Station Identification: Confessions of a Video Kid

By Donald Bowie

This is a memoir by a thirty-one-year-old man who has just given up the most meaningful, heartwarming and enduring relationship in his life—his television set. The tale begins with Donald Bowie’s discovery of Howdy Doody, and ends as he bids farewell to television after the last episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. In the span of Donald’s young life, he trades reality for the better life on the tube. TV becomes Donald’s family, his friends, his classroom and, ultimately, his undoing. Station Identification is his hilarious confession of that beautiful friendship. Grappling with the urges of puberty, he finds that “the whole business of womanhood seemed easiest to understand when it was jammed into Elly May Clampett’s jeans.” Years later, after a wonderful night on the town, Donald brings his date home to watch TV—something close to having her meet the folks. “She fell asleep during a rerun of The Honeymooners,” he writes. “I knew the relationship wouldn’t last.” Time takes its toll on Donald Bowie and television. Hoping to recapture the ecstasy of Howdy Doody, he watches Sesame Street, “Something about the Sesame Street gang suggested that after the show they have white wine in stemware from Bloomingdale’s. Buffalo Bob always drank milk out of jelly glasses. He was one of us.” This becomes the beginning of the end. If television was once believed to be a vast wasteland, Donald Bowie has come back to tell us that it is a place where dreams are born.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Untreed Reads
• Release date: Oct 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611877328

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Mary

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.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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

Cable Harbor

www.untreedreads.com

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 it’s 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 parents—but 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 can’t 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 parents—I was still too young to be outside very much, where I might find peers to imitate—I 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 didn’t 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 dinner’s 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 wasn’t 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 I’d 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 Hunt’s 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; we’re 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t even want to hear about prices; I didn’t know how they could even be thinking about prices—but 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 doesn’t care what Mildred says, my father intervened. He added, My wife’s sister. She’s fifty-four and lives with her mother, who’s 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 set’s 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 I’d made since I’d 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.

When my grandmother and Aunt Mildred heard that we had a television set, and that I was fascinated with it, they disapproved. Instinctively. Straitlaced as their white summer shoes, my grandmother and my aunt were of the opinion that anything new was materialistic if not decadent (like my mother’s automatic washer; Aunt Mildred was still washing her slips with a scrubboard). My grandmother and Aunt Mildred seemed to fear a new world order, a dawning era of laziness and self-indulgence brought on by the general availability of liquor and sex. And they were no doubt irritated that my father was making more money than anyone else in the family (why should my mother and I have so much more than the rest?).

My mother said of my aunt that she had a determined chin, which she used to navigate through life with the decisiveness of an icebreaker. Aunt Mildred had not wanted my mother to marry my father; she had stood outside the bathroom door worrying the knob while my mother was inside brushing her hair.

Who do you think is going to pay the board and help keep this house going if you go and get married? Since she was thirty-one at the time, my mother couldn’t be bothered any longer with questions like that. She got married anyway—and sent board money to the house for several months after she had left it.

So Aunt Mildred, the firstborn of eight children and the last one at home, had to reset her chin and steel herself to beating rugs and turning over mattresses alone. Whenever Aunt Mildred and my grandmother came to visit, they did their best to reverse the moral decline my mother had entered by marrying. They seemed to think they could counteract the unmentionable things my father and mother were doing upstairs by getting me to sit up straight in my chair and wash my hands before meals (Aunt Mildred once said to my grandmother’s brother, who was eighty at the time, I hope you washed your hands after you went to the bathroom, and that set the old boy sputtering all through Thanksgiving dinner).

Aunt Mildred knew the proper etiquette for every occasion. She told me, "The thing to do, if somebody offers you a drink, is turn your glass upside down on the table and say, ‘No, thank you!’" In her mind, propriety and abstinence were one.

There isn’t going to be any liquor in this house, Aunt Mildred once declared in my mother’s kitchen.

Oh yes there is, said my father flatly—which retort left Aunt Mildred speechless. And she always seemed to lose at Old Maid too, though she played her cards gamely enough.

Confronted at our house with this latest spectacle of television, my grandmother and Aunt Mildred responded by indignantly turning their backs.

We’ll have no part of that business, Aunt Mildred announced. She sat in the living room with her arms folded and her head turned away, stubbornly refusing the tasteless medicine. She was determined not to be corrupted. Her chin was set. She looked as though she were declining an offer of a cocktail from a bleached-blond waitress. Evidently Aunt Mildred had heard enough about television to realize that it could be an impediment to conversation. And she thrived on conversation. ("She never lets anybody get a word in edgewise, said my mother. Just goes on and on, like a hurdy-gurdy.) With a television set upstaging her, Aunt Mildred would not be able to command much attention with her standard topics: her compost pile; her friend Florence, who was seventy-three and still driving a Model A; the psychology course she was taking at the church (People who don’t like themselves are suffering from an inferiority complex," the minister had said); and the Brain-Wey Players, a little theater group made up of people from the towns of Braintree and Weymouth.

"We won’t look at it," my grandmother insisted, stamping her foot.

"Why don’t you just look at a little of it?" my father teased, the way he teased when he was trying to get a sip of sherry down Aunt Mildred’s throat. Milton Berle was on. He was wearing a dress. Certain male members of the Brain-Wey Players had been known to show up for parties in dresses—but still Aunt Mildred was unwilling to be cajoled. She gave Milton Berle one look and said, Oh, honestly. If that isn’t a lot of foolish nonsense. Rising from her chair in high dudgeon, Aunt Mildred announced that she was going to sit on the porch and get some nice fresh air. My grandmother followed her. The two of them sat there until Milton Berle’s show ended. Aunt Mildred read an article by Norman Vincent Peale and my grandmother darned socks.

After Milton Berle, Aunt Mildred and my grandmother came back with a fresh strategy in mind: they pointed out to my parents what television was doing to me.

It’s past this poor child’s bedtime, Aunt Mildred began. Look at him slouching in that chair. Why, he can hardly keep his eyes open.

He’s going to just ruin his eyes, my grandmother agreed. She went around the room snapping on lights.

And his posture, Aunt Mildred added. What’s he going to do to his posture—slouching like that?

All right, all right, said my mother. We’ll turn it off and he can get ready for bed. But I didn’t get ready for bed right away. Aunt Mildred kept us all up for an hour and a half talking about psychology.

Though Aunt Mildred won that early skirmish, she was destined to lose the war. She underestimated the power of television to assimilate even the most skillful conversationalists. Scourge herself though she might—flailing scatter rug after scatter rug with the carpet beater—Aunt Mildred could not for long resist the temptation; she and my grandmother had a television set five years later. And my grandmother began to include in her telephone conversations reports on the soap operas. She mixed them up in her mind with the goings-on in the family. She would say to my mother, "Imagine him doing such an awful thing to that nice young girl. And here he’s a doctor if you please—supposed to be educated." Aunt Mildred referred to Love of Life as my story. The show became a personal belonging, something she held as closely to her as her pocketbook. She wouldn’t go anywhere without it. She scheduled her hairdresser around it, and sometimes told my mother to step on it if they were returning late from a shopping trip and Love of Life was going to be on.

When my father teased my grandmother and my aunt about watching soap operas, Aunt Mildred became indignant.

Well, they have very good acting on that show, she said huffily.

As good as the Brain-Wey Players? asked my father.

Oh, that foolish bunch, replied Aunt Mildred. "Don’t remind me of them."

Once you thought they were really something, my mother noted.

"Well. If any of them had been that good they would have been on in the afternoons."

At least we don’t watch those Westerns, my grandmother said. "With all that shooting. There’s no story in that—shooting people."

Nobody noticed anymore whether or not I was sitting up straight. I wasn’t. I was leaning back in my chair, slowly growing round-shouldered in the posture of watching television. Even today I catch myself in a store window—walking stooped. And my posture wasn’t the only thing about me that television was affecting. As Aunt Mildred might have learned in her psychology course, early influences can be crucial to a child’s development. Toilet training counts. I was getting toilet training from television in vivid black and white, impressions that reached the bowels of my psyche.

Howdy Doody was bad for both my posture and my self-restraint. The show was unrestrained; it suggested a world wonderfully out of joint—or loosely jointed, considering that Howdy and many of his supporting cast were puppets. Buffalo Bob was a father figure in a Daniel Boone suit. Clarabell was a clown, with a seltzer bottle that he squirted right in Buffalo Bob’s face.

Naughty! one of my friends shouted when Clarabell squirted Buffalo Bob. Naughty was to my age group what a martini was to our parents: intoxicating. Howdy Doody distilled naughtiness and dispensed it from the seltzer bottle. No child could watch Howdy Doody without entering the conspiracy; there was only one rule governing the peanut gallery, and that was have fun.

I knew how to be naughty. But I was discreet about it, because I was a relatively adult child. The reign of naughtiness on Howdy Doody—Clarabell’s brazen, openly bad behavior—was example enough to encourage me to go further. So I went into the bushes with Nancy Gosling. Or else we went under the hammock on the front porch. We began misbehaving together—when we were six or so, two years into Howdy Doody, and already intimates from hours of watching television together and responding the same way, at the same time, with surges of energy.

Nancy and I would drape a beach towel or an old army blanket over the hammock to make a tent, then crawl underneath. In the tent, crouched on the cool, painted floorboards, I would stare at Nancy’s bare bottom, which I think had freckles, and she would look at me. I remember Nancy’s breath on my skin—a bland, gentle warmth that made me feel like Clarabell’s painted smile: widened, and red. One time Nancy suddenly became embarrassed while I was studying her bottom. Looking about anxiously, she pulled up her pants. Then she said, "I want to go to the playground right now, and if we don’t, I’m going to look at your front. I knew Nancy meant business, because usually, by mutual consent, looking at the front was prohibited. Maybe Nancy thought she heard her mother’s whistle (her mother used a police whistle to summon her home). Anything could set her off; I never knew when she was going to start feeling guilty. For instance, I once said to her the word sex and she replied, aghast, You swore!"

I had no patience with Nancy’s guilt feelings. They could be as exasperating as Aunt Mildred. There were two different worlds you could live in, it seemed to me: the world of Aunt Mildred, which was generally prohibitive, and the world of television, which was whatever a free spirit wanted it to be. Unrestrained. All I understood then of the basic difference was that television never frustrated me. It encouraged greater liberties than being outdoors.

One liberty Nancy and I took from television was playing Indians. Watching The Lone Ranger and other Westerns, we were inspired to substitute playing Indians for