January 2011

Charles A. Lindbergh, who vaulted to international fame 70 years ago this May by taking off alone one night and flying from New York to Paris in his single-engine monoplane, is buried in a small churchyard on the eastern end of the island of Maui in Hawaii. I learned this a few years ago in a conversation with a couple of tourists in the bar of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Oahu.

The husband, a retired airline pilot, said with pride that he was a Lindbergh buff, and that was why they’d driven all the way out beyond the town of Hana to visit the flier’s grave. His wife was not so enthralled. She thought the Hana trip had been an interruption of their vacation. She also could not understand why such a famous person would choose such a remote burial ground. So, few people would come to visit.

Nothing to Apologize For Nothing to Apologize For Roycroft Romance Dog Food Liberal Longevity

It was a series of sounds and images that had monumental impact and will always remain in the minds of those who watched: the bloodstained suit, the child saluting the coffin, the funeral procession to the muffled drums, the riderless horse. More than thirty years later American culture is still obsessed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and by its greater meaning. Yet, viewed purely in television terms, the impact of the four-day coverage of the Kennedy killing and funeral looms almost as large. It’s not simply that most Americans were glued to their TV sets as vicarious mourners over this four-day period. Nor was it that the death of Kennedy, America’s first political TV superstar, was itself turned into a television production.

When the Ampex Corporation launched two-inch black-andwhite videotape in 1956, broadcasters were smitten by it. At last they had a quality electronic medium that let them store their output for later broadcast and duplication. Many advertisers welcomed it too. Tape was less costly to shoot than film, needed no processing, and was indistinguishable from live TV. It was “instant movies.” Still, agency creative people were not thrilled.

Location tape shooting required a huge recording and control van. And tape was best shot in sequence using multiple cameras, like doing live TV, because editing with Ampex tape was slow and laborious. Special effects were limited. So the technical limitations of the medium restricted creativity.

Color television made more demands that film seemed better able to satisfy. So film dominated quality production. It still does at most agencies and production companies.

It was 1945, and everybody needed everything. If you knew how to build a car, a house, or a washing machine, you could sell it faster than you could make it. Car dealers, including fine old names that soon would be history—Hudson, Nash, Packard, and Studebaker—all had long waiting lists. Many dealers bluntly Quoted not the price of the car but the price of getting on their waiting lists.

In 1945, I had barely heard of either television or the advertising business, and I had no idea what a boom was, even though I was smack in the middle of one. I was thirteen years old, just out of grade school, and my goal was to become an engineer. Instead I spent forty-six years in advertising, mostly as a TV copywriter, later as a writer-producer and agency owner. While it wasn’t always fun, it certainly was never dull.

I tend to resist television history, especially when it’s on television. The narrator always says, “The Golden Age of …,” and there’s some grainy footage of a man dressed in women’s clothes tripping over a coffee table amid gusts of scratchy hilarity.

But of course, like almost any other American who was a kid in the 1950s, television history is my history. TV and I grew up together, and I’ve been most agreeably reminded of this by our three articles that chart television’s coming of age: John Leonard’s marvelous ode to Ed Sullivan and his works; Harry Matthei’s tangy veteran’s account of the making of the commercial; and Steven D. Stark’s succinct, perceptive look at what TV learned over one terrible weekend.

Two times during the course of assembling this issue, television history put me in mind of larger historical concerns, one cheering, one less so.

Each week since October 1988 I’ve delivered myself of a five-minute “media criticism,” a sort of sermonette, on “CBS Sunday Morning.” A dozen times in those eight years a stranger has stopped me on the street, at a movie, or waiting in line for a glimpse of Matisse to ask: “Do you write your own stuff?” To which I have learned to reply, passively aggressively, “Well, they didn’t hire me for my looks.” But at least it’s a human question.

Like most American families, mine grew up nibbling on potato chips, pretzels, and Cheez Curls. Our neighbors, however, munched on peanuts. Lots of them. Every horizontal surface in their home held a bowlful of goobers. These were odd little legumes, with but one nut per shell, rarely two and never a triple. The Franklin family grew them in their back-yard garden, while the rest of us raised tomatoes. Years later I learned that this crop, strange for our latitude, was a family tradition stretching back many generations.

The Franklins were direct descendants of a runaway plantation slave who had traveled the Underground Railroad. His antebellum snack, cheap and nutritious, shared that historic journey North. Dutifully, he and then his children and grandchildren planted and harvested nuts for well over a century. Without doubt, the Franklin and peanut genetic stock was as tightly intertwined as a DNA double helix.

When I was a senior in high school in 1939, I was engaged in a fierce competition with a boy named Irving to become editor of the school newspaper. Much to my dismay, the paper’s adviser named us co-editors. I marched into the teacher’s office and pleaded that I needed every honor possible to help me win a hundred-dollar scholarship to Brown University. My father had saved a hundred dollars and could borrow another hundred, and I planned to earn one hundred more, but a scholarship was my only hope of raising the full four-hundred-dollar annual tuition.

I argued that I was graduating in January and Irving was not graduating until June, so he could become editor after me. The adviser finally agreed, and I was the sole editor for six months.