I can pronounce it now, but I still don’t understand it.
Now they’ve got 150-some channels instead of just three or four, and yet it doesn’t seem there’s half as much on as there used to be.
Oh, those old TV listings! Endless fascination for a 10-year-old who was packed off to bed at 8 o’clock.
https://leeduigon.com/2013/08/25/late-night-tv-circa-1958/
Well, this is a blog for sharing memories, isn’t it? I’d love to hear some of yours.
“Hey! Don’t touch that umbrella!”
When I was a boy, TV was loaded with ancient black-and-white cartoons–those old “Farmer Grey”cartoons, by Paul Terry. You might not be old enough ever to have seen one.
A common feature in many of these cartoons was cats, mice, and sometimes humans jumping off a rooftop and wafting gently to the earth by using an umbrella as a parachute.
This does not work in real life (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/peoplesdaily/article-4420876/Boy-jumped-five-storey-home-holding-umbrella.html). The host of one of those cartoon shows, “Uncle Fred” Sayles (he also MC’d wrestling), used to have to issue frequent reminders to his youthful audience not to try this. But kids did try it, and some of them got hurt. But good. I would have tried it myself, but I didn’t have anyplace handy for jumping off.
Is it necessary to explain why this doesn’t work? Like, is there any 29-year-old Gender Studies major who thinks it might work, if you use a big enough umbrella? Yo, genius, stick to Play-Doh.
Kids try crazy things because they don’t know any better. That’s why we don’t give them credit cards and drivers’ licenses.
And we still can’t stop overgrown kids from trying to eat detergent pods because they saw it on Youtube.
As a kid in the 50s and early 60s, I just loved this show! It was “The Phil Silvers Show,” but who didn’t just call it “Sergeant Bilko”?
Phil Silvers played the oily, slick, fast-talking Sergeant Bilko to Paul Ford’s longsuffering, endlessly put-upon Colonel Hall. Bilko came up with one scheme after another, always several jumps ahead of everybody else.
We had a peacetime draft in those days, so an awful lot of people could relate to an Army comedy. If we’d had a few more real-life Sergeant Bilkos in our military, we could have won wars without fighting. Just turn Bilko loose on the enemy: he’d cheat the enemy’s pants off, and the enemy would thank him for it.
Ah, Phil Silvers! A very funny man. He had a long career in movies and TV, but “Sergeant Bilko” was his signature achievement.
But it’s probably a good thing more kids didn’t grow up to be like Sergeant Bilko.
Those who did, probably wound up in Congress or on Wall Street.
I know I’m gonna get you with this one: Soldiers of Fortune, from back in 1955.
My father watched this show; that’s how I remember it. I remembered the title and the name of one of the characters: “Toubo Smith.” I mean, you can’t forget a name like Toubo.
In each half-hour episode, globe-trotting adventurers Tim Kelly (John Russell, later to star in Lawman) and Toubo Smith (Chick Chandler) take on the crazy jobs that no one else will touch with a ten-foot pole, have wild adventures in every exotic location you can think of, and use up more stunt men per 30-minute series than any other in the 1950s.
I was amazed to discover some of those episodes floating around Youtube. In fact, you can get the whole two seasons, 1955-56, on disc. I watched one last night and enjoyed it a lot–skullduggery and derring-do in the mountains of Tibet. You have to admire the way they packed so much into so little time, and without giving the impression of hurrying through it.
Dad, I can’t remember this show without remembering you.
Nothin’ beats a good story, does it?
I was delighted to find some of these episodes available on Youtube: The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca. I’ll try to get Patty to watch these with me, this weekend.
This series, starring Robert Loggia, came out in 1958 on “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” Remember that? It must have been good, because I’ve remembered the theme song for 60 years. This is the kind of great stuff Disney productions turned out while Walt was still running the place. He wouldn’t be happy with what they’re doing now: heads would roll.
In real life, Baca, then a deputy sheriff in New Mexico, won his reputation for “nine lives” when he was surrounded by a gang of bad guys after taking shelter in a rather small adobe building reminiscent of the old Stelton Hotel here in the heart of Jersey. They couldn’t persuade him to come out and get shot, and whenever they tried to rush the building, he made them pay for it. So they hunkered down and fired 4,000 rounds (!) at the place (yes, somebody actually counted the bullet holes), and not one of them hit Elfego Baca. That’s why someone counted the holes–the man’s survival seemed a miracle.
And I like miracles!
Anyway, here’s the theme song–and I don’t know who these performers were, but they were pretty good.
Back in the 1950s, Chuck Connors in The Rifleman showed us how it’s done. Try counting the shots he gets off in 20 seconds–and that’s not even a semi-automatic rifle.
I forget the name of the town The Rifleman lived in; but something tells me MS-13 wouldn’t flourish there. It looks like it would be a very bad idea to go there to make trouble.
Something also tells me that if you brought this show back on the air, liberals would howl and normal people would just flat-out love it.
Remember this? Sky King–the only TV Western hero who flew his own airplane, which he called, affectionately, Songbird.
Sky King started as a radio show in 1946 and ran on television from 1951 through 1962–quite long-lived for a TV series. It starred Kirby Grant as Sky King, who always caught the bad guys but never killed them, and Gloria Winters as his niece and co-pilot, Penny. I had kind of a crush on her when I was 11. I wonder if my other girlfriends at the time, Jean Simmons and Lee Remick, ever got jealous.
Anyway, this little clip ought to bring back pleasant memories. It was such a can’t-miss idea–a Western with an airplane–you wonder why it took so long to think of it.
Jon Hall (left) starred as “Ramar of the Jungle”
Some of you, like me, don’t watch television anymore, largely because it’s gone so crappy. You don’t even have a television set. And you reacted strongly to “Beauty Beyond Bones” watching–and blaming herself for watching–the unbelievably cheap and sleazy denouement of a popular “reality” show.
Like you, I don’t watch such bilge. But I was part of the first generation of Americans that grew up with television, and TV was a big part of my childhood. I thank God that the kind of TV we have today wasn’t! And thanks to the Internet, I can no revisit a lot of those great old shows, commercial-free.
I have fond memories of many of those shows. Even more, I learned a lot from them about the art of storytelling, which now I have the honor to perform in the service of the Lord.
Man, when I was eight years old, nothing turned me on like Ramar of the Jungle! Later on in my childhood I moved on to Wagon Train, Rawhide, Route 66, etc. But it was Ramar that set my mind on fire and introduced me to techniques of storytelling which I use today. They had only half an hour, minus time lost to commercials, to tell the story of an adventure, with beginning, middle, and end, create coherent characters and put them through their paces in a way that made sense, and still devote some time to immersing the viewer in the exotic African setting. It was a big job, but week after week, they did it.
OK, even old TV had its share of (shall we put it kindly?) faults. Grandma’s soap operas, for instance. Twilight Zone sneakily pushing atheism. Queen for a Day. I remember when the first kid in our third-grade class got color TV and invited the whole class to his house to watch Howdy Doody one Saturday morning. We were treated to an unearthly mixture of greens and reds in seldom-seen tones: color TV still had a ways to go.
So I grew up with television before it entered its current Gold Age of Sleaze. It helped teach me the kind of work I do today. And when I play an old Columbo episode from 40 years ago, I like it!
I only got to see this show if I stayed at my Grammy’s for the weekend; but it’s the kind of show you remember.
For one thing, it had fantastic music: the Paladin theme by Richard Boone and Johnny Western, played above in its entirety, plus background music by Bernard Herrmann, one of the all-time great movie and radio music composers. It had a great star in Richard Boone, compelling stories by a stable of fine writers that included Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame, and talented guest directors including William Conrad, Ida Lupino, Sam Peckinpah, and Boone himself. In short, it had everything!
I find this theme song haunts me. Although Paladin was a hired gun, he always sought a peaceful solution first. And he did pro bono work for the poor. I guess you could say he was a real trouble-shooter: he faced the trouble, and shot it.
It takes me back to a better time. I was born into and raised in a world of men and women, not freaks. When we imagined heroes, they were human heroes: not a lot of caped and costumed comic book characters poncing around like fashion models on a runway.
Could we go back to being the people we were then? It wasn’t perfect, but it was a towering sight better than what we’re doing now.
I saw it. I lived it. I know.
One of my earliest memories came back to me this morning.
I’m not old enough yet to go to school. I’m sitting on the floor of our little sitting room, playing with blocks while my mother does her ironing. Because she’s a Giants fan, she has the ballgame on: we have one of those primitive TV sets with all the knobs, you’ve really got to fiddle with it, to get a good picture. The Giants are playing the Brooklyn Dodgers, and my mother carefully lists for me the many moral defects of the Dodgers–except for Roy Campanella: not a word against him!–and explains how no right-thinking person would ever root for them. And I don’t know why, but I love the smell of ironing, and the texture of the rug, and the grainy black-and-white picture on the screen… and my mother’s company.
The very best day I ever had at school was not as good as this. Nowhere near as good as this.