Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (9 page)

Tillstrom and Allison soon had competition in the form of another, more frenetic human-marionette interchange.
The Howdy Doody Show
featured a live audience of exuberant preschoolers seated in a row of bleachers called the Peanut Gallery. The two stars of the daily show were genial, burly “Buffalo Bob” Smith, dressed in a Western-style fringe outfit, and his puppet counterpart, Howdy Doody, a freckle-faced redheaded boy dressed in miniature plaid shirt, neckerchief, and blue jeans. Buffalo Bob's major nemesis was the irrepressible clown Clarabelle, who communicated only through honks of a horn while spraying victims with seltzer bottles, while Howdy's antagonist in the town of Doodyville was the mean, supercilious banker Phineas T. Bluster. The show was fast-paced yet gentle. By episode's end, Clarabelle would behave, Mr. Bluster would prove capable of good deeds and empathy, and the television audience would learn much about friendship and conflict resolution.

Kinescope recordings of
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
and
Howdy Doody
often appear primitive compared to
Sesame Street
and
The Electric Company
, yet for the first cohorts of Boomers and many of their parents they offered access to an almost unlimited universe beyond the home. Because television was so new, it carried some of the same shared wonder now produced by the internet. Even as these original programs gave way to more sophisticated fare, some portion of the special bond between television and the first generation that grew up with the medium would remain.

Television is the leisure activity most associated with children of the fifties and early sixties, not because it was
the Boomers' dominant recreation—it probably was not—but because of their unique status as the first “TV generation.” The limited number of channels in the precable era, the limited hours each station broadcast, and the limited number of television sets in each household ensured that the youngsters of this era could never match their children or grandchildren in the opportunity to watch television almost continuously. Yet these very limitations created a much stronger sense of shared community, an almost village-like experience of viewing in which family members, friends, and schoolmates often watched the same program so that discussion of a particular show might carry over from the living room to the schoolyard the next day. The viewing of some evening programs became family events.

Boomer children would generally participate in three sometimes distinct but overlapping television experiences: children's television, specifically directed at young viewers, in which adults were merely tolerated; family programs, which sought to attract both children and their parents; and adult-oriented shows geared for a more mature audience but either surreptitiously or openly viewed by children as a glimpse of a world beyond childhood. Television viewing was also a changing universe: the oldest Boomers gradually left the more juvenile shows to their younger siblings, and the networks frequently canceled programs and forced children to experiment with a new show, so that no two television seasons were ever exactly alike. Yet even if the world of early television was hardly static, there were enough characteristic programs or formats to provide insight into the Boomers' viewing experience.

The children's programs on the networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, and, early on, DuMont) usually featured action geared
to short attention spans, sometimes used children as important characters, and advertised products aimed at a young audience. Children's programs could be live, animated, or a combination of the two, and would usually be broadcast weekday mornings, afternoons, or early evenings, and Saturday morning, either live or on film.

The most successful weekday children's program of the 1950s was the
Mickey Mouse Club
, which captured the attention of much of the young population of that era. The program featured a cast dominated by talented, photogenic children between eight and twelve years of age, who danced and sang in almost vaudevillian routines, introduced by the only significant adult presence, Jimmy Dodd. While all the Mouseketeers quickly enjoyed fan clubs, a few children became early idols of Boomer kids. The two youngest performers, eight-year-olds Cubby O'Brien and Karen Pendleton, were precocious, cute, and the only kids who were actual Boomers themselves. Twelve-year-olds Annette Funicello and Tommy Kirk were the most versatile, which led them to post-Mousketeer acting and singing careers. One of the most attractive elements of the program was that each day had a separate theme, such as “Fun with Music” day, and stage action was interspersed with filmed serials, such as Spin and Marty and the Hardy Boys episodes. Product tieins to the series were heavily advertised, and millions of children clamored for the attachable mouse ears that would become one of the symbolic images of Boomer childhood.

The hugely successful
Mickey Mouse Club
usually led into more localized children's fare in the time slots just before or even during dinnertime. Many local stations found a profitable niche for recycled 1930s and 1940s comedy shorts and cartoons, so that many Boomer children watched various
Three Stooges Shows
and
Popeye Theaters
hosted by local personalities. More than a few perplexed children tried to decipher Swing Era slang and jokes or wondered why Popeye was fighting 1950s allies such as the Germans or Japanese.

Daily afternoon programs were followed by early evening primetime shows that emphasized a family-friendly or child-friendly component.
Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, My Friend Flicka
, and
Circus Boy
were filmed dramatic series in which the central characters were children, often orphaned or in a single-parent home, and frequently paired with a highly intelligent animal. The evening time slots of these programs ensured at least some level of adult audience, and commercials were a mix of general family products and items of specific interest to children.

Prime-time children's programs either competed with or led into the broadest category of network television programming, shows developed for the entire family with sponsors geared to adult purchase. Ten years after the first tentative steps toward network broadcasting, a fairly standardized series of formats began to dominate mid-evening family viewing. A glance at a network program grid from 1957 reveals a variety of formats centered on programs that would become icons of fifties popular culture. Situation comedies such as
I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best
, and
Ozzie and Harriet;
Westerns such as
Maverick, Wyatt Earp
, and
Sugarfoot
; and comedy/variety programs including Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, and George Gobel were eagerly anticipated events for all age groups. Only the enormously popular and mostly rigged quiz-show format of
Twenty-One, Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question
, and
Tic Tac Dough
was an endangered species, and as congressional pressure forced their cancellation, they were quickly replaced by
Donna Reed, Leave It to Beaver
,
and
Bonanza
. Generally Westerns had enough action and comedies offered enough slapstick or young characters that children were entranced, even if the advertisements were for floor wax or deodorant. Since rules governing bedtime varied by household, not all kids saw all of these programs, yet a family audience encouraged a discussion about shows that attracted children as listeners or participants, far more than twenty-first-century parents might imagine.

The situation comedies of the postwar era, like
Leave It to Beaver
, became a shared experience for all members of Boomer-era families, even if real households were considerably larger than their TV counterparts.
(Getty Images)

For most children, the least accessible television programming was the increasingly mature fare after 9 or 10
P.M
. Even the most “adult” drama then would receive a PG rating in modern coding, but many fifties parents were nonetheless concerned about the impact of television on their children. Some children who were able to negotiate lenient terms from their parents were sometimes permitted to
sample “adult” programs such as
Perry Como
or
Andy Williams
, simply because the “mature” character of the program was its music content, which would be supremely boring to a ten-year-old. Slightly older children might be permitted to stay up late enough to view weekend episodes of moderately scary but not particularly violent or suggestive shows, such as
One Step Beyond
or
Twilight Zone
. Programs that were extremely violent or sexually suggestive, however, represented the parental line in the sand, as the furor over the body count and implied sexuality of the late fifties program
The Untouchables
testified. Still, this reality was far removed from V-chips and parental lockboxes, and children's viewing habits tended to remain rather tightly under adult control and supervision.

By the late 1950s more than 90 percent of households had television sets. Yet many of children's leisure-time activities exhibited direct continuity with those of prewar youngsters. In the summer, for example, many beach resorts, camping areas, and other vacation spots were too far from cities with television stations to provide viewing opportunities. And more than a few parents felt that in summertime their children should be doing something other than watching reruns, so that in many cases the breakdown-prone TV sets weren't repaired, or adults imposed stringent viewing restrictions during vacation months.

One classic prewar activity in a world of limited television channels and summer “blackouts” was that other visual medium, the motion picture. Postwar children had fewer movie theaters and fewer films than their parents had enjoyed in their childhoods, but most of the thirties and forties movie experience was still largely intact. Much like their parents' era, Boomer movie viewing was roughly divided into
two experiences, Saturday matinees for kids and evening shows with parental accompaniment.

Urban or suburban neighborhood theaters accessible by foot or bicycle, and newer theaters in shopping centers that catered to auto traffic, both provided that staple of childhood recreation, the Saturday matinee. These shows offered a low admission price, often a quarter or half-dollar, and tended to have an audience composed primarily of children, with older siblings chaperoning younger brothers or sisters. The features often included one or two low-budget comedies, such as
Ma and Pa Kettle
or
Francis the Talking Mule
, or equally low-budget science fiction, horror, or World War II films, supplemented by strings of cartoons that offered the advantage of being in color in the theater while on television they were only black and white. Many parents were happy to unload some or all of their children for a Saturday afternoon, much to the consternation of harried ushers and candy-counter personnel. Altogether the experience was close to what the Boomers' parents had known in the 1930s—and even their grandparents remembered from the silent-film era.

The family outing to a movie theater in the evening, a major part of social life in the 1930s and during World War II, continued to be a major event throughout the fifties and early sixties. The film industry was initially terrified that the advent of television would remove the incentive for families to leave the house and pay for watching films. These fears were partially realized: two or three visits to the Bijou now became a more occasional, yet more special, event. Three film genres were still able to entice mother and dad to take the children to the movies. First was the “spectacular,” using new technologies in sound and wide screen, often involving
a film with religious or moral overtones. Among the most successful films in this category were
The Ten Commandments
and
Ben Hur
. The second theme focused on Walt Disney's ability to entice families to view a combination of re-released and new animated features. In the postwar era parents relived
Dumbo
and
Snow White
with their children while all experienced first-time screenings of
Lady and the Tramp
and
Sleeping Beauty
. Finally, Disney and some competing companies updated the prewar family comedy and adventure movies, offering the added attraction of a wide screen and color, not available at home. These offerings included
The AbsentMinded Professor
and, remarkably, a compilation of the three-episode television presentation of
Davy Crockett
. A final postwar movie theme, developed with little concern for a young audience yet experienced by a great many Boomer children, centered on adult tastes in music. The fifties and early sixties were replete with biographies of famous big-bandleaders, such as
The Benny Goodman Story
and
The Glenn Miller Story
, and film versions of Broadway musicals such as
My Fair Lady
and
The King and I
. All these films offered catchy tunes and relatively accessible plot lines, but this part of the “family” movie experience was probably more memorable for the parents than the kids.