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?