Donald Bowie - Station Identification: Confessions of a Video Kid

Station Identification: Confessions of a Video Kid

By Donald Bowie

Copyright 2014 by Donald Bowie

Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

Portions of Chapter One previously appeared in somewhat altered form in The Saturday Evening Post.

Cover Design by Ginny Glass

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in print, 1980.

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This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Also by Donald Bowie and Untreed Reads Publishing

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Station Identification

Confessions of a Video Kid

Donald Bowie

Acknowledgments

To Harvey Klinger, my agent, who made this book possible. And to Fred Graver, my editor, who guided its development.

For my mother and my father

And now its time for station identification.

Kate Smith

1. A Howdy Doody Conspiracy

I began watching television before I began kindergarten. Television had a profound influence on me. So did my parentsbut only because they were there first. My parents molded my personality, and television fired it (as a freshly painted ceramic piece is set: the radiation from the tube was a kiln that has given me my glazed eyes).

I grew up subject to influences. Since I was an only child, I found few distractions around the house and mostly had to content myself with little things. I was imaginative and impressionable. The first of these impressions, the earliest memories of my childhood, are intense, almost surreal. I remember reaching from my stroller to pick tiny pebbles from the grooves in a bicycle tire. I remember reaching for the kitchen stove because its shiny chrome trim attracted me (I was burned, but I cant recall the pain, though my mother says I screamed bloody murder). And I remember crawling up the bars of my crib and easing myself over the rail (I fell onto my head, and vividly remember screaming bloody murder). Perhaps these accidents of curiosity disinclined me toward exploration while still a toddler; I became a stay-at-home child, happy just to sit and look about me. In the relatives view I was a model child, as quiet, as complacent, and as self-contained as a goldfish.

My indoor good behavior was largely imitative. I observed, and then acted accordingly. Since my principle behavioral models were my parentsI was still too young to be outside very much, where I might find peers to imitateI was a thirtyish three-year-old. Once, picking up on what I saw my father do to my mother, I crept up behind my maiden aunt, Mildred, and goosed her. She let out a war whoop (that was what it sounded like to my mother, who was in the kitchen), whirled around, and cuffed my ear. I yelled bloody murder. Later my father explained to me that Aunt Mildred didnt enjoy being goosed because she was an old hen. All old hens like to do, I learned, is make a fuss in the kitchen when dinners being prepared and run the carpet sweeper and then empty it out onto a piece of newspaper. What I could do was be a big help to Aunt Mildred by carrying out the newspaper. I understood all that, but I still wasnt sure why Aunt Mildred had cuffed me.

When I was about the same age I inadvertently provided the entertainment, one evening, in a restaurant. Seated in my high chair, I spontaneously sang, at the top of my lungs, Time out for Dawsons. I was echoing a beer commercial Id heard on the radio. All the customers in the restaurant laughed at me. I had no idea why. I liked listening to the radio; its catch phrases bobbed in my head. And, feeling happy to be sitting way up in a restaurant high chair, I suppose I responded to an urge to share my happiness by singing the little ditty that buoyed my childish spirits when I was at home.

The radio made impressions that were translucent to my ears: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. Yet radio, however vivid it might have seemed, would pale next to television.

*

My parents were the first people in our neighborhood to own a television set. They bought their set in 1949, when I was four and television was still enough of a novelty to attract crowds to the windows of stores. I went along with my parents to Hunts Appliance Center the day they ordered the set. Following them into the store, on the way to buy a TV, I was a little balloon of pride and self-importance: Look at me ; were going to get a TV. I think there is a triumphal procession in the opera Aida that approximates my internal swelling. Hunt showed my parents a Starrett, for which he wanted 495 uninflated dollars. He wasnt offering any discounts either. While Hunt was out back my father said to my mother, Did you notice how he looked disappointed when I hinted at giving us a break on it?

Well, he is a deacon in the church, my mother said. He probably has old-fashioned ideas about prices. I would have had them buy the set at any price. I didnt even want to hear about prices; I didnt know how they could even be thinking about pricesbut then again, my parents were capable of walking slowly in an amusement park.

The big advantage of these Starretts, Hunt pointed out when he returned from the back of the shop with a brochure, is that the picture tube and the chassis are both made by the RCA people.

Mildred always said to buy General Electric, my mother replied.

Mr. Hunt doesnt care what Mildred says, my father intervened. He added, My wifes sister. Shes fifty-four and lives with her mother, whos seventy-eight. If you want any advice, ask those two.

Hunt said GE appliances were very reliable, but when it came to television you wanted RCA. He unscrewed the fiberboard from the back of the Starrett and invited my father to inspect the chassis. My father leaned over and sniffed around, much as the RCA dog quizzically pokes his nose into the horn of the gramophone.

The Starrett was only slightly smaller than a warehouse. The picture tube, which must have measured only ten inches or so, diagonally, occupied the center of the tremendous mahogany cabinet. Hunt said that larger picture tubes were unreliable. The tiny picture tube was proportionately as far from the four corners of the cabinet as the second balcony is from the stage in a theater. The big Starrett had been designed with a sense of theatricality: tambour shutters opened and closed on the screen, like theater curtains. And the sets hum, as it warmed up, was like an overture.

The day the enormous Starrett arrived in our living room was as exciting for me as several Christmases rolled into one. I and four of the little friends Id made since Id started playing outside waited in reverent silence to see the magic. The delivery men took forever, but finally, a little after five-thirty in the afternoon, one of them clicked a brass bezel to on. And in a minute, Buffalo Bob appeared. My friends and I were hypnotized on the spot.