First Sights
Author’s Note: I didn’t start writing about TV and movie viewing until high school. These childhood impressions are ones that stuck in my memory and got themselves written in after years.
[ ] My parents in another light – Back before I’d ever been to school, back when all my learning came via family members or TV or sheer imperfect noticing, back in that little eternity of knowing almost nothing, I would make discoveries. One of them I made in the middle of an ordinary night.
We lived in the house trailer then. I was four or five years old, I got up from bed and went to find my parents. They were watching a late movie in the dark living room, the sound turned low, their faces lit strangely by TV light.
“Look who’s up!” they probably said, but it might have been, with light teasing, “Now what are you doing up?”
There was no question that bed was where I belonged. But my parents would have been patient. Because maybe I’d had a bad dream, or didn’t feel well, or had some worry. They would have made some gentle inquiry, some assurances. At the same time, there was no pausing a TV in those days. Their show went flashing on, and their eyes would have been flickering back and forth between me and their program.
Whatever had gotten me out of bed, I would have been curious to see what parents found interesting when the kids were asleep. I must have dared some peeks at what was, in the world of night, not the TV of us kids, but their TV. One or both of them said I wouldn’t like this movie, that it wasn’t for kids, that it was scary. And they were right. There in the TV, an arm away, as vivid to me now as it was then then, came a creature, lumbering out of the sea. Walking on two legs but not a person. Long shreds of seaweed or slime or loose skin hanging from its body, and with large, bulging eyeballs. I can still feel my fright. What a thing to walk into your living room and see.
It wasn’t just the monster that scared me. It was suddenly seeing Mom and Dad as not just my kind parents, but also grownups with a taste for the horrible. And with desires that didn’t include us kids. I began to feel unwelcome. And then a commercial came on and one of them got up from the couch for something, leaving me with just one parent for protection.
I remember I was soon back in bed, away from the nightmare of my nocturnal parents. I can still feel how I shook. I didn’t like what I’d seen, but I also did. Even my older brother had never experienced this. I’d grown up a little, all by myself. ~ Approx. 2022
[ ] First times at the movies – I remember seeing these movies as boys together at The Calvin. Help and Goldfinger for sure. You might have also been with us when we went to see The Castaways, Son of Flubber, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and others of that period. Our mothers took us to The Sunset Drive-in to see Lady in a Cage, a horrifying movie. Do you remember that? An elderly woman is held captive by crazy beatniks, and she stabs one of them in the eyes. Don’t know what our mothers were thinking, taking little kids to see that. Maybe they didn’t know much about the movie in advance. ~ Aug. 4, 2017 / To Jim Carroll
[ ] Bonnie and Clyde (XXX) – Jim Carroll, I remembered another one I’m pretty sure we saw together as boys—Bonnie and Clyde, 1967. Our parents must have had no idea what we going to see in that movie. I know I didn’t. I came out of that theater different than I went in—a little more mature, a little shocked. It was strong beer for boys. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the movie since, but I can still remember scenes from it, and even more than scenes, the tone and feeling of it, the mix of delightful entertainment and awfulness. I don’t think it harmed me in any way. It probably disenchanted me a little, made the world scarier and more confusing, but I was old enough for that to start happening. The main revelation was that bad guys could in some ways be someone you cared about. Put another way, that people you love can be capable of awful things. It’s a revelation I’m still sorting out. ~ Aug. 5, 2017 / On Facebook (1)
[ ] TV Shows of childhood – My Friend Flicka, Fury, The Rifleman, Daniel Boone, My Mother The Car, Car 54 Where Are You, The Real McCoys, Woody Woodpecker, Mr. Ed, The Danny Thomas Show, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, My Three Sons, Dobie Gillis, Wendy and Me—and so many more. ~ Aug. 26, 2021 / On Facebook
[ ] Johnny Crawford – I liked that actor. His character on The Rifleman was one of my first role models. We were about the same age, but he had adventures, made adult decisions, had a good heart, tried to emulate the maturity and wisdom he saw in his father. Plus, he rode horses and wore western clothes. I’ve spontaneously had the thought many times, “I’m glad Johnny Crawford is still out there.” I feel like I’ve lost some percentage of myself. ~ May 1, 2021 / On Facebook
[ ] The Flintstones (XXX) – One of the big thrills of the week was Flintstones night. Tuesdays at 6:30, as I remember. The whole family watched it. The opening and closing credits had a largeness to them that made this program more than a cartoon. Maybe because these opening and closing pieces were a little, orchestrated story in themselves—a family going to a drive-in movie (the opening credits), then returning home afterward (the closing credits) to their house in a cozy suburb. I remember these weekly half hours as times of family togetherness. Not sure if Mom and Dad really liked the show that much, or just found it more bearable than other stuff us kids watched. But it was good times in the Beaver house, with that family out of his-to-ry. ~ Oct. 4, 2014 / On Facebook (2)
[ ] Old when I was young – I remember as a kid hearing about shows (TV and radio) that stopped airing just a little before I came to life, and they seemed so far back in history they were ridiculous. Shows and names like Sid Caesar’s Show of Shows, Imogene Coca, Fibber McGee and Molly, Walter Winchell. It’s funny how the past has such a distorted time scale when you’re a kid. Everything that happened in the five years before you were born seems to have happened in a previous century. And everything else, from The Great Depression to the Romans to the cavemen, seems to have happened the century before that. ~ Oct. 4, 2014 / On Facebook
[ ] My favorite TV shows then – My earliest TV favorites are from when we still lived in St. Louis, when I was four and younger. They include: Woody Woodpecker (“a Walter Lance production”), Corky the Clown (he aired a lot of Popeye cartoons), Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Rin-Tin-Tin.
Then, in our first year or so in the country, there was Fury and My Friend Flicka, Sunset Strip (hated it) and my Mom’s daytime shows—Charlotte Peters, As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, Queen for a Day. Also, very early in the morning, when we got up to get Billy off to the school bus, there was an awful non-cartoon show called P. S. something-or-other, regional/rural programming of some sort. First TV show of the day on that channel. If you tuned in right before it began, you would see the test pattern (a big circle with an Indian), then some video-switching flickers, then the boring talking heads discussing weather and crops and other things of no interest to a child desperate for something to watch in the half hour before Fury came on and life became fun again. ~ Oct. 4, 2014 / On Facebook
[ ] Daniel Boone (XXX) – An all-time-favorite I must mention: Daniel Boone, with Fess Parker and Ed Ames. This was a formative show for me. No life seems better to me than being part of a community inside a fort. No person seems more heroic to me than Fess Parker’s “Dan’l”—resourceful, preferring to defeat enemies with his wits, but will do it with his fists or his gun when necessary; always a gentleman—never gloating; always willing to give his enemies a second chance; and always stepping in to help a stranger. And Dan’l knew every inch of forest in Kentucky, and how to do anything that needed to be done. That impossible level of intelligence about the world has been my goal ever since. Not one I expected to reach, just one to reach for. ~ Oct. 4, 2014 / On Facebook (3)
[ ] My first infatuations – Some of the females I had a very young infatuation with, and who were powerful in various ways (powerful in the context of those times, anyway): Annie Oakley, Dale Evans, Jeannie, the household of women in Petticoat Junction, Ma Barkley in The Big Valley, Ellie (Andy’s first girlfriend in The Andy Griffith Show), Calamity Jane (F-Troop), Ellie Mae (Beverly Hillbillies), Supergirl—ah, Supergirl. And Peter Pan, because I never thought of Mary Martin as a boy. And Gidget. I could keep going—better stop. Even the comical, sexy ones in that list were forces to be contended with. ~ Oct. 4, 2014 / On Facebook
Author’s Note: A reply to my childhood neighbor and friend, Jim Carroll
[ ] Our TV-charged minds – Those country acres we lived on were charged with stories and characters from TV, from local history (the real Daniel Boone), and from our imaginations. It was a lucky break for us that our parents were friends and ended up moving together to the country. And we all happened to be kids with active minds. It could have been a lonesome, boring existence otherwsie, out there in the sticks.
Instead, those hills, creeks and old buildings were bursting with adventure. I have to give TV a lot of the credit. Thank goodness we got to have our childhood before the age of mere reality shows. What we got from TV shows and movies, and the occasional theatre movie, was a vision of life as it could be—exciting, significant, poignant, romantic and funny.
Life as a steady stream of opportunities to be a good guy.
Life as an almost endless time of favorite things and new things; a series of countless small episodes and occasional grand ones, most of them ending happily, all of them with something in them that could leave your mouth hanging open. ~ Oct. 4, 2014 / To Jim Carroll
1. Bonnie and Clyde (Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Dir. Arthur Penn, 1972)
2. The Flintstones (Animated TV Series, 1960-66)
3. The Daniel Boone Show (Fess Parker, Ed Ames; TV Series, 1964–70)