Category: Autobiography

When I was 4 years old, our family lived in Japan.

I have a vivid memory of a dark night when the maid took my brother and me out for a rendezvous with our parents. We stood on concrete steps outside a brick building waiting for them to show up.

Beneath the starless sky, almost at eye level, a neon sign emitted a glow of colors. I’d never seen anything like it. I asked our Japanese maid what it was.  It’s television, she said.

The year was 1952. Four years earlier, the first television stations in the United States started to broadcast. But Japan then was a primitive, conquered country. It would be years before television arrived. Our maid didn’t know what she was looking at. Neither did I.  For me televisions continued to be bright neon signs for quite some time.

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

True regular commercial television network programming did not begin in the U.S. until 1948. During that year legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini made his first of ten TV appearances conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra; Texaco Star Theater, starring comedian Milton Berle, became television’s first hit show. Since the 1950s, television has been the main medium for molding public opinion.

[Not to digress into weeds that might choke a winding river, but during World War II, Italian composer Arturo Toscanini’s daughter  Wally Castelbarco (friend to Russian-born actress Marianned Pistohlkors) and Allen Dulles (CIA director, 1953-1961) engaged in a ”forbidden” sexual affair in Bern, Switzerland (check the correct location and dates).  President Kennedy fired Dulles after the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  Following Kennedy’s murder in 1963, Allen Dulles sat on the Warren Commission. He died from complications of flu in 1969. Wally is the woman at the far left standing next to her parents.]

Like almost everyone else in America, our family missed the first seven years of broadcast television, including Toscanini’s series. I was born in San Diego in 1948, the year commercial television made its debut. At the time, Americans owned 45,000 television sets — three-quarters of them in the New York City area. (Americans owned 44 million radios.)  In San Diego, what few televisions there were lay locked, most of them, behind laboratory doors.

Mom and Dad didn’t buy our first television until 1955. I was seven.  By then we were living in Bethesda, Maryland where Dad worked for the National Security Agency. At the time, no one knew the NSA existed. It was television, many years later, that brought the secret agency to the public’s attention. 

Our first television looked a lot like the one pictured above. It was a magical box that, at first, we were not allowed to touch. Touching the television got us sent to our rooms, or worse. Dad delivered a painful nip with his finger to the back of any hand that dared to touch the keen knobs that controlled the TV’s mysterious features. But eventually, especially when Dad wasn’t around, the rest of the family, myself included, became adept at the controls.

The television-set broadcast two channels crisp and clear and one channel with a lot of “snow.” The picture was always black and white, and the stations went dead after 11:30 PM. Of course, we were all in bed well before then. Our parents wouldn’t dream of staying up later. They worked, after all.

After 11:30 PM each television station would display a graphic like the ones below and issue forth a loud hum or ringing noise.  Sometimes I got up way too early and would observe these mysterious symbols and their humming on all three channels. They reminded me of what we might see and hear if Russia attacked us with atomic rockets.

Our favorite shows were on early Saturday morning. In addition to cartoons like Mighty Mouse, we watched The Lone Ranger, the Howdy Doody Show, Buffalo Bill, and Captain Kangaroo.  

On weekdays after school, we rushed home to watch the Mickey Mouse Club starring Annette Funicello. I loved Annette completely. She was the only female Mouseketeer to have boobs.

Next to Marilyn Monroe — who everybody knew about but no one had ever seen (she wasn’t allowed on television) — Annette Funicello was the most desirable female on planet Earth at that time. But, by fourth grade, a terrible tragedy struck. Though not reported by television or newspapers (kids didn’t read newspapers, anyway), every child somehow learned that Annette had died from bubblegum asphyxiation — a tragedy to rival the Kennedy assassination years later.

Much later — in college during the 1960s — we learned Annette Funicello didn’t die. Media reported that she was alive and well and living somewhere in California.

The knowledge helped to ameliorate the pain of other deaths that were reported in the newspapers and on television back then — John and Bobby Kennedy; Martin Luther King; Malcolm X; Otis Redding; Jimi Hendrix; Janis Joplin; Marilyn Monroe; Che Guevara — and many others. Maybe it was possible,  just possible — we hoped against hope — someday, someway — we would learn that these unusual people didn’t die, either.

By my third-grade year, the biggest event in everyone’s lives was the night Elvis Presley appeared on television for the first time — on the Ed Sullivan Show. Everyone — adults and kids alike — dropped everything to see Elvis. Words cannot express how huge this event was in the history of America. Those who didn’t have a television went out and found one. The entire country watched.

Everyone knew about the controversial movements Elvis Presley made with his legs and hips — they were reported in all the magazines and newspapers — but no one could imagine what these moves actually looked like. We needed television to show us.

And what did television do? In a spectacle that would be repeated again and again for decades after, television dropped the ball and disappointed its huge viewing audience. The camera focused on Presley’s face and upper body. No one saw his infamous lower-body machinations. After all the psychic energy invested by everyone to finally learn the secrets of this unusual man’s success, television left us wondering.

Elvis sang a song that night we had all heard many times before on the radio: Hound Dog. Seeing the song performed — not just hearing it, like on the radio — was exciting enough to make most everyone forget about what they had missed.

You ain’t nothing but a hound dog — cryin’ all the time. You ain’t nothing but a hound dog — cryin’ all the time. You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine. When they said you was high class, well that was just a lie. When they said you was high class, well that was just a lie. You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine.

No one who experienced the magic of his television appearance could imagine in their darkest nightmare that someday Elvis would die, too.

On a brighter note: advertising revenue for the show set an all-time record; viewership set an all-time high. It seemed clear to all that television was here to stay.

Billy Lee