Most confounding newsi/youth moment. Waiting to be picked up at Catholic School at age 10. Teaches informs us the Pope had been shot.
Like a bolt from the blue, a name came to me a few nights ago.
Bob Newhart.
Exactly the way I remember it. I’m sure that I’ve written almost exactly this sentence somewhere. Maybe more than once.
Talking about “important things” on TV that I can vaguely recall…
I remember the 1972 Olympic Israeli Hostage crisis. I was 6, and at the time the news anchors didn’t say “Terrorists” but rather called them “guerrillas”. I remember thinking how odd it was that a bunch of “gorillas” had taken people hostage.
Tony
The job of unentangling my mother’s 18 foot phone cord and always there was that one weird part that was twisted the wrong way and you just had to make it right by twisting all 18 feet of the dang wire so that all was right with the world (than the next day do it again).
Ice cream sodas made at home using cream soda.
No batteries on Christmas Morning and no open stores to buy any.
The way that, if the cream soda was cold and the vanilla ice cream was real cold, you’d get a coating of frozen soda on the ice cream? Soooo good.
We did rootbeer floats, using Dad’s Rootbeer. That’s about the only time I ever really enjoyed rootbeer.
We also had an old-fashioned pharmacy with a soda fountain and a spin-rack full of comics not too far from us. We’d ride our bikes up, sit at the counter and order a malted, and read the comics for free. We just thought that’s how it was, you grabbed your reading material and had your malted. We didn’t know how nice they were being to us kids by letting us read the comics.
It’s funny when I look at the bike ride now. At the time, being little and riding stingrays and little kid bikes it seemed like a bit of a hike. As an adult on an adult bike it’s about 8 blocks and a breeze.
Yeah, I was actually describing a float there.
Another different thing about growing up when I did is the paucity of TV. We had five, and then six channels. VCRs hadn’t been created yet. Saturday mornings were full of cartoons and there would be a Fall preview of the Saturday morning lineups I always looked forward to.
After school there would be reruns we’d watch. Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, etc.
Late night, 10:30 pm CST, there were the talk shows (Carson and others) but the interesting thing is there weren’t that many movies on. I seem to recall there typically only being one channel showing a movie. As a result I watched a lot of things I probably would have skipped if the offerings had been more robust. Really, I was game for about anything once I was at that age where I might stay up until midnight, especially in the summer when school was out.
So I ended up seeing lots of musicals. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Anchors Away. Singing in the Rain. They were often on and it was watch those or watch a talk show. And movies like The Robe or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Barabas or The Agony and the Ecstasy.
Because there was so little on, I watched a lot of movies that I normally wouldn’t have, and many of them were quite good!
Oh, and the National Anthem playing at the end of the broadcast day when I was in my teens during the summer and staying up really late. And then the test pattern. How many have seen the test pattern on their TVs?
Speaking of limited TV viewing, anyone else remember this programming Christmas day?
I remember one of the networks, NBC I think, had Saturday Night at the Movies during prime time. And, of course, there were the Friday late night schlock horror/sci-fi movies. In Cleveland during the '60s a fellow named Ernie Anderson created a character named “Ghoulardi” to host these movies. He became wildly popular with adolescents like me, largely because his antics enraged staid adults. He populated the movie pauses with silly skits and even inserted himself into some of the dumber movie scenes in a pre-computer age kind of way.
After a couple of years of this silliness, Anderson and one of his sidekicks from his skits decided to seek greener pastures in Hollywood. Anderson found success as the prime voice-over person for ABC (“The Looove Boat!”). The sidekick found rather greater success. His name was Tim Conway.
In Duluth, MN, the ABC affiliate, channel 10, aired two movies a day. One was aired at 3 PM and featured the weatherman pulling names out of the phone book to call during a couple of the commercial breaks. Then, after Nightline, another movie was played. One of the times was called “The Big Ten Movie” but I’m not sure anymore if that was the afternoon or evening one.
I’m also old enough to remember when they still used dry-erase boards or felt boards (basically) for the weather report and when the first weather radar showed up and when the first color radar showed up.
Growing up in New York we had the Million Dollar Movie (channel 9, iirc). It aired the same movie at the same time Monday-Friday and then 2 (or was it 3?) times in a row Saturday and Sunday. What was great was that they were often horror or SF, many Japanese “classics”.
We ate them up. I can still recite the opening narration to Rodan.
That’s pretty amazing.
In St. Louis we had a similar thing. They’d call people and give away money. I can’t remember if they asked them anything first? They might have asked them what movie was airing or something.
We also had Bowling for Dollars. You had to get 2 or 3 strikes in a row and then you won some tiny amount of money. And of course bowling was a thing back then. They had pro bowling on Saturday TV. I remember a bowler named Earl Anthony, I believe, who seemed to win all the time.
I remember it well.
There were like 2 TV’s in my grandparents village.
I remember watching channel 5 right after Saturday morning cartoons ended and they often hard martial art type movies.