My Old Neighborhood Remembered (10 page)

The crowd gathered in front of the store window and I considered myself lucky to squeeze into a space with a clear view of the screen for the Joe Louis-Jersey Joe Walcott heavyweight championship fight from Yankee Stadium in June 1948. Television had arrived in the Bronx, not yet in our apartment or in the apartments of the people I knew, on view through the windows of the television sales and repair shops beginning to appear throughout the Bronx. The store owners closed their doors at night, left a television set turned on in the window and let the set play and do the business of selling the idea of television. Not much selling was required. Within a couple of years or so of that fight everyone I knew, including my family, owned a television set.

Previously, for home entertainment we had phonograph records, 78s my sister and cousin brought home like Tony Pastor's
One Meat Ball
, said meat ball which you “gets no bread with,” and albums like
Ballad for Americans
, sung by Paul Robeson. And we had beloved radio — the war news, the sports events, the comedy shows, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy — a ventriloquist on the radio — our programs,
Tennessee Jed, The Lone Ranger
, the dramas,
Lights Out
and
Escape
. But with television suddenly we had riveting visual images and the television sets were headed right for our living rooms.

Television went into our living rooms because that is where our console radios had been and television was so extraordinary, placement in a living room where we could gather around was demanded. Some people were concerned about how a television set was to be integrated into the living room decor. The standard look of the furnishings in the Bronx apartments I knew relied heavily on mahogany pieces for status. Consequently, many of the early television sets in the Bronx were in the talking furniture category, inserted in cabinetry which was often made of mahogany with cabinet doors that closed on the screen so when the set was not turned on it looked like a piece of living room furniture. Sort of.

A store near our apartment specialized in this kind of disguised television set and that was the kind we ended up with, cabinetry containing an off-brand television set that went on to live a sickly life requiring constant repairs within its fancy trappings.

A new social arrangement came out of these early days of television ownership, the visiting of friends or relatives who owned a set. My brother-in-law's cousins owned one of the first television sets and this was an event, going over to their apartment and I went one evening with my sister, brother-inlaw, and my mother. It was important enough for my mother to wear a new black dress, something I especially remember because one of the cousins present, my mother's age, was wearing the identical black dress causing embarrassment for them both. Significant about the incident was that the evening, gathering in someone's apartment to watch television, was considered dress-up by the women.

The first friend of mine to own a television set was my classmate from junior high school, Ben Miller. A relative of his built a television set for Ben's family from an electronics kit. Heady stuff to someone like me who had been inept in making model airplanes. In an exclusive boys' clubhouse activity, Ben would invite friends to watch Milton Berle.

When we owned our own television set I was so thrilled I watched anything, even Jon Gnagy demonstrating how to draw pictures I wouldn't dream of emulating and didn't try.

Since each television set required a separate roof antenna, competition became intense for rooftop space to accommodate the antennas which altered the skyline. Antenna wires flopped over the roofline into the various apartments. We pointed out our antennas to our friends as though we owned real estate.

The reception in the Bronx was shaky, nobody in our area was able to get a clear image of the Dumont Television Network, which came in with a shadowy ghost. And the sets were shoddy, tubes were constantly burning out. Men who had been fix-it guys with radio repair shops were now television repair experts, nearly as important as doctors who made house calls.

In deciding whether to see a movie without subtitles, my aunt and uncle would ask, “Is there a lot of talking?” If not a lot of talking, they would go to a movie theater to see the movie. Accordingly, they watched television with the rest of us when there was not a lot of talking, as with variety shows.

The Brooklyn Dodgers were the best team to watch on television. They featured more advanced television coverage than the Yankees and the Giants. The Dodgers had their Zoomar close-up cameras installed in the dugouts at Ebbets Field — Don Newcombe, focused and perspiring, staring in from the mound. Yankee fans watched Dodgers games just for the coverage.

One day we found ourselves looking wide-eyed at television through store windows and in a dramatically short period of time television was part of our lives. As the industry figured out the medium, the programming was scattered, ranging from the live dramas,
Studio One
and
Kraft Television Theater
to roller derby and wrestling. Teenagers caught up in the magic, we passed along the hearsay that the wrestler, Antonino Rocca, was so fierce that in Argentina he killed a man in the ring, which we believed just as we believed Antonino Rocca's wrestling matches were on the level.