In this age of high definition signals viewed on flat screen television sets, it sometimes makes it easy to forget that as Baby Boomers our first taste of television was in black and white.
One of my first black & white impressions is of Soupy Sales. The news of his recent passing had me searching my memories for him. I must have been very young, because I can’t remember specifics, just a fuzzy image of him, speaking to puppets, getting a pie in the face and making me, then a small child, laugh. My mother tells stories of watching Dark Shadows (the original vampire television event?) as I hid behind the a chair, scared, but still peeking to watch Barnabas or Quentin Collins transform.
Once I started thinking about these early television memories, more came flooding back, Lassie, Gentle Ben, Flipper, The Lone Ranger and The Andy Griffith Show. All of them a bit fuzzy, but warm memories just the same.
It’s fun to remember those early television shows isn’t it?
What are your earliest memories of television? Share them here in the comments section or in the Your Boomer Voices section of this website.
I remember getting to stay up 30 minutes extra one night a week – to watch Red Skelton. I can still recall his skits of Gertrude and Heathcliff, Clem Kadiddlehopper, and Freddie the Freeloader. Those were the days!
Another of my favorites was Mr. Ed. I can still hear a part of the theme song in my head: “A horse is a horse, of course, of course. And no one can talk to a horse, of course; that is, of course unless the horse is the famous Mr. Ed.”
And do you remember:
My Three Sons
I Dream of Jeannie
Bonanza
Lost in Space
Gunsmoke
Star Trek (The Original!)
Hawaii Five-O
The Ed Sullivan Show
Carol Burnett
And game shows:
Concentration
Jeopardy (The original)
The Price is Right
To Tell the Truth
What’s My Line
I’ve Got a Secret, etc.
Isn’t it funny that we can remember those old shows, but some of today’s shows come and go almost unnoticed? There weren’t as many channels then, of course, so there was less to compete for our attention. Still, they seemed to have more depth of character somehow. Well…I remember them fondly.