I have written a lot about when I was a small boy in Havre, Montana. It was the late 1940’s and early 1950’s and children in my neighborhood of Second Avenue played outside winter and summer. Not only that but we walked everywhere. We walked to school and back home again. We walked to the movies on Saturday night or to the Havre High Gym to go to a basketball game. Not only were my friends and I walkers, but the streets were full of kids walking home from many events that had happened around the town. I remember there were four basketball players who were from my neighborhood and they walked home after games just ahead of my group.
You would have thought that we did nothing but walk and had no time for anything else but there was always time for that magic time that brought households and families closer together. That was sitting in front of the radio and listening to our favorite programs.
Grandma Stuart had one great vice. Every afternoon she could not miss her soap operas on radio. Whether she was ironing clothes, cooking or cleaning, the radio was always with her as she heard of the convoluted lives of Ma Perkins and Pepper Young’s Family. Those were shows not to be missed.
Of course, there were all family shows as well. They were at night and included George Burns, Jack Benny and Red Skeleton to mention a few of the great actors who got started on radio in United States homes. Whenever Jack Benny was on, we would, as a family, gather round the radio in the living room and be ready to regale ourselves with the very latest in jokes about how miserly Mr. Benny was or how Rochester and Mary really ran the household.
But for us kids, our favorite shows, shows just aimed for us, were usually on Saturday morning. They included the Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston, Gun smoke, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers who traveled as much by his jeep which I think was called Nellie Bligh or something like that then his horse Trigger. There was even Sky King, a cowboy pilot for goodness sake!
Those radio shows carried us far away from Montana to lands we could only dream about. And later, when we were playing outside we played out scenes from those shows. So, the campus at Northern became Roy Roger’s ranch or the far north and my dog jinx became Sergeant Preston’s mighty husky King.
Those have been called the golden years of radio. Then later in the evening, maybe President Roosevelt would come on in my early years and tell us in a Fireside Chat how the war was going. Those were the times when my mother and father listened intently because they all had friends and relatives in one or more of the wartime fronts and they were always looking for news. I can remember my mother saying that people would think that the war was going badly, then President Roosevelt would come on and they would know that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed and that we were going to win and win sooner rather than later.
I can remember listening to the funeral’s of King George and Joseph Stalin broadcast over the radio right here in Havre, Montana.
Most of us thought those times would never end. But then a few homes started to have a strange flickering light in their livingrooms as we kids would walk by their houses on the way to the Lyric or Orpheum or Havre Theaters. Those minute flickers were coming from television sets and all of a sudden there was no more radio and television had come to the prairie towns. First it was by antenna for a while, then cable companies came in and strung cable throughout the town.
A few shows were able to make the transition from radio to TV. Jack Benny made it and did most of the comedians. Roy Rogers made it to television as did Gun smoke. Gun smoke, in fact, became even more famous on television than it was on radio.
Soap operas now had identifiable people to watch when listening to their convoluted plot lines. All of a sudden, life was much more interesting even though it all was seen in glorious black and white for the longest time.
I can remember that my mother could buy a new washing machine or dryer or something else but when it came to a television, my father had to be in on the decision as well. They both trooped down to Clack’s Hardware and listened to Mr. Brown talk to them about the values of a GE television set. Then a few years later they both trooped back to Mr. Brown who sold them on the values of a GE color television set. Color television was almost too much for my father who was always tinkering with the tint button. He thought he could fine tune color better. Then came the days when the sets were set on color and my father was sad because there was nothing for him to do but to sit and watch the program without making it better.
Again, on Saturday mornings there were kids programs to watch. And there were also cartoons which there had never been on radio. It could be said that television brought the nation together in a memorable way. Much more so than radio which had really just made us realize what a big country we were. Television promptly shrunk the country to a manageable size every night of the week. Politicians learned what a wonderful medium television could be to get a message to millions of people----something they had not been able to do before. And in times of national calamities, television was there as it still is today, to guide us through those times.
I can remember in the early days of television, one show that was on a lot was Georgia Championship Wrestling. Gorgeous George and the boys would throw chairs at each other and beat each other up on a nightly basis. It was good entertainment but was it put on or was it real? That was the question. An old timer from Clear Creek was told by his doctor he could not watch wrestling any more. It was just too hard on his heart.
At the high school, wrestling was being watched as well by our coaches who found professional wrestling offensive to real wrestlers (we never knew any real wrestlers back then but there must have been some somewhere.)
So, this coach decided in one six weeks of PE to teach us boys how to wrestle correctly. I watched the proceedings being bored out of my gourd by this man and his star athletes showing us grunts the very latest correct wrestling moves.
Finally after about two weeks of showing all the moves, the coach decided it was time for us to wrestle. He called on the two “heavyweights” in the class to wrestle. They were Lucke and Bruce Taft. I asked Taft under my breath if he watched Georgia Championship Wrestling. He said he did and I told him, let’s wrestle like them. So we chased each other around, tried to push each other down and rolled around the floor like demented mountain lions. Finally, I was tiring of this event which was accompanied by many laughs, whoops and hollers from the audience (except for the coach). I decided to end the event with a clear win on my part so I ran over, picked up a folding chair and hit Bruce over the head with it, declaring myself the winner just like Gorgeous George did that last Saturday afternoon.
That ended my career as a PE person. For the rest of the year I was banned from the gym and washed towels in the locker room for my hour of PE. That worked for me.
And all that brought in the golden age of television which had not left us to this day.
