Earliest Television Memories

As I write these essays, my mind often does the following. I imagine that instead of writing about 15 essays a week, I wrote just one essay per week. I then try to project backwards as to when I would have had to start writing essays to have written all the essays on this site. For example, I wrote essay 1850 on May 11, 2006 (see here.) In that essay I projected backwards 1850 weeks from May 11, 2006 and came up with a date in October 1970. I recalled that very week in my mind, and hence I wrote an essay entitled "The Pleasures of Memory" to highlight the vividness of thoughts from that week in October 1970. The same thing happened to me this morning. I wrote essay # 2506 earlier today. Counting backwards 2506 weeks from today leads me just about to New Years Day 1959. I happen to remember that day (I was six years-old at the time) because it was the first time I recall watching the "Bowl" games on television. New Years Day and football would become a ritual for me and my family until the 1980s, but it all began for me on January 1, 1959.

A Special Day

A six year-old knows few special days apart from his birthday and Christmas. Jan. 1, 1959 became special for me because of its importance for my father. He was born and bred in the hardscrabble country north of Utica, NY in 1925, where his family had eked out a living from the unforgiving soil in Constableville for nearly a century. They had been German immigrants who quickly settled into the "West of the Hudson" areas when that land opened for White settlement early in the 19th century. His parents, born in the 19th century, met in Constableville in the early teens of the 20th century; his father's family was German and his mother's Dutch. The union produced seven children, one of whom died in infancy. My father was the only one who had the opportunity or amibition to "escape" the hard rural life; he ended up bringing us up in a prosperous CT suburb while he worked in NYC. He never forgot, however, where he was from. One of the memories he was fond of recounting was how he was so poor after being discharged from the army in 1945 that he turned down his acceptance from Cornell because he had already sent in a deposit to another school (St. Lawrence Univ.) and he couldn't justify spending two such deposits. In any case, the nearest four-year university to his home was Syracuse University.

In the 1950s Syracuse put itself on the national map because of its stellar gridiron teams. The world made note of Syracuse in 1956 when ambitious coach Ben Schwartzwalder, who had been recruited from tiny Muhlenberg College a few years previously, persuaded a poor-as-dirt Georgia athlete, Jim Brown, to come up to play football at Syracuse. Brown did so well in 1956 that he was named an All-American; in that year he also scored an NCAA record 43 points in one game (against Colgate Univ.). Syracuse would go on to be ranked # 1 in intercollegiate football in (Fall) 1959 behind the stellar performance of halfback Ernie Davis; on New Year's Day 1959, when Davis was still a freshman (and ineligible to play varsity ball) Syracuse was still ranked high enough to play in one of the elite bowls (the Orange) that day. Thus, we had the TV tuned to that game, which saw Syracuse lose to the fabled Oklahoma program, 21-6.

Refining the Memories

Though I don't remember the Syracuse game, I do remember one feature of the day. It was the introduction of the players for the Rose Bowl. All I could remember was that Iowa was playing, and that their team name was the Hawkeyes. The reason I remember the player introductions was that they showed us pictures of the guys on TV as if they were in a sort of family album. They would "turn the page," and we would see another player. We would not see the guys with their bulging necks in jacket and tie, however. The pictures were "action shots." So, if he was a back, we would see him in the typical 1950's "pose"--ball tucked under one arm and other arm stretched out behind him as if warding off a tackler. If he was a lineman we saw him in a crouched stance with a menancing look on his face. Indeed, I saw so many pictures of Iowa linemen that I thought that a Hawkeye was a person who was crouched in a low menacing position. The guys seemed so big and strong, that I thought also that they were giants. During a commercial I decided I would try to imitate their walk, and I ambled, in a sort of duck-walk, over to my three year-old brother Bob and knocked him down. While he was crying and picking himself up, I proudly announced that I was an Iowa Hawkeye.

Those were the days when we only had one TV, a big black and white General Electric. I used to spend lots of minutes tracing the script letters for "General Electric" with my finger both before and after I learned how to write in script writing (they started calling it "cursive" in the 1980s). A few years later we acquired another TV, and on one New Year's Day my father decided to set two TVs next to each other so that we could see the action in two games at once. This seemingly brilliant idea caused so much confusion that it almost led to a family fight. In any case, those were the days when I often supplemented my TV-watching with listening to the radio account of local football games. Especially noteworthy for me were Marty Glickman's broadcasts of the NY Giants games. His "poetic lilt and slight NY twang," as one author has it, always made me think that every time I heard the NY Giants that I was listening to the exploits of a real group of giants. One day, I thought, I would like to join their number.

Conclusion

These memories seem as though they happened almost in a different lifetime. This was not even the time of "low definition" TV. And, these were the days when having two or more football games on TV in one day was exceptional. New Year's Day, with four games (Orange, Cotton, Sugar and Rose) was simply an over-the-top day. But it provided me, as time has shown, one of the earliest memories of a pleasant family engagement. And, for that I am grateful in 2007.

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