1.
We didn't get a TV until 1949. My grandfather owned the house we lived in, a three story brick dwelling on Congress Street, situated in a working-class neighborhood of Jersey City. My mother, father, my older brother and I lived in the upper two stories which my grandfather, (we called him G.P., an abbreviation of Grand Pa), rented to us. There was no barrier separating the two families; all we needed to do was to walk down the stairs to visit our grandparents. Everyone had free reign of the house; we lived, more or less, as a joint family. We didn't know that, however, since that term was not in anyone's vocabulary.
Although in many ways far from typical, we were in some ways a typical working-class family. My grandparents left school around the seventh grade; they married in 1912. Their only child, Mabel--oh, how she hated that name!--was born in 1914. My grandfather owned his own business on 49th Street in New York City. He fashioned vases, statues and such into lamps; he also turned objects into objets d'art--I guess I can use that term, although, if he had ever heard it, he would would have asked, "What the hell is that?" He was quite good at his craft, and had many wealthy customers.
The only thing I have left from him is a jewelry container--I suppose that's what it is, although there is only room enough for, say, two rings--which he created from a lump of quartz some customer brought to him. How it came into his possession, I'm not sure. Maybe it was returned as a payment for other items he had made for a customer. Another possibility is that G.P. had made it as a gift for my grandmother.
I keep it on the bookshelf of my living room. Here are pictures of it:
My grandfather, who rented the upper two floors of his house to us for a nominal fee, brought in the money. Not a lot, but enough. My father, who had serious problems--he would eventually commit suicide at the age of 57--never could hold a job for very long, despite his considerable intelligence. (Until my brother and I went to college--both of us became doctors--Dad had the most education of all family members, having graduated high school in Hoboken, New Jersey, his home town.) It is only recently that I realized, with some exaggeration perhaps, that we would have 'wound up on the street' without G.P.'s support. (The concept of homelessness, however, was at the time as unknown to my brother and me as the geology of Ceres, the largest asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, is unknown to me now. G.P. wasn't going anywhere, at least not for a long time--he died in 1972 at the age of 83.)
As I've already written, we didn't get a TV until 1949, where it assumed the central place in our grandparent's living room. An expensive model, designed to be a showpiece, it was several feet long; to the right of the 10 inch screen was a Victrola, a phonograph, accessible after one lifted the lid of burnished oak on top. (On the inside of the lid was the dog-and-gramophone logo of RCA Victor, familiar to everyone in those days.) Grandfather must have bought the 78 rpm records along with the TV; I don't remember his ever having listened to them. I doubt if he had ever purchased another record again. The old vinyls, mostly of big band music--this was in the days before rock 'n' roll--provided me, the sole member of the house who listened to them, with many hours of listening pleasure.
Being only three years old at the time, I do not recall its arrival. I must have been fascinated by the new phenomenon of seeing people singing, shouting, selling, and most of all, acting out stories right in the center of our living room; I do indeed recall, however, prevailing on my parents to purchase one for our living room as well. There were undoubtedly financial issues, of which I was blissfully unaware; we finally did get a TV of our own four years later, in 1953.
It looked very much like this:
A difference was that ours contained a cabinet shelf at the bottom, in which I eventually stored my collection of Disney comics. Oh, how mad I was at my mother for having thrown them away years later during a fit of spring cleaning. The anger, of course, has long since vanished, but a regret remained for over half a century--they would have been quite valuable today. No matter--for if I had saved them then, they would still be gone today. Donald, Huey, Dewey, Louie and Unca Scrooge would have lost their cartoon lives as they sank, never to be read by a child again, into the muck of our basement in February, 2015, the month our house was destroyed, while we were in India, by a burst pipe.
2.
I loved Lucy passionately I admit it.
This sitcom, recently voted as "The Best TV Series of All Time," ran from October 1951 to May, 1957. It soon became immensely popular. The light projected from cathode ray tubes into living rooms across America that had been programmed to form the images of Lucy, Desi and the Mertzes was as important to the history of television as the light released 300,000 years after the big bang was for the history of the universe. Although somewhat accurate, this assertion is also a ridiculous exaggeration of scale and, therefore, doubly appropriate: from the 1950s on, American English, which had always been more fond of hyperbole than British English, has appropriated a good deal more wows! and absolutelies! to its vocabulary as a result of TV advertising. (In those days, there was no remote with which one could turn off the volume during commercials. We escaped, if we escaped at all, by finally answering nature's call. Jingles were often accompanied by flushes in those days. Our escapes, however, should have been more thorough; Philip Morris, the cigarette manufacturer, was a long-time sponsor of the show.)
Watching TV was different then--It was a family event, at least in our house. All of us were newly converted moviegoers; very few had had the habit of going to the movies alone. Another difference was that there was for a long time only one TV in each apartment or house. In addition, it was on only when a program was being watched, unlike today. There were few channels; in Northern New Jersey, where I grew up, there were the three main networks, ABC, NBC and ABC, and three local stations which were rarely watched.
I Love Lucy was quite innovative. It was the first to be recorded before a live audience; contrary to its contemporaries, the best 35 mm film was used, with an eye toward reruns at a time when there was no such concept. Adapted from the movies, the use of more than one camera gave the program a more intimate "cinematic effect" rather than a "theatre effect," during which the only way to change one's angle of vision is to turn one's head. Canned laughter was used from the very beginning, which often included the very identifiable laugh of Desi Arnaz.
As I have indicated, the show was immensely popular. At its peak in 1953, when there were (only?) 20 million TV sets in the United States, over two-thirds were tuned into the weekly Monday night episode of the program.
In that year, the whole nation was entranced by episodes that dealt with the birth of Little Ricky--Lucille Ball, in her early forties, did give birth to her son, Desi Arnaz Jr. at this time. No one was permitted to use the word "pregnant" in those days; her sit-com husband referred to her condition in his accented English as "spectin." (When a scene was shot in the couple's bedroom, the view encompassed twin beds separated by Cotton Mather in the form of a night table) I would have been seven years old at the time. I had heard, I'm not sure how, about the banning of this word from TV and asked by grandmother what it meant. She didn't tell me; she laughed out loud, as if I had innocently said a very dirty word, and left the room. This gives one an idea of the extent of sex education many working-class children received in those post-war days of inhibition.
I was hooked, but the romance didn't last. I have only watched a handful of reruns in the over fifty years since the original series came to an end. But I am still able to recall many episodes. How primitive, how naive, how stupid, were phrases that came to mind years later as I recalled what seemed to be over-the-top in a bad way to me now, compared to what seemed to be over-the-top in a good way to me then. For instance, Lucy and Ethel pretending to be Martians on the top of the Empire State Building and convincing others that they were indeed Martians. They were dressed in tacky Flash Gordon get-up that made them look like giant toddlers trick or treating in Newark. Lucy's baby-talk-improvisation of Martianese was pathetic. Another episode I recalled ended with Lucy attempting to be a TV announcer. She had broken the television, and, in order to avoid her husband's anger, she removed the screen, crawled into the cabinet from behind, and, hoping Ricky wouldn't notice the difference, pretended to be, not Lucy, but a TV star. It was just too silly.
Lucille Ball later said that she lacked talent; her success was due to hard work. This isn't true. She certainly had a genius for slapstick and physical comedy. (Later on, when she tried to recapture the success of the original show with several imitations, the slapstick fell flat.)
As I said, my romance with Lucy didn't last; traces of my obsession, however, have remained. I remember an episode that I thought was particularly funny. It is not one of the classic segments, such as the one with Lucy eating the chocolates on the conveyor belt in a vain attempt to keep up with the pace.
I loved music even then, but I didn't know it; it is not surprising that one of my favorite episodes centered on Lucy's lack of musical talent. I was surprised--not really, since YouTube seems to have everything--to be able to hear it again, after over a half century. I was also surprised to discover that it still made me laugh. I will close this first essay in a series of two with the video of her attempting to sing a duet with her husband.
To be continued
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