Life Before Television

    So what did we do in those old days before television?  There was radio.  It might have been Wednesday night that we had to listen to “The Lone Ranger” with Tonto and Silver and Scout and silver bullets, etc.  “Who was that masked man?”  “Hi yo Silver away!”  And the famous theme song, Dum ditty, dum ditty, dum dum dum.

     When Tonto and the masked man didn’t want to be followed, they had a way of covering their tracks.  That was all good and well on the radio, but later when I watched them on tv, they were dragging tree branches or bushes behind their horses.  A macular degenerated centenarian could have followed that trail.  Oh disillusionment!  That ranks up there with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

    I remember “Big John and Little Sparky” every Saturday morning.  “When you go out in the woods today, you’d better not go alone. . . Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic” or something like that.  I can’t remember a single episode of that show.

     On Sunday mornings, we listened to the Sunday funnies while we ate our bacon and eggs.  Sometimes we got the funnies, second hand from Grandma and Grandad, but we never had them when the program came on the radio.  Somebody (Bob Lilliy?) read the funnies from the Denver Post and listeners were to follow along with their own paper.  We were stuck with whatever our imaginations could come up with.  The Funnies were followed by various Sunday morning evangelists. 

      A few of the other radio shows I remember listening to: 

Jack Benny (Rochester’s raspy voice, Dennis Day’s tenor voice);

The Great Giltersleeve (Willard Waterman’s laugh, his “LeeRoy!”);

Fibber Magee and Molly (“Taint funny Magee”, the famous closet that spilled its contents every time it was opened);

Queen for a Day (maybe.  Jack Bailey?  Three poor ladies vied to see who was the most miserable and that one got crowned Queen for a Day which came with a bunch of prizes.);

Art Linkletter (People are Funny?);

A quiz show like $64000 Question, the name of which I cannot remember;

At least one summer, we got hooked on Stella Dallas (couldn’t listen during school because it was a daytime soap);

Hit Parade (Saturday night? Giselle McKenzie, Dorothy Collins—lots of others).

      There were other shows we listened to every morning on KOA, Ivan Schooley, who read the news as well as spun a few discs.  Part of the news was the most recent traffic deaths ending with the death count so far that year and the advice to “Drive Careful.”  Of course there were the tragic times when we recognized those named in the report.

  Pete Smythe also filled the morning air.  He probably deserves his own column, he did so many things, playing the piano along with creating and acting his fictional characters and playing a few records.

       We probably read a few books.  I remember wanting to know how to read so I could read comic books on my own.  But there were other evening pursuits.

    I remember Grandma teaching me to play Chinese Checkers with marbles and a homemade board made by drilling holes in a fiberboard.  Someone gave us a set of games with checkerboard and sets of cards such as Old Maid and Crazy 8’s.  The Old Maid game wore out pretty soon because someone (me?) in a fit of anger crumpled up the old maid card when he drew it from another player.  Thereafter, you would have had to been blind not to see which card not to draw. 

     We played other card games such as Solitaire (Grandma taught me that one, too) and Double Solitaire, if that isn’t a contradiction which required two decks and two players.  We also played Brains or Concentration.  Endless games of Monopoly are associated with snowy days when there was no school.  We might start a fire in the “cob-burner” in the “closet” behind the chimney upstairs.

      We played a lot outdoors, too if it was clear and not too cold.  I remember the shop being converted to an indoor baseball field with rubber ball and lath bat.  We never broke a window, and there were lots to be broken in the old school house converted to a farm shop.  We also had many a basketball game in the shop with a tennis ball and a one-pound coffee can nailed to the wall serving as the goal.

    In the warmer weather, we had a few outdoor baseball games with the piano students who came to get lessons from Mom.  And we could play basketball under the light when we inherited Cousin Keith’s old backboard and netless hoop.  It was fastened to the most sliveriest 6x6 post ever.  Layups were discouraged because the post and backboard were fastened to the south end of the old red barn and near the yard light on the meter pole.  If you did a layup, you couldn’t follow through without getting a huge splinter or crashing into the barn wall.  We played a lot of “HORSE” relying on trick shots to win.

      We also learned a game called “Smearum” when we went to Crook to watch a football game. (I may be wrong about where we learned it.)  It was like baseball’s workup, for when you didn’t have enough players for two teams.  As I recall, one person had the football and everyone else was on defense.  You could play in pretty cold weather.

      Once or twice we had weather conducive to ice hockey.  The snow melted and filled the wheel ruts with water.  A cold snap froze the water and we “skated” on it with sticks and a puck.

     We also spent a lot of time trying to devise a lethal arrowhead for our toy bow and arrow.  That stemmed from an indoor pursuit, listening to 78 rpm records on the Stromberg-Carlson radio-phonograph.  One of those was a two or three record set of Robin Hood.  Robin had a whistling arrow he could use to signal his merry men.  Of course he was a crack shot with the bow and arrow.  We weren’t.

     The radio is probably another subject entirely unto itself, we had so many memorable records.   

     For indoor sports, we had a “playroom” filled with our games and toys, such as they were.  We had Tinkertoys from which we could make buildings, windmills, tractors, implements, trucks. . . .  We had all the pieces named, knobs, wheels, short sticks, medium-size sticks, cigarette size sticks, long sticks, and one between cigarette and long sticks, the name if which I don’t remember.

      Once in a while we turned the basement into a skating rink.  We fastened the old clamp on skates to our shoes.  When the clamps failed, you wrapped old shoe strings around the skate and your shoe toe.  An untied shoe lace led to more than one accident.  We could go around in a circle, the stairway defining the west end and the brick chimney the east pylon.  A trip up the steps to use the bathroom could be exciting.  You couldn’t take the time to remove the skates.  Try walking up steps with wheels strapped to your feet.

      There were some other less innocent pastimes, such as the indoor clod fight we held upstairs using wooden blocks for clods.  No casualties among the participants, but the woodwork suffered several nicks form the aerial assault.

     Maybe the real question should be, how did we have time for television?

Gene Amole

 One-word-intro.

     I must have been eight or nine years old when we got our first television.  Coming down the lane in the school bus, we could see Dad up on the roof tying to erect an antenna.  And there in front of the dining room’s east window stood a pretty good size tv, a console sitting on four legs with the ability to swivel right and left.  I think one of the first shows we watched that night was “My Little Margie”.

    In this tv business, we had followed Alexander Pope’s advice, “Be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”  My first tv experience occurred in a cold, unheated upstairs room that I seem to remember we had to access from an enclosed outside stair.  It belonged to Haldo Kjosness. 

      We had gone to church, gone home to eat our roast beef dinner, then loaded up and went back north to Haldo’s place.  I don’t remember much about the tv except that it was pretty cloudy, or “snowy” as we used to say in those olden days.  What I remember the most was lying on a calf skin on the floor.  It was furry and soft just like it was on the calf, except it was clean.

     I also remember spending the night in Denver with Aunt Dell and Uncle Wilbur.  They had a tv with good reception.  We watched Lawrence Welk (I think) and Bears’ baseball.  I wasn’t in to baseball much in those early days, but I loved the commercials between innings.  Most of them were Hamms ads with an animated bear bouncing around doing funny things in fantastic background scenery ("from the land of sky-blue waters"). “Hamms the beer refreshing, Hamms the beer refreshing.”  I can still hear it.

     The other tv experience I had before we got our own set was at Aunt Ruth and Uncle Walter’s.  They lived about 30 miles from Colorado Springs and got KKTV Channel 11 very well.  Later KRDO out of Pueblo would be added.  I remember watching “Blinky the Clown” every afternoon, and sometimes an hour long Western, Roy Rogers maybe?

     On Saturday there was the CBS Game of the Week, baseball with Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blatner, and later Diz and Pee Wee Reese.  They didn’t always break for a commercial between innings.  Sometimes they made the commercial right from the booth.  I can still picture the Diz holding up a six pack of beer between him and Pee Wee and extolling the virtues of that brew and encouraging all of us to enjoy a cool one while we watched the game.  Was it Falstaff?  Schlitz? Pabst Blue Ribbon?  Uncle Ricky always claimed Diz and Pee Wee indulged in some of the product during the game.  Would that explain some “Dizisms”?  “Brother, he threw him a ripple.”  “He slud into second.” “The pitcher is taking his ‘pliminary pitches.”

     Once, Diz was the mystery guest on “What’s My Line”.  One of the ladies, Arlene Francis or Dorothy Kilgallen, mask still on during Mystery Guest appearances, said, “You sound too intelligent to be Dizzy Dean.”  When the masks came off, there sat Dizzy Dean.  The lady fell all over herself apologizing, but Diz didn’t seem to mind.  Maybe he didn’t understand the slight?

      The Channel 11 news came on about 6 p. m.  Sometimes John Bartholomew came on with an opinion piece which always ended with, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  I guess that excused his weird (I thought) opinions.

    Another weirdo who voiced his opinions on tv was Gene Amole.  He was on Channel 2 I think. After much tinkering with antennas, we settled for a two-antenna system, one antenna pointed southwest towards Colorado Springs, the other northwest toward Denver.  The Denver stations never came in quite as well as the Springs ones, but if we wanted to watch NBC we had to watch Denver Channel 4.  Anyway, two guys I thought must be crazy and didn’t have enough to do were John Bartholomew and Gene Amole.   

     Some years later, I would become a Rocky Mountain News reader.  Gene wrote a regular column for the News.  I don’t remember how often his column appeared.  I read quite a few of them.  His trademark was the one-word introduction.  They were very effective.  It piqued your interest and the first thing you knew, you had read the whole column.  The one-word intro did just what it was supposed to do, bait the hook that caught you.

     I can’t remember many of the things he wrote, except one that tickled my fancy and my sense of humor.  Geno, like many a writer, was bemoaning how the slobs were undermining our English language.  This time it was those bureaucrats and technocrats who created new nouns and verbs by adding a preposition in front of a verb or noun.  One word that I remember him complaining about was “inservice”.  As a teacher who attended many a crummy inservice, that one struck a chord with me.  Some others I seem to remember were “downturn” and “outsource”.    He had several others I can’t remember.

   He ended that column with a little advice for those English degenerators:  They can just go “upstick” it!

    In the end, Gene “blogged” his death.  His blog platform was The Rocky Mountain News.  When he and his doctors decided the end was at hand, he wrote several columns about his experience of dying.  For a guy who had a reputation for hating change, he broke a lot of new ground.

     So let us raise a Schlitz or Hamms or Falstaff or PBR to those old tv pioneers, Gene and John, Diz , Buddy and Pee Wee.

      As for those bent on upscrewing our language (think texting):

Upstick it!  (Old Diz excepted)   

   

Fair Weather Works

     In the desert we have become the last few years, any moisture finds the welcome mat out. So Tuesday’s half inch drizzle fell on grateful grounds. 

     But coming on the heels of the switch back to standard time, where the afternoon turns into evening in the afternoon, such days are hard on us Vitamin D addicts.  Plus, the skid steer was sitting in the circle drive waiting to go to work on the cement steps and porch.  The attempt to get the cement work removed on Monday afternoon, before the predicted wet weather, fell victim to the time change.  Darkness fell and the steps didn’t.

     Wednesday to the rescue.  It dawned clear and afternoon temperatures reached the 60’s.  On with the outdoor work.

     Steps to the basement and from the garage into the house have never had handrails.  Well, we aren’t getting any younger, you know.  The weather had cooperated enough earlier in the week to do the staining and varnishing outdoors.  Newell posts had to be installed on cement floors in both cases, necessitating drilling holes in concrete to secure support plates.  Wednesday morning was a perfect time to do that in the garage.

    I added one step and reduced the risers from seven inches to five inches in the garage.  The addition of the “mop handle” (British slang for handrail) will make this entrance to the house pretty accessible.

       The steps wait for the remover.

    Thirty minutes later, the work is done. The destruction work that is.  Quite a bit of cleanup had to be done, a couple of yards of dirt to remove.

    And the ruts.  The skid steer didn’t do the yard any favors.

      Fair weather held out through the weekend, so out with the wheel barrow, and the ruts got filled, the north foundation got a kinder gentler slope, and the south ditch got a temporary dirt pile.

    Two yards of dirt gone, time to cover up the wound left by the porch removal.

     Metal flashing, two strips of ¼” Styrofoam insulation, and a 10” siding piece cover a lot.  It was warm enough to apply a coat of metal primer to the flashing.   Two holes in the block foundation got a little masonry work.  A coat of blue ought to make the scars disappear.

     The house is now accessible only through the garage.  But the welcome mat is still out.

       

Kansas

    How many Kansans does it take to change a light bulb?

    One, but please don’t tell OSHA.  That’s a stairway spanned by three 2X4’s bearing a piece of ¾ inch plywood and a folding step stool.  Next time, it may take two to change this light bulb.. 

    The  one-inch ledge on the left, abutted by a 2X12 plate, now only ¼ of an inch, is all prettied up with a piece of sheetrock and three layers of joint compound.  Now the difficult part, feathering out the edges of the goop so they don’t stand out like acne on the Mona Lisa.  It will probably take an OSHA approved adjustable leg ladder to change the bulb from here on out.

    Firewood time has rolled around again.  Time to descend into the neighbor’s un-Kansas-like pasture where century old ash trees abound.

     There are some dead elms, well over 100 years old.  This was a homestead in the late 19^th century.  The wreckage of a “modern” windmill tower (it’s made of steel) hides among a renegade growth of elms.

      I can hardly imagine getting in and out of this gulley (drainage, draw, whatever you want to call it) with a wagon and team of horses.  It won’t be politically correct to say the homesteaders were hard headed Scotsmen, who eventually had to give up.  It was the second generation that got soft and left to pursue less arduous ways of making a living.  The 1930’s probably made that decision “easier”.

  

   Until 30 years ago, there was water in the creek.  A spring still keeps this pool alive.  If you ignore the old truck, and during recesses for the buzzing chainsaw, you can imagine yourself taking a trip back 150 years in time.  Imagine trying to carve out a living among the rocks and the “soapweed”. 

    The truck slowly fills and late afternoon approaches.  Time to lug the harvest from picking over the bones of the ancient ash trees up the hill. 

    Plenty of sunlight left to stack the wood by.

       Well, back to 2013.  November already.  Don’t forget to set your clocks back.