The Ugly Boxes
Radio was in the air. Television was locked up in ugly boxes. The first set I ever saw belonged to my Uncle Leonard, my dad’s brother. Leonard was wiry, twitchy, and fast‑talking. He was younger than Dad, taller, and not as responsible. He would show up drunk at our apartment or at Gramma Streiker’s from time to time. He always demanded my attention, repeated whatever he said to me, and put his ink‑stained hands on me. (He was a printer.) He was generous, giving me his trophies from the Battle of the Bulge and a toy rotary printing press with rubber type that produced smeary but readable postcard‑sized documents. Dad loved Leonard, but didn’t quite approve of him. Leonard’s exuberant, reckless ways, his drinking, his marriage to a somewhat daffy Southern girl he had met while he was in basic training, and the slovenliness of his appearance made him an embarrassment.
Leonard showed up one day, acting even more intense than usual, cradling a cumbersome, heavy box that looked like a squished console radio with a peephole. It was the day that the world changed forever! Leonard had become the first Streiker to own a television set. And he had to tell his big brother Fred all about it. Leonard expostulated and raved like a Bughouse Square orator, his arms flailing wildly. Dad was unimpressed. Leonard plugged the power cord of the contraption into a wall socket and turned it on. The tiny green screen displayed strange random specks and splotches. Dad was still unimpressed. Leonard twisted knobs, adjusted the poles of an antennae, turned the power off and on again, feverishly repeating the gyrations. Then through the snow and static, and image appeared, the head of an Indian chief with spokes protruding from a large circle beneath his head and from smaller circles in the four corners of the image. And all the while the set whined a high pitch scream. “This is called a ‘test pattern,”’ Leonard explained. There’s nothing else on until seven o’clock.” My dad shook his head and asked how much Leonard had spent on “this toy.”
TV test pattern Howdy Doody
Along Chicago Avenue and Madison Street, console TVs with larger, sickly green screens began appearing in the windows of radio repair shops. The Commonwealth Edison showroom on Madison Street, where we turned in our burnt out light bulbs for free replacements, placed a set on display in a dark corner. I went there once to see my Aunt Harriet dressed in a short-skirted costume and net stockings assisting a hammy magician. Earlier I had watched them rehearse in Gramma Streiker’s tiny apartment.
One of Dad’s colleagues, a radiologist, bought a projector set in which a set of mirrors and lenses created a fuzzy, washed out image the size of a fully opened page from the Chicago Tribune. A bar at Pulaski Road and Lake Street ballyhooed just such a set with large posters inviting the public to see the NFL championship game between the Chicago Cardinals and the Philadelphia Eagles. Then nine years old, I lingered in the doorway and watched in fascination until my self-consciousness drove me away.
The first television set I saw after Uncle Leonard’s was in a corner bar at Springfield Avenue and Ohio Street. I delivered the newspaper there, and would, with the owner’s permission, linger for a few minutes if no one else were there to see me. (After all, kids weren’t supposed to be in bars.) One cold night, while I was collecting after dinner, I sat at the end of the bar and watched a vaudeville review that was constantly interrupted by an interfering, leering, pratfalling comedian. “That’s Milton Berle,” the bartender explained.
About the same time, my Uncle Herb and Aunt Flo got a massive RCA with a really good picture. From time to time, I would baby-sit my cousin Ricky, and get to watch without fearing that a bartender would tell on me. I would arrive hours before I was needed so that Herb could turn on the set, make sure it was properly tuned, and leave me in the stranglehold of its spell. “Look, Uncle Herb,” I would call, “It’s an alligator.” Herb would correct me, “That’s Ollie. He’s a dragon.”
When I was ten, there were still no TV sets in homes in our neighborhood. Until Dad convinced himself that this toy could pay for itself by alleviating the need to pay a dollar and a half a week to send the three of his children to the movies on Saturday and Sunday and, getting a great discount from his friend Hank Leshan who owned a downtown music store that now sold Capehart television sets, Dad boldly thrust us into a new world.
There in our darkened living room, the monster stared at us as we stared back. Reception without a roof antenna was catch-as‑catch‑can. Dad would take it upon himself to improve the image by arranging and rearranging the folding sections of the rabbit ear antenna and twirling controls in front and behind the set in infinite permutations and combinations—his wife and children complaining, cajoling, and protesting the whole while. My brother, sister, and I would jockey for position, trying to find perfect spots on the furniture or floor that were sufficiently comfortable, were neither too close or too far away lest we, as we had been warned, permanently hurt our eyes, which permitted a clear view of the nine‑inch screen, and which interfered with no else’s view.
This was definitely not radio. Radio was democratic and tolerant. Anyone could listen anywhere while doing anything. Radios had shrunk to convenient tabletop sizes that could sit on any surface. They were in the dashboards of automobiles. They were cheap to buy and inexpensive to maintain. Television sets were imperious, elitist, and exclusivist. There was one set per family. The huge mechanism, cleverly disguised as furniture, commanded space, attention, time, and resources. To watch its flickering images, the entire family huddled in the darkness in awe of its uniqueness like the cave family that had first figured out how to build an indoor fire. All utilitarian work, conversation, handicrafts, hobbies, games, reading, and school work ceased. Watching television with Mom and Dad, Sister and Brother replaced going to the movies, reading the funnies, trips to the museums, meals at the Chinese or Italian restaurants, etc. An uncomfortable new intimacy was forged. We were in danger of being with one another day and night now, not as friends or peers or family but as an audience for the green‑eyed monster in whose presence we could not speak or joke or even cough and before whom none was permitted to stand. We had become prisoners in a tiny, living‑room‑sized theater.
Appropriately, Mother served popcorn. The monster insisted that we no longer speak, move, or create our own pictures in our heads. With radio, the possibilities for seeing are infinite. A blind man can soar just as high as anyone. Imagination would shrink to the size of a nine‑inch screen—for years and years. And television would impose faces on radio characters, whom we had never seen except in our imaginations or on rare occasions in motion pictures, forever ending the curiosity and speculation, and forcing us to witness them age before our eyes.
We would be exposed to culture for the first time—Omnibus would bring us erudite Allister Cooke, Royal Dano and Joanne Woodward in the early life of Abraham Lincoln, Patrice Munsel in “Die Fledermaus,” and Maurice Evans in “Macbeth.” Ballerina Maria Tallchief would dance and soprano Margaret Piazza would sing arias on “Your Show of Shows” as would Jan Peerce and Robert Merrill on “The Toast of the Town” (later known by its host’s name as “The Ed Sullivan Show”). Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians would introduce us to well arranged choral singing. And I would feel classy and well bred.
My friend Jerry’s family, who lived in a basement apartment a block away, also had a TV. We would play guns and wrestle until four p.m. when Bob Smith and the Peanut Gallery interrupted to tell us, “It’s Howdy Doody Time!” Then we would watch Pinky Lee or Gabby Hayes or Tom Corbett, Space Cadet or Captain Video and His Video Rangers until it was time for dinner. But we never ran around in the open air pretending to be Peanuts or Pinky or Gabby or Space Cadets or Video Rangers. We didn’t even let our imaginations run wild. We just watched.
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