributed greatly to my family’s love and cohesion. After church on Sunday, as we ate the noon meal in our small kitchen, we watched Polka Varieties on the small black and white television jammed on a shelf, and my mother would screech in joy when she recognized one of the dancers. My father and I were devoted fans of the Rockford Files when it was shown nightly on syndication. The whole family gathered together as a group to watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart juggernaut. We probably did other things together as a family, but I don’t remember any of them. I know we watched sports on television together as a family, but, being Cleveland fans, there isn’t much to remember.

Later in my youth, I convinced myself that all that television was bad, and that, a century ago, people would go to church, read the bible for entertainment, and quote scripture in their day-to-day lives. But I now realize that there was an equal amount of inane entertainment throughout mankind’s history, be it stoning and crucifixion in biblical times, the conflagration of witches and heretics in the dark ages, and the hanging, drawing, and quartering of criminal and political prisoners starting in the renaissance and continuing through the reformation.

Some people believe that television is the bane of civilization, but I counter that it was two thousand years without television that culminated in the violence of two world wars, genocide, and the National Hockey League. I now believe that television, although an opiate of the masses, may be our one true salvation. I believe that once HDTV is widely available, there will be peace on earth. And I for one welcome the promised land in full, living, technicolor.

Mickey Hadick

September 2005