This week in TV Guide: April 9, 1955

When I was a kid playing with model trains, there was a line of accessories that you could use to build your own village, complete with stores, factories, and even a depot. It was called Plasticville, and it was (and is; it's still around) pretty cool. But can Plasticville possibly compete with Videotown, U.S.A.? 

Videotown is also known as New Brunswick, New Jersey, a community of nearly 40,000, which has been studied—"relentlessly scrutinized," as Frank De Blois calls it—for the last seven years to find out the impact TV has had on the community, "and, by extension, on all the rest of us." The raw figures tell us that 83 percent of families in Videotown own televisions (compared with 64 percent who own cars, and 80 percent with telephones), that the average size is 21 inches and that the family room is built around it, that 74 percent turn on the set at least once a day, and that the longer they have a set, the more they use it—at least three hours a day. What those numbers don't tell us is the effect television has had on these people. That is what we're about to find out.

It all started in 1948; there were 267 sets in the town at that point, and because of its proximity to New York City, the advertising firm of Cunningham and Walsh decided to launch their study. One of their initial conclusions was that, interestingly enough, television brought families together. "Children stopped playing stickball in the street. Parents quit going to the movies. Bowling leagues broke up. Even the sale of comic books went down. Result: the living room once again became the social center of the family." Said one mother in 1950, "We all stay home now. TV is wonderful." Women began doing their daily routine early in the morning, so they could get to watching TV. "It takes up so much of my time," one woman confided, "that I don't have enough left to do my housework." 

Since then, things have evened out a bit; "[P]eople began to go out to the movies again, to read books and magazines once in a while, and to get back into the bowling league. Even radio made a comeback." Even so, people continued to watch as much TV as ever: "Monday through Friday nights husbands total 13.3 hours; wives, 13.8 hours; kiddies 7.7." The conclusion, according to the firm's research chief Gerald Tasker, was that "for one thing, most viewers had completely stopped visiting their friends." When television first came along, one housewife recalls, "our neighbors used to come in every week and look at Milton Berle with us. But now they got the TV too—and whenever Milton Berle goes on, why, me and Pa just sit there and watch him all alone." Sure enough: whereas 25 percent used to go visiting or entertain, the number has now dropped to 10 percent. And that's how they can continue to go to movies, go bowling, read, or listen to the radio. Those who go out have simply traded one kind of socializing for another, but for those who don't leave the house at all, it's just them and their TV.

One of the broad conclusions that everyone seems to agree on is that people love their TVs ("It's the greatest thing in the world!"), and they'd hate to go without it. ("We'd rather hock the ice box.") The rest of the results are, as you might say, mixed: TV either starts or stops fights, it's good or bad for the eyes, it's better or worse than radio, and so on. 

It's hard to draw a direct parallel between 1955 and today, thanks to social media; you'd have to compare the number of hours people watched television back then with the number of hours they spend looking at their screens now. There are other differences; the multiplication of options and the introduction of various options for on-demand viewing mean that television—media, we have to call it—is no longer a unifying experience, with people watching the same shows at the same time. What it has succeeded in doing is isolating people, not only from their neighbors but from their own family members, as everyone retreats into his or her own virtual world. And it's trivialized so, so much; I do wonder if everyone still thinks of television as "the greatest thing in the world." 

On my reading list is Neil Postman's provocative Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which I expect is going to have a lot to say about the effect television has had on our society. Once I've read it, you can be sure I'll be back to this subject. Maybe Videotown, U.S.A. is just another Plasticville after all.

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Here's something for my friend Hal Horn at The Horn Section: a profile of Bob Cummings, the "up and coming" star of The Bob Cummings Show, better known as Love That Bob. He's also the star of My Hero, which is currently in reruns and scoring healthy ratings. And he's also "a man endowed with a talent for spinning yarns so complicated and so fantastic—and yet, coming from him, so believable—that people believe them." For example, there are at least five different versions of how he came upon "Robert S. Beanblossom," the name of his My Hero character; the latest one says Beanblossom was a man who found a mechanical pencil that Cummings had lost and carried it with him for 16 years until he could return it to Cummings. 

Bob with co-star Ann B. Davis

Cummings is considered one of the most versatile performers in Hollywood, particularly in light comedies, but he's also made several movies, a Studio One drama, and a musical for NBC. (That Studio One drama, although the article doesn't mention this, was "Twelve Angry Men," in which he played the Henry Fonda role, and brilliantly.) And he's not afraid to use his influence, either: not only does he deliver the commercials on his show, he won the right to write them as well.

The concept for his new show—a Hollywood photographer with an eye for the starlets he snaps—came to Cummings in an episode he wrote for My Hero; independent of that, a similar idea had also come to Paul Henning, writer for Burns and Allen. When Henning approached Cummings with the idea, it turned out that Cummings had been about to call him with the same idea. Henning is now the show's producer and its only writer. The Bob Cummings Show will run for five successful seasons, and though Bob will have two other series and will appear many times on other shows (including a memorable appearance on The Twilight Zone), audiences will never love Bob as much as they do now.

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Sunday is Easter, and as is to be expected in the 1950s, television takes notice. Besides five chuch services on Sunday morning (two Catholic, two Episcopal, one Baptist for those of you keeping count at home), we have coverage of New York's Easter Parade on not one, but two stations. WPIX's ambitious two-hour broadcast, starting at 11:30 a.m., features Ed Sullivan as host and actress Haila Stoddard providing fashion commentary, plus the Georgetown Chimes a cappella group performing Easter songs, actress Patty McCormack reciting an Easter powm, Easter art fromt he Metropolitan Museum of Art, UN members talking about how the holiday is celebrated in their countries, appearances by Nancy Kelly, Don Ameche and other stars, and President Eisenhower's Easter message from Washington. Over on WRCA, coverage begins at 12:30 pm, with Ben Grauer on Fifth Avenue, Arlene Francis covering an international fashion show from the Hotel Pierre, and music from soprano Mimi Benzell and the Robert Shaw Male Chorus. Another Easter fashion show follows on WRCA at 1:00 p.m., this one from the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, hosted by Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg. The show's called "The World of Silk," and it's sponsored, surprisingly, by the International Silk Association.

One of the day's highlights has to be The Kuklapolitan Easter Show (6:30 p.m., ABC), starring Fletcher Rabbit, with Fran Allison and the rest of Burr Tillstrom's Kuklapolitan puppets, plus a "special appearance" by Kukla and Ollie. It's an "egg-sighting" tour of the Easter Bunny's famous Egg Plant, and I think this would be a delightful show to see. The Hallmark Hall of Fame presents "Lydia" (5:00 p.m., NBC), with Sarah Churchill as a Greek pagan converted by the apostle Paul; there's also a special Easter show by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians on G.E. Theater (9:00 p.m., CBS) to round out the evening.

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There's music in the air this week as well, with a couple of specials to look forward to. Max Liebman's monthly "spectacular" on NBC is the Franz Lehar operetta, The Merry Widow, with Anne Jeffreys, Brian Sullivan, Edward Everett Horton, and John Conte heading the cast. (Saturday, 9:00 p.m.) And on Sunday, The Colgate Comedy Hour turns itself over to an hour-long adaptation of Roberta, the Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach operetta, starring Gordon MacRae, Nina Foch, Agnes Moorehead, and Jack Carter. The orchestra is conducted by Carmen Dragon, whom, we all know, is the father of Daryl Dragon, the former husband of Toni Tennille. (8:00 p.m., NBC)

As if that isn't enough, baseball season starts on Monday, with two traditions: the Cincinnati Redlegs, the first professional baseball team, opens the National League season at home against the Chicago Cubs, while in Washington D.C., President Eisenhower is on hand for the Senators opener against the Baltimore Orioles. However, in New York the television season begins much earlier; on Saturday, WOR carries the pre-season game betwen the Yankees and Dodgers from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (1:55 p.m., with Vin Scully on the play-by-play!). and on Sunday the two teams meet again, this time at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. (1:55 p.m., WPIX, with Mel Allen and Red Barber) You might wonder how baseball was handled in a three-team city like New York; WOR is the hme of the Dodgers, with all 77 home games and 25 road games on the channel; the Yankees and the New York Giants both call WPIX home, with each team having their 77 home games carried. Including the two exhibition games over the weekend, that means New Yorkers will be blessed with 258 games from which to choose. And here's a footnote: all three teams start weekday night games at 8:00 p.m. or so, much later than teams do today. Fewer night games, shorter games, and less crime are your reasons.

Keeping with the baseball motif, Ed Sullivan introduces all the stars on Toast of the Town. (Sunday, 8:00 p.m., CBS) The lineup includes Willie Mays, Pee Wee Reese, Dusty Rhodes, Robin Roberts, Warren Spahn, Vic Wertz, and Jerry Coleman. The first televised regular season games are on Tuesday (Dodgers vs. Pittsburgh Pirates at 1:25 on WOR; Yankees vs. Senators at 1:55 on WPIX.) Play ball!

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Some big names on Monday's shows: Robert Montgomery Presents stars Montgomery himself as Jay Gatsby in "The Great Gatsby" (9:30 p.m., NBC), which also includes Phyllis Kirk as Daisy, Ed Binns as Nick, John Newland (host of One Step Beyond) as Tom Buchanan, and Gena Rowlands as Myrtle. And at 10:00 p.m. on CBS's Studio One, Louis Jourdan stars as a Czechoslovakian hockey player plotting to defect after the Soviets take over his country, in "Passage at Arms"; Theodore Bikel is part of the supporting cast.

On Tuesday's Today (7:00 a.m., NBC), Dave Garroway interviews film producer Stanley Kramer; if Kramer's there to promote a movie (the listing doesn't say), it's probably Not as a Stranger, which comes out in June, and stars Olivia de Havilland, Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, and Lee Marvin. Also, "[a]n armored truce is scheduled to drie up with a million dollars worth of jewels and Jinx Falkenburg inside." Whether the guards are for the jewels or Jinx isn't said. 

But since this is the second mention of Jinx Falkenburg in a handful of pages, let's take a timeout for a minute. Last year, after she appeared in a TV Guide from 1951, I noted that Jinx Falkenburg was the owner of the nightgown that Rita Hayworth wore in her famous pinup. Which is why I'm submitting this for your approval.

Getting back to the subject at hand, Tuesday night Wendell Corey and Keenan Wynn star in Rod Serling's "The Rack" on The United States Steel Hour (9:30 p.m., ABC). "The Rack" is a Korean War story about a decorated Army officer being court-martialed for collaborating with the Chinese as a result of being tortured in a POW camp. Marshall Thompson (Daktari) plays the young captain facing charges of treason; when the story's made into a movie the following year, the role's played by Paul Newman. The lesson remains that torture is second in immorality only to war itself.

Wednesday's Disneyland sees the premier of the three-part story "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter" (7:30 p.m., ABC), shot on location in the Great Smoky Mountains and along the Ohio River, an impressive achievement for television. Fess Parker stars as Crockett, with Buddy Ebsen as George Russell. The Hollywood TV Teletype reports that Disney has already decided on four more Crockett films for next season.

This month's Shower of Stars (Thursday, 8:30 p.m., CBS) is called "Show Stoppers," and it figures to deliver, with Ethel Merman, Red Skelton, Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy, Harold Lang, and Cindy Robbins. It's nice to see how the ad reassures us that, even if you don't have a color set yet (a status that applies to roughly most of the country), you can still enjoy it in black and white. Later, on Four Star Playhouse (9:30 p.m., CBS), Charles Boyer and Angela Lansbury star in "Madeira! Madeira!" and Charles Bickford stars in "The Woman at Fog Point" on Ford Theatre (9:30 p.m., NBC). A big night for stars, indeed.

I don't know why, but I noticed the debut of a program on WOR called A Man's World (Friday, 7:00 p.m.), described as "a weekly series of fashion hints for men," starring a man with the unlikely name of Bert Bacharach. And no, of course it's not the composer. It's his father. 

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Finally, a collection of those clever slides you used to see on your screen whenever technical difficulties would arise, which in the early days of television happened relatively often. There must have been a million of these at one time or another; these are some of them.

I'm sure we're all grateful that technology has become more dependable over the decades, but there's something charmingly playful that's missing from our oh-so-serious way of doing things, even as the things we do continue to seem less and less serious. The 3D, CGI graphics, slick and polished and identical no matter what or where the channel is—is there really no room for them today? As the pioneers of television might say, so uncreative. TV  

This week in TV Guide: October 19, 1951

Sometimes the only way to find out whether or not an idea really works is to just jump right in and try it. For instance, I had a couple of TV Guides to choose from today, issues from the mid-50s; I also had one from the '60s that I'd used eight or so years ago, long enough that it would still be new for many people. Those would have been the safe choices, but, I asked myself, why not live dangerously this week and try something different? (Now, it's true that if this is the best I can do when it comes to living dangerously, it's no wonder why I live such a sedate life. And if you asked yourself that, you'd be right. But maybe that's what it takes to break out of a fog.)

And that's how, with the aid of the Internet Archive, we find ourselves looking at the TV Guide of October 19, 1951. This is a year-and-a-half prior to the national rollout, when TV Guide was limited to New York, New England, and the Washington-Baltimore area, so expect an emphasis on local, rather than national, stories. Since most of the familiar features have yet to appear, I have no idea what we're in for, so we'll just take it as it comes and hope for the best!

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Here's a promising start: an ad on the inside cover (labeled page 2) for Jim McKay's 15-minute WCBS variety series, The Real McKay.

You might know that Jim McKay's real name is Jim McManus; in fact, his son Sean, who is chairman of CBS Sports, uses the family name. And it might have been ABC's Wide World of Sports with Jim McManus, had it not been for this show.* The title is, of course, a pun on "The Real McCoy," and it was to be young McKay's first break in big-time television. He wasn't thrilled to find out that his name would now be McKay; "I liked my own name just as it was," he wrote in his autobiography The Real McKay. "The thought of James K. McManus disappearing into thin air didn't please me at all, and I knew would be even less pleasing to my parents, and to [wife] Margaret, who had easily taken to the liquid sound of my real surname." He quickly realized, however, that there was no sense in jeopardizing his chances, and so, though he wondered "why they didn't just call me Jim McCoy," Jim McKay it was, and would remain, for one of the legendary careers in television.

*Roone Arledge, who produced Wide World, would always refer to McKay as "McManus" over the headset. 

The format of The Real McKay, which McKay helped develop with WCBS's program director, is that of a standard interview/variety program, taking place on a faux living room set designed by McKay's wife, Margaret. For the first program, the producer lined up a couple of singers from the Catskills, one male and one female; McKay would interview them, they would each sing, and then a few months later they'd be brought back to the show to see how their careers were progressing. The female singer was Barbara Cook, who a few years later would co-star on Broadway with Robert Preston in The Music Man, playing Marian the Librarian (the role played by Shirley Jones in the movie version). And the male singer: the man who would go on to marry said Shirley Jones, Jack Cassidy—TV and Broadway star in his own right, and father of Sean and David. And the program director of WCBS, who helped create The Real McKay and get it on the air? His name is Dick Doan—Richard K. Doan, who will later produce "The Doan Report" for TV Guide. Where he doubtless will carry a report on his old colleague, Jim McKay.

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Well, that went pretty well, so let's go to page 3, "a terse weekly report" called "Inside TV," which serves as a prototype for the future TV Teletype that we know and love sio well. And among other facts (did you know, for instance, that actress Adelaide Hawley actually played Betty Crocker in a Saturday noon weekly show called Betty Crocker Star Time? And here, you thought she was only a picture on a box.), we learn, in a section called "Program Possibilities," that "Dave Garroway may be emcee of an NBC-TV 7 to 9 a.m.—and we mean a.m.—program to be called The Rise and Shine Revue." That, of course, is The Today Show, which will premiere on the network the following January, and which Garroway will host until 1961.

Joining Garroway on that first Today and remaining on the program until 1967 as co-host, announcer, and occasional foil is Jack Lescoulie. (Garroway was known as "The Master Communicator"; he dubbed Lescoulie "The Saver" for his ability to liven up dull segments.) Lescoulie had previously worked as a game show host, announcer, and producer for WCBS. Among the shows he produced: The Real McKay—he was the producer who chose Barbara Cook and Jack Cassidy as guests for that first program. I tell you, you can't make this stuff up.

 

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Let's turn now to the man on the cover, actor Lloyd Nolan. Over a long and successful career, Nolan made a lot of movies and appeared on a lot of TV shows; you might well recognize him most from a series of movies he made featuring private detective Michael Shayne, or from his role as Dr. Chegley in Julia. Shayne is in the past, however, and Julia is in the future; we're concerned with the present, where Nolan is the new star of Martin Kane, Private Eye (he's one of four actors to play the part over the show's five seasons on radio and television).

Among the things we learn about Nolan in this brief profile: he once worked as a stagehand in a theater where one of the ushers was a young woman named Bette Davis; he and his wife introduced square dancing to Hollywood and had a group called the Beverly Hillbillies (what a pity he never did a guest stint on the sitcom); and that his real name, in fact.is Lloyd Nolan. (I know, it would have been great if his real name had been McCoy or something like that, but you can't have everything.) One of his most acclaimed roles is still ahead of him; his stage and television portrayal of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which Herman Wouk adapted from his own novel, and for which Nolan wins an Emmy in 1955.

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The listings in this issue are very short on details; no Close-Ups, and while there are ads for movies (mostly The Late Show on WCBS, Channel 2), there are also ads for movies in the theater, for horse racing, for restaurants (prime Angus steak dinner for $1.95!), and for companies that sponsor various shows (though not for the shows themselves).

But as different as things may look, there are still programs you're going to recognize. either from having watched them or seen them in pages of future TV Guides:

• Your Show of Shows (Saturday, 9:00 p.m., NBC)
• Meet the Press (Sunday, 4:00 p.m., NBC)
• Toast of the Town, aka The Ed Sullivan Show (Sunday, 8:00 p.m., CBS)
• Colgate Comedy Hour (Sunday, 8:00 p.m., NBC)
• Red Skelton (Sunday, 10:00 p.m., NBC)
• What's My Line? (Sunday, 10:30 p.m., CBS)
• The Voice of Firestone (Monday, 8:30 p.m., NBC)
• I Love Lucy (Monday, 9:00 p.m., CBS)
• Studio One (Monday, 10:00 p.m., CBS)
• Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle (Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., NBC)
• Arthur Godfrey and His Friends (Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., CBS)
• Suspense (Wednesday, 9:30 p.m., NBC)
• The Lone Ranger (Thursday, 7:30 p.m., ABC)
• Burns and Allen (Thursday, 8:00 p.m., CBS)
• You Bet Your Life (Thursday, 8:00 p.m., NBC)
• Amos 'n' Andy (Thursday, 8:30 p.m., CBS)

I didn't include a number of less well-known shows that are still among the era's best (Armstrong Circle Theater or Robert Montgomery Presents, for instance), nor did I go into the daytime (Love of Life, Search for Tomorrow) or the pre-primetime (Kukla, Fran and Ollie, The Perry Como Show) schedules. I also left out boxing, which will be a staple on all networks throughout the 1950s. Still, that's pretty good.

Then there are the shows that aren't starting up until later in the season. That movie on Channel 2, for instance, isn't for the Dragnet that we know and love. (Besides, Henry Wilcoxon is no Jack Webb.) But the famed cop series is on the way; Dragnet, with Joe Friday and Frank Smith* patrolling the streets of Los Angeles, makes its television debut on December 16, 1951, alternating every other week with Gangbusters. 

*Barton Yarborough, who had played Friday's partner Ben Romero on the radio version of Dragnet since 1949, died after two episodes of the television series had been filmed. After a short time working with several other partners, Smith (Ben Alexander) became Friday's partner for the remainder of the series.

By the way, although Jack Webb enjoyed playing the character of Joe Friday on the radio, he was not at all sure that he was the right actor to play him on TV. He was, however, much too closely identified with the role, and the network insisted that he continue. The actor who was Webb's choice to play Friday: Lloyd Nolan, of course.

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One more story I wanted to get to, and that's the show advertised on the back cover: New York Close-Up, Monday through Friday at 6:30 p.m. "The program that tells the story of the people who have a story to tell"—don't you appreciate the urgency that conveys? The show is hosted by the inimitable married couple of Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg, and in the day they were a media sensation. "Mr. and Mrs. New York," indeed. They were pioneers in the talk show format, just as Dave Garroway was with Today, and like Garroway they are mostly forgotten today.

Tex McCrary had not only been a correspondent during World War II, he was also a colonel in the Army Air Corps who led the first journalists into Hiroshima after the bomb. Jinx Falkenburg was considered one of the most beautiful women of her time: cover girl, athlete, USO entertainer. That nightgown that Rita Hayworth wore in her famous pinup? That was loaned to her by her friend, Jinx. I imagine it looked just as good on her.

Tex taught Jinx the basics of how to conduct an interview (other protégés of his included Gabe Pressman, Ted Yates, Barbara Walters, and Barry Farber), and she wound up being one of the best in the business. They began a breakfast radio show in 1946, then made the transition to television (while doing two radio shows and a newspaper column). In 1952, they staged a rally in Madison Square Garden that helped convince Dwight Eisenhower to run for president. Tex would move into public relations, where he would work behind the scenes with William Levitt and Thurgood Marshall to make sure Levittown was integrated. Jinx, meanwhile, traveled to the Soviet Union in 1959 to open a model house belonging to one of Tex's clients at a U.S. exhibition—in the kitchen of the model, Nixon and Khrushchev would engage in their "kitchen debate." Accompanying Jinx on that tour was a young researcher who became a well-known columnist and political speechwriter: William Safire. In other words, just ordinary people like you and me. 

It's true that only a handful of people in this world live lives like this—we all know that. And yet, reading through these issues, you're overwhelmed by the extraordinary lives of extraordinary people. It shouldn't make us feel inadequate, because if everyone lived like this, no lives would be extraordinary; they'd all be average. So if you're inclined to feel kind of down after reading this, just remember that you're doing your part to help create extraordinary people.

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So that's a look around a 1951 TV Guide. Only 32 pages, including the front and back covers. There are no reviews of programs or movies, no crossword puzzles, and the Letters to the Editor are rather mundane. Yet it's been a fascinating experiment, don't you think? Maybe I'll do it again sometime.

And by the way, this week's MST3K alert: I Accuse My Parents (Sunday, 1:00 p.m., WPIX). Some things never change. TV