Tag: vintage 1950s TV

Trying to Restore My Memory

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The Cisco Kid - The Carriage and Western Art Museum

Duncan Rinaldo (right) and Leo Carillo (left) in The Cisco Kid

I’m trying to kick my memory back into gear. A spotty memory, part of “chemo brain,” is a standard leftover from chemotherapy and radiation. In my own case it’s taking a lot of time to fade away.

Yesterday I was exercising my memory by asking it what TV shows I used to watch with Grandma. I spent a lot of time at her house. I was too young to realize this, but television had only come along later in her life and still seemed a touch miraculous.

When the weather was nice, of course, we were out on the porch–me with my pick-up sticks, Grandma with her Reader’s Digest. When it wasn’t, we resorted to the living room and turned on the TV.

Here are three shows I remember from back them.

*The Cisco Kid (1950-1956). I loved this show! So exotic! Certainly nothing like it in New Jersey. Grandma always tried to please her grandchildren, so we watched The Cisco Kid. I’m not convinced she thought it was so great.

*Arthur Godfrey. Great Caesar’s ghost! Could this guy put you to sleep, or what? Grandma never missed it. He played a big part in early TV history, on air 1949-1959. And it was live TV: sometimes he liked to just throw away the script and wing it.

*Queen for a Day (1956-64). This started out as a radio show in 1949–and who can forget it? Old ladies competed with each other, and whoever could trot out the most abject misery got to be “Queen for a Day.” Really, this was just awful! Grandma lapped it up like chowder.

I want to get my brain back on line. Somewhere out there is Ozias, Prince Enthroned–but where is it? I’ve got the longhand copy, but the finished manuscript is still hiding in the blahsmos.

Come on, memory! No more lolly-gagging!

 

No-Nooze Sunday (and ‘Car 54’)

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Let’s keep our sanity, shall we, and follow the example of Judah the Maccabee, who never fought a battle on the Sabbath unless he was attacked.

Years ago on Sunday night–after I was packed off to bed!–my parents watched Car 54, Where Are You? I listened to the theme song. I knew the show was created by a lot of the same people who turned out Phil Silvers in “Sgt. Bilko.” So of course it was very funny!

Joe E. Ross (left) and Fred Gwynne (right–and he would go on to play Herman Munster, another TV hit) play two New York police officers who somehow always find time for a game of checkers, despite the hurly-burly described in the theme song. Policing can be a very grim business, but not for these two. And everything always turned out all right by the time the episode was over. Perhaps this places Car 54 in the realm of fantasy; but to be able to relax people and give them a laugh–well, that’s a gift of God, and not to be despised.

Memory Lane: ‘Highway Patrol’

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This show ran from 1955 through 1959, in glorious, grainy black and white–and I’m not sure why I liked it so much. I was only ten when it ended, six when it started. What does an 8-year-old kid get out of Broderick Crawford barking “10-4!” into his two-way radio?

Broderick Crawford, by the way, won an Oscar for his role in All the King’s Men. You don’t get Oscar-winners on a humble TV series anymore.

Each episode supposedly depicted a real crime and real police methods. I don’t know: maybe it was reassuring to know that Broderick Crawford was out there with an army of police connected and directed via the magic airwaves. The bad guys never got away.

That must be what I liked about it! As opposed to real life, where the bad guys always get away with it. That was before the police became Herod’s Men.

‘Memory Lane: “The Mickey Mouse Club”‘ (2019)

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Great balls o’fire! This is indescribably awful! It sounds like a dirge. I can’t bear to stay for the whole two minutes of it.

“Unknowable” had a truly horrible thought: What if this show were made by Disney today, instead of Disney as it was in 1955? Ai-ya! Run screaming to the sidewalk!

What is the meaning of The Scream? - BBC Culture

Memory Lane: ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’

Hey, it was bad enough with all that singing and dancing, and Moochie and his pals ALWAYS winning the national championship… and yet I watched it, and so did all my peers. Why did I watch it? I only wanted to see the cartoons.

It makes me suspect that television hypnotizes people.

Memory Lane: ‘Cheyenne’

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Wow! Warner Bros.’ “adult Westerns”–what a splash they made when they came out in the 1950s. Do you remember any of them? (They all had cool theme songs.)

The one I remember best was Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker, maybe because it had such a long run (1955-62, with over 100 episodes). Cheyenne Bodie wandered around the Old West, looking for adventures. He found one every week. And he was always on the side of truth and justice. That’s how old this is.

Ah! Maverick. Sugarfoot. Rawhide. Lawman. Bronco. Laramie. And of course Wagon Train. Those were shows that you could sink your teeth into. If you didn’t like Westerns, I’m afraid you were rather stuck. But it wasn’t all shoot-outs and cattle-rustling. The best scripts transcended the genre.

As for TV in the 2020s–well, I don’t know, I haven’t watched any.

Memory Lane: Sgt. Bilko

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If you were born after, say, 1990, it might strike you as very strange that once upon a time in America, every male, with only a few exceptions, had to serve in the army whether he wanted to or not. But it’s true. When I was a boy, every male over 18 had to register for the draft and pretty much everybody got sucked up. (Well, God told us through Samuel what a king would do to us, didn’t he? Too bad we didn’t listen.)

And so The Phil Silvers Show, also known as simply Sgt. Bilko, struck a universal chord back then that it doesn’t strike anymore… because we have no draft, thank God.

Sgt. Bilko (Silvers) was a smooth con man working in the motor pool and being a thorn in the side to his commanding officer, Col. Hall. Paul Ford was just great as the hapless colonel, perpetually bamboozled by the slippery sergeant.

This was an awfully funny show, although a military draft is not funny at all. God did warn us about increasing the size and power of the state (I Samuel Chapter 8)–but no, the people had to have a king like everybody else! The show ran from 1955 through 1959 and was very popular. Gee, I can hardly believe I was only 10 years old when Sgt. Bilko went off the air.

Seems like only yesterday…

Bonus Critter Video: Guinea Pig Drive

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What if Rawhide had been about herding guinea pigs instead of cattle? I guess the guys couldn’t’ve called themselves cowboys. They’d have to be pigboys.

For those of you who missed the Bronze Age, Rawhide was about cowboys herding cattle across the western plains, and all the adventures they had incidental to their dull and grueling job. Even a run-in with Druids!

Anyhow, here are guinea pigs chasing a human and then running past him–he’s gonna need a lasso. Maybe there are Druids in the house. That would explain it.

A Loud Breath of Fresh Air!

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(Good grief! Look how young Chuck Connors was when he played the Rifleman! I swear he used to be older than me…)

Don’t you wish, sometimes, that someone would come along to clean out the cobwebs?

Just for fun, try counting the number of shots Chuck gets off in 20 seconds. I know, I know, we’re not allowed to talk about guns, we can protect our freedom just as well by engaging in a meaningful dialogue, blah-blah…

But that makes for a really lousy Western.

Memory Lane: Adult Westerns

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Westerns were big, big, big! on TV while I was growing up. But toward the end of the 1950s, the studios decided we needed Westerns that offered something more than just cowboys riding around shooting people. We needed some adult Westerns with meat on their bones. And psychology. Lots of psychology.

Lawman, for one, aired on Sunday night after my bedtime. But I could always hear the theme song coming on, and then my brother and I would get out of bed–we had a room upstairs–and creep toward the hall door. If we opened it a crack, careful not to make any noise, we could peer through that crack all the way downstairs–right down to the TV screen. And we watched as much of Lawman as we could before conking out and crawling back to our beds.

I was not an adult, but I liked those adult Westerns. The ones by Warner Bros. always had great theme songs. “Cheyenne, Cheyenne, when will you be happening by…” “Sugarfoot, Sugarfoot, easy-lopin’, cattle-ropin’ Sugarfoot…” And they were still shooting bad guys, instead of just letting them take over our society and screwing it up.

Besides which, the set decorator for Lawman was–of all people–William Wallace! “Braveheart”! How cool was that?

‘Memory Lane: Don’t Try This’ (2018)

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Image result for images of farmer grey cartoons

Growing up with 1950s TV, I must have seen this a thousand times in ancient Paul Terry cartoons–assorted mice, cats, and humans safely jumping off rooftops with an umbrella for a parachute.

Memory Lane: Don’t Try This!

All over the world, kids got hurt trying to duplicate this feat. Jump out the fifth-story window? Sure, no problem–I’ve got an umbrella!

These were really old cartoons, with captions instead of speech. Like silent movies. Actually, all these decades later (some of them are a hundred years old), they’re still pretty funny.

But kids will try to do what they see characters do in cartoons–so do your best to make them understand why they shouldn’t. (“Experience is the best teacher, but the fees are very high.” Especially when you jump out the window.)