From 1950 to 1980, before the personal computer revolution and the birth of the Internet, a vigorous and pervasive paper media flourished in America. The underground press — as it was called then — included not only thousands of newspapers, but literary gazettes and alternative periodicals.
Hippie Rescues Drowning Child. Michigan legend, Denny Preston, illustrated this famous cover from the Underground Press.
Historian Ken Wachsberger is now working with libraries and publishers to find, rehabilitate, and digitize hundreds of underground publications that otherwise will be lost to history as they decay to dust in closets and basements across America.
Not on my watch, Kenny has pledged.
Historian Ken Wachsberger is the Director of the Digitizing our History Project
The task is enormous. [ click on link above to see how big ] The number of publications is in the thousands.
The underground press got its energy from millions of people who opposed war during a period when the United States raged racist wars in countries like Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Countless men and women of conscience opposed segregation in America; they dedicated big chunks of their lives to helping our country come to grips with its sordid racial past.
The underground press injected energy into a cultural revolution that brought hope to women, gays, racial minorities, the poor, the disadvantaged, and the physically and mentally challenged.
During the thirty years between 1950 and 1980 the underground press brought a fresh point of view, which changed not only America but the world. The earth became a better place to live for hundreds of millions of people who had been burdened and locked-out by discrimination and prejudice — the ravages of war and scarcity — brought by the greed and power of men, mostly, who didn’t give a care about who they hurt.
Today it seems like if it’s not on the internet, people think it never happened. If a PDF, Word file, blog, or web-site doesn’t write about it — or a YouTube video doesn’t feature it, people give up looking for records from past that exist only in the memories of folks too old to understand the internet enough to preserve their experience for the folks who will come after.
The risk to everyone — to the people who lived and suffered these changes — is that everything the smartest generation learned and accomplished will be forgotten.
Civilization will slide back into old the habits and ways that have wrecked society after society over the entire history of humankind. The politics of exclusion will push back the politics of inclusion. Peace will give way to war. Open and free-living will give way to gated communities and a fortress mentality.
The lessons learned from the struggle to save America will be lost, and our country will have to relearn them, at great loss to our national momentum toward a better life for all. Should totalitarianism take root, freedom will disappear, forever.
It’s a risk every thinking person is wise to take seriously.
The project to digitize the legendary past is big and important. I am grateful to Ken Wachsberger and his team for the effort they are making to save our history when so many seem ready to put it behind at great peril to future generations.
If might makes right, America is the most righteous nation to ever exist.
Most Americans — if asked before 911 — would say that nothing is wrong with America. America is where everyone wants to be. People risk everything to come here. End of story. And by the way, if you don’t like it, leave.
The attitude of most Americans before September 11, 2001 was to willfully and blissfully ignore the many blunders for which the United States is renowned in the rest of the watching world.
These screw-ups include but are not limited to:
Codifying slavery in our Constitution (Article IV, Sec. 2)Southern States fighting the Civil War to preserve slavery.Conducting genocidal wars against native Americans.Depriving Negroes of their freedom after fighting a bloody civil war to give them their freedom.Permitting our country to slide into a Great Depression while doing almost nothing to fix it. (Free coffee and donuts?)Dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities.Killing 20% of the population during a senseless war in Korea.Allowing gangsters to run our cities.Unleashing a bloodbath of assassinations against politicians and entertainers in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.Executing foreign leaders (among them, Che Guevara, pictured above) while launching Bay-of-Pigs style military operations against small countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Chile.Conducting a genocidal war in Vietnam — simply to test a new generation of weapons. Jane Fonda, pictured above, was among the first who said it wasn’t right.Exploiting migrant agricultural workers.Overturning sixty years of tax law in the 1980s to allow undemocratic concentrations of wealth.
In 2001 Americans believed these idiocies lay in our past; our distant past. They were symptomatic of nothing; not worth noticing, analyzing or fixing. They had nothing to do with now. Nothing was going on now that we needed to fret about or repair. Like Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine, Americans could say, What, me worry?
World Trade Center Twin Towers.
In 2001 the Twin Towers came down. Buried in the rubble lay two-hundred billion dollars of 99.997% pure gold ingot (allegedly recovered).
The oil-rich Bush family‘s first reaction was to take the world to war. The ramp-up was egged on by profiteers, as war always is. And Wall Street insiders, under the cover of the War on Terror, began to deploy contrived financial instruments like bundled sub-primemortgage derivatives (which obfuscated risk) to better suck dry the deep pools of the world’s wealth unaware.
Blunders came fast and furious. By 2008 the leaders of the United States had made so many mistakes they created a financial meltdown. Millions of people lost their homes and jobs. The middle class lost fifty-five percent of its accumulated wealth — much of it in retirement accounts. The situation became dire, causing some people to believe God was punishing the USA for its sins.
Before he made his Nobel Prize winning run for the presidency, Barack Obama’s pastor was Jeremiah Wright. During the early years of Obama’s term, hundreds of retired Chicago police officers set up a perimeter defense around Jeremiah’s church each week to protect congregants from death threats. Obama eventually resigned his membership to protect from harm his friends-in-Christ. It worked. Over the years the threats decreased; the church survived.
People decided to turn around and do the unthinkable: elect the nation’s first black president. His pastor, Jeremiah Wright, screamed, the chickens have come home to roost, on all the news shows. Some people thought, maybe Barack Obama can calm down our angry God.
But as of 2014 — six years after the near-fatal financial meltdown — the USA continues to hover on the precipice of a Soviet Union style collapse.
It’s time to ask the question: Is something wrong with America? And maybe one more: Is somethingwrong with Americans?
Before we ask or answer questions like these, perhaps we should ask an even larger question. Is America a place where people have any chance at all to do well over time?
It might be that geography and geology on this side of the globe are not suitable for civilization or sustained human activity. Whoever lives on this side — whatever their values or culture — may, in the long run, not matter.
Historically, large populations of humans have been unable to establish themselves for long periods on our hemisphere.Hurricane Irene, 1999
The Americas have been inhospitable to humankind. Looking back over the eons, a case can be made — due to earthquakes, volcanoes, meteor hits, frequent ice ages, predatory animals, mosquito and insect bred diseases, droughts, floods, wild fires and hurricanes — that large populations of humans have simply not been able to establish themselves on our hemisphere for long periods; nor will they, ever.
This disturbing graphic is one artist’s depiction of volcanic eruptions 100 miles southeast of Yosemite National Park — now a hundred years overdue.
The United States endures, on average, a thousand tornadoes each year. This number is greater than all the tornadoes that occur in the rest of the world added together.
It wasn’t until 1920 that the population in North America reached a hundred million people. It is conceivable — under reasonably imagined scenarios — that the population of North America will soon collapse.
Some geologists believe the mammoth super volcano buried beneath Yellowstone National Park will erupt someday — perhaps soon. If they are right, surviving humans will have to start over.
Coastal shelf off Los Angeles, California
Other geologists believe seismic activity in the west may one day cause the loss of sizable portions of our continental shelf, perhaps precipitating a cataclysmic flood. Earthquakes in the Cascadia subduction zone have wiped-out huge swaths of our Pacific Northwest forty-one times during the past ten-thousand years. The next earthquake/tsunami is a hundred-and seven years overdue.
It is often said California is the eighth largest economy in the world. Should California or the Pacific Northwest slide into the Pacific Ocean, it would be hard for the rest of North America to keep going.
In addition to the deaths of forty million people, intensive seismic activity and floods could destroy California’s four civilian nuclear reactors (one active, but all storing dangerous quantities of radioactive waste) and the military’s nuclear sites, nuclear powered ships, and submarines. High-level radioactive waste would then pollute the Pacific Ocean and our coastal areas for many thousands of years (much like the disaster now unfolding in Fukushima, Japan).
The question of whether our continent is suitable to support an advanced civilization for more than a few hundred years remains to be answered. It’s not clear to me that it can.
But let’s return to the original question: Is something wrong with America?
Why does a country with our values do bad things? Why so much inequality, crime and perversion? Why so much addiction, pervasive drug use, bullying, child abuse, domestic violence and murder?
Why generational wars, gated communities, blighted inner cities, militias, and political extremism? Why concentration of wealth for the few and debt and despair for the many? Why the increase in home schools and private academies in a nation whose founding virtue was public education for every citizen?
Why so much hatred directed against a people whose only crime was hating slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the current hardships of discrimination in hiring, housing, health care, and policing?
Why can’t black people, for example, catch a break after everything they’ve put up with, from lynchings to (for one black man, at least) being ridiculed on national television for mispronouncing correct answers on Jeopardy?
When we ask questions like these, it seems clear (to me at least) that something sinister is wrecking havoc on our dreams and aspirations. Something fundamental about the way we think and problem-solve is not serving us well.
Europeans like to point out that Americans solve problems by selecting and working through all the wrong solutions first. It’s what makes us so sure we’re right, when we finally stumble on the correct solution.
But how about another view? We live in a country where powerful people once owned slaves. Industrial tycoons operated private militias to control restless employees.
We live in a country where an entitled, strong-willed aristocracy has ruled for centuries a population who believes itself to be free; a democracy.
Old habits of thought and action have been handed down from each generation to the next on both sides.
The powerful and wealthy have learned they can hire spokesmen (like Rush Limbaugh and Tom Brokaw, for example) to play on the fears, aspirations, and assumptions of common people to better confuse and seduce them into serving their interests. This manipulation of one class of people by another has led to a schizophrenic dynamic, which is one of the reasons people in other countries and cultures think Americans are crazy.
Possible future if we don’t secure our democracy.
The lunacy will not end anytime soon. It seems our country is determined to follow its aristocracy wherever it leads. History is full of examples of elites who — deluded, depraved, and out of touch — led their civilizations into the abyss. It’s why our ancestors invented democracy — so cliques of wealthy, well-connected power-trippers couldn’t harm us.
Alas, democracy is not a form of government the elites of the world favor. And we may have lost our democracy a long time ago. Perhaps we never had one. We simply imagined we did, because our rulers told us so.
Billy Lee
Post Script — 19 October 2017 — from the EDITORS:Nineteen months after the publication of this essay, Americans elected a self-proclaimed billionaire and entertainer who was unvetted as to his physical and mental health; unvetted as to his financial status; unvetted in his foreign entanglements; and who lacked any experience whatever in the art of politics.
He lost the popular election by eleven million votes to Hillary Clinton (3M votes) and third-party candidates (8M votes).
Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and Evan McMullen garnered the lion’s share of third-party voting.
The new president blamed his 11 million vote deficit on illegal voting by immigrants. He is now being investigated by the Justice Department and committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives for conspiring with foreign powers to rig the outcome.
He didn’t serve in the military, yet threatens to take America to war against Korea and Iran. Something is wrong with this picture. He is dismantling health-care and unleashing immigration pit-bulls like ICE on a population of young people who have no memory of having ever lived outside the United States.
It seems like an angry, racist pit-bull is loose in the china-shop. Maybe Billy Lee is right. If so, the United States is screwed. It really is. When this nightmare is over, a lot of broken glass is going to be lying around that everyone will somehow have to clean-up.
The good news? America has a way of surviving catastrophes of its own making. We’re good at managing unnatural disasters that we inflict on ourselves. Maybe to some the chances seem this time to be as low as one in a million.
Jim Carey said in the movie Dumb and Dumber, one in a million means we still have a chance. We might survive the mess of a failed presidency. It’s possible. Who knows? Many are ready to sit on the sidelines to “wait and see” what happens.
During WWII, millions boarded trains in Europe to travel to God knows where. What’s the worst that can happen? many thought to themselves as they watched German soldiers with dogs push families into rail cars.
Maybe waiting to see what happens is not the best strategy for survival..
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Note: On Tuesday September 24 2019 the House of Representatives opened an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.
If the United States divested the wealth of the 100,000 wealthiest Americans but allowed divested persons to keep one million dollars to sustain themselves, what could it do with the money?
The question deserves an answer.
The answer may surprise people. Some say the United States could completely pay off the national debt of 17.4 trillion dollars and run the government at current spending levels (5.6 trillion dollars per year) for the next five years. Taxes on everyone, including the wealthy could be completely eliminated for half a decade — until 2020.
Tools of a typical tax accountant: calculator; complicated forms; toy blocks.
As a practical matter, the United States can’t divest 100,000 of its wealthiest citizens — not without crashing the economy. And, sadly, information about wealth and its distribution is frustratingly opaque. Economists can’t trust what they think they know.
Nevertheless, the United States can put in place tax policies that lift the burdens of filing and paying taxes from the backs of the vast majority of citizens. It can easily pay for things like education, health care, research, and retirement while stimulating economic investment and growth. And it can protect our freedoms and egalitarian way of life from individuals who have sequestered an unreasonable share of our resources. (Read Capitalism and Income Inequality elsewhere on this site.)
This is the visible hand.
The wealthy, and those who support them, tell us that the closer a civilization resembles the natural order of things — that is, a state with the least amount of government possible — the better off that civilization will be. The invisible hand of free markets will enhance the destinies of all. Free markets, fewer taxes, fewer regulations — policies like these take the brakes off the economy and improve everyone’s lives.
Since we all plan to be wealthy someday, what could possibly be wrong with reasoning like that?
Bullies rule on unregulated playgrounds.
Well, for one thing, it ignores why folks create civilizations in the first place. In the eons before civilization, humans made little progress. Think of an unregulated school yard or imagine a jungle with no rules. What always happens? Bullies and predators end up running everything. The meek and the fragile have to hide or be eaten. Whatever ideas or contributions they might make to enhance the quality of life get lost.
It’s been like this in jungles and on playgrounds for as long as jungles and playgrounds have existed. It’s never going to change. It’s why folks need playground teachers and yes, civilization. With civilization we can organize ourselves. We can make rules to protect the weak and improve the lives of both predators and prey.
We know from history, it’s the powerful who create civilizations to protect their advantages. For thousands of years bullies in expensive garb have run the show on every continent on Earth.
Our nation’s founders said that all people were created equal before God.
Two-hundred-and-forty years ago something new came along. Our ancestors won a revolution. They organized a civilization that would eventually empower the powerless and give voice to the weak.
Yes, they codified slavery, because what else could they do? Africans had been slaves in America for a hundred years already. For a hundred-and-fifty years two-thirds of whites had come to America as indentured servants, a temporary form of slavery that ended, typically, after seven years of servitude.
The habits of history weighed heavily on our founders, and being unsure of their steps, they gave-in to the pressures of greed to better form the consensus that would permit the birth of something new in the world. And guess what? Our new-born civilization grew up, matured and ninety years later ended slavery in the United States of America.
Earth needed a new way — a way based on the dignity of people, their rights before God, their need to be free from humiliation by others more powerful and crafty than themselves. They needed a new kind of civilization, and our founders found a way to build it, blemished and imperfect as it was.
It took time; it didn’t happen overnight. I was twenty years old before black folks got the right to shop freely; to buy a soda in a drugstore; to buy a house; to get a loan. Maybe two-hundred years seems like a long time for a constitutional republic to get serious about freedom for individuals and families. It is a long time. We might as well admit it.
The flag should stand for what is right, just, and fair. It is the symbol of our civilization.
Today, as the civilization we built slides into the shadows of an unregulated jungle, people need to stand up and shout, No! This can’t be right. In a civilization built by hundreds of millions, we can’t let a few thousand of the most clever humans sequester twenty-five percent of the wealth. It’s an unreasonable reward for cleverness, and it’s unfair.
Why did our ancestors build the civilization we call America? Why did they take hundreds of years to shape and change our way of governance?
It’s because they intended to make America succeed for everybody. I’d like to believe that they didn’t want it looted and plundered by the powerful. They didn’t intend for average people to be “gated” out of the desirable places to live, or for the disadvantaged poor to be locked away to rot deep inside our inner cities.
We still have work to do. The work falls on each generation to make the world a fairer, safer, more loving place for every person who lives and breathes.
Thomas Piketty was an instructor of economics at MIT during the 1990s; he is the founder, Paris School of Economics; Director, Department of Social Sciences, Ecole Normale Supérieure; and Director of Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Fortunately, America has allies around the world ready and able to help do what’s right, if we only listen. One is Thomas Piketty, the French economist.
I’m excited about this book. Many reviewers say it’s important. It is the culmination of years of research by a brilliant scholar. It presents, I’m told, a paradigm shift in thinking about the problems economies have delivering fairness to average people.
If Piketty’s book strengthens the courage of economists in the United States to speak openly about the touchy subject of inequality, he will have done our country and its people an enormous favor.
Gold jewelry and coins held in an overseas bank.
The United States, though proud of its wealth, seems to go to great lengths to under-report it. It’s primary focus is to collect taxes, I guess.
Assets not subject to taxation hold little interest for government accountants. The Feds limit their count to households and tell us that our total wealth is 54 trillion dollars. Other economists say it is higher — maybe as much as 188 trillion; they include in their tally many assets not normally taxed.
The subject of how wealthy America really is — who holds the wealth and in what amounts — is murky at best. According to John Cassidy, Thomas Piketty’s call for households to declare their net worth and be taxed on it will provide the reliable statistics needed to un-muddy the waters and enable policy makers to fashion the sound and fair tax policies required to protect the benefits of civilization for everyone.
Billy Lee
Post Script:Billy Lee advocates for a standard of maximum personal-incomes and estate-sizes established by the United Nations as ratios pegged to each country’s minimum wage. Violations would be treated as felonies by international courts.
Billy Lee’s proposal and some of its economic and moral advantages are described in the article, Capitalism and Income Inequality. The Editorial Board
Here is an excerpt from a 1975 resume about my experience in the nuclear power industry:
Engineering Technician at Ingersoll-Rand Company. Designed and serviced pumps and condensers for nuclear power plants; assisted engineers on service calls; toured and worked inside nuclear power plants; trained in construction and operation of nuclear power plants.
I didn’t last long at Ingersoll-Rand before they fired me for incompetence. But during the six months before my meltdown they sent me inside nuclear power plants to learn how to operate and maintain the pumps and condensers used to move and cool liquids inside the plants. Under the supervision of licensed nuclear engineers I learned how to inspect and fix pumps — some of them the size of little houses.
The plant executives had the habit of inviting visiting engineers and technicians to lunch, where their supervisors would present short overviews of plant operation, describe safety features, and speculate about the future of nuclear energy in the United States.
They promised that the government planned to approve the construction of a thousand nuclear power plants by the year 2000. The facilities would be “fail-safe” due to their many redundant safety features. As it turned out, their enthusiasm was misguided.
As of today, 438 nuclear power plants have been built in the entire world. The United States operates 61. The safety record is abysmal.
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown in March 1979 — twelve days after Michael Douglas released the movie China Syndrome. The meltdown catapulted the movie to international success as people struggled to understand what happened. After the accident, cancer rates within ten miles of the plant increased 64% according to a team of Columbia University researchers.
Currently, there are 30 operating nuclear reactors at 12 generating stations on 11 sites in the Great Lakes basin. Almost all are located on the banks of our great fresh-water lakes. Radioactive waste-products are stored in cooling-ponds at each of these sites yards away from the purest fresh-water on planet Earth.
Highly radioactive, spent-fuel rods are collected and dry-stored at Chicago’s Lake Michigan Zion facility, which experts warned in 2015 pose risks not only to the Great Lakes but to the entire region. The lethal dry-storage facility and the contaminated ponds at power-plants located on the shores of the Great Lakes grow in size and radioactivity year after year after year.
Editors note: On 25 October 2016, Energy Solutions announced that the Zion plant is 88% shut down and that all of its high radiation fuel rods are now contained inside an on-site ISFSI (Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation) where they will remain until someone figures out what to do with them. The entire facility is scheduled for closure by January 1, 2027 at a cost of 1 billion dollars.
We are one earthquake away from catastrophic contamination of up to ten percent of the world’s freshwater supply.
31 people died at the Russian Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in April 1986. Today the number of deaths stands at nearly 100,000. The plant released 400 times the radioactive material of the bomb dropped by the USA on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Authorities evacuated the city; it remains uninhabited. Click this link for a drone-video of the site.Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan experienced catastrophic failure during the March 3, 2011 tsunami, which swept away nearly 20,000 people. The accident irradiated over 300 workers and killed six. The site will never recover.
Editor’s Note added 3-11-2021: The Japanese government announced this week that 3,775 people died during the past decade from health problems caused by what officials now admit was a “triple meltdown” at Fukushima. 41,000 remain forced to live outside their hometowns.
Several districts near the plant continue to be off-limits to everyone. The government hopes to decommission the power plant by 2051.
The ruined facility houses 900 tons of highly radioactive debris and 1.2 million tons of radioactive water that must be removed and isolated before the plant can be safely closed. The coronavirus pandemic slowed progress at the site, according to NHK News.
Anyway, after the lectures — which were accompanied by short films and slide presentations — executives opened the sessions for questions from the audience. I was one of those nerds who believed they were serious so I did ask a lot of questions. (I was a pontificator even then).
I asked: What is the half-life of the radioactive waste produced in this plant? Where is waste stored? How much of it will this plant produce over the next 30 years? What happens during an earthquake? How are meltdowns prevented? What are the consequences of operator errors? What happens when the plant gets old and comes to the end of its useful life?
It wasn’t long before my supervisor called me into his office and advised me to keep my questions to myself and do my job better. But it was not to be. I learned a life lesson: when the boss tells you to be quiet and just do your job — hold on to your hat. It’s too late. You will be fired as soon as the permissions and the paperwork are done.
Maybe I was incompetent. I don’t know. After being fired I went into counseling for depression. I re-entered MSU and studied mathematics and electrical engineering. I ended up designing machinery — mostly in the food and beverage industry — until I retired six years ago in 2008.
Everyone uses tear-spout coffee lids on foam coffee cups. Folks drink their coffee without removing the lid. Yeah, I designed the first one and the tooling to produce it; it was a team effort, of course. Everyone buys orange juice and milk cartons with tamper-proof safety caps. Yeah. I did those too. I share a patent, which proves it.
What am I most proud of? I didn’t design a damn thing on that Fukushima disaster, which is contaminating the Pacific Ocean and its fish stocks, perhaps to the end of time.
Billy Lee
NOTE from the EDITORIAL BOARD:In May 2019, HBO released its award nominated series on the Chernobyl disaster of April 25, 1986. The producers speculate that up to 93,000 Russian citizens died in the aftermath from radiation poisoning. The video below is a promo of the series.
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.
The neon sign emitted a bright glow of colors. I’d never seen anything like it.
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.
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.
Touching the television could get you sent to your room, or worse.
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.
After hours, mysterious symbols hummed on all three channels.
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.
Annette Funicello
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 actuallylooked like. We needed television to show us.
Elvis Presley, 1956
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.
