Thirty Rooms To Hide In (9 page)

The Millstone sat on its hill in Minnesota for nearly 30 years before the first television was carried across its threshold; or
lugged
, rather. In 1958 Dad brought home the single heaviest object ever to exist in the house – a “portable” TV. If I owned the thing today I could string a purple rope around it and charge people admission just to cool off in its shadow. The old black-and-white was as portable as a box of anvils and was moved probably twice in all the time we owned it.

My brothers and I, of course, met it at the door like an honored guest and became without knowing it the first generation of kids to grow up bathed in the bouncing light of television. At first, we watched mostly Westerns:
Gunsmoke
,
The Rifleman
, and
Bonanza
. But their themes of righteousness and gunfire soon bored us and we discovered the cartoons, which showed almost exclusively on Saturday mornings.
Rocky & Bullwinkle
was a favorite.

Kids then were no different than kids today. We would watch the thing for hours, our jaw muscles slowly relaxing until our mouths hung open and the tops of our tongues dried. The blank look on our faces and the crap we spent hours watching gave chills to intellectuals like Mom and Grandpa. They were both convinced television represented the death of Western culture.

But it was the news programs on TV that finally hooked old RJL. Although he was a man who loved the printed word, even he could see television was the best way to follow the returns during a presidential election. And when JFK ran against Richard Nixon in the fall of 1960, Grandpa did the only thing any self-respecting book lover could do.

He rented a television for the week.

Myra was the first of the two to give in and actually buy a television. In a 1960 letter she admits to Grandpa, “It must now be told we are the owners of a television set,” and goes on to explain how “our two big boys are spending Saturday afternoons away from home to watch football games and Luke and Danny are too frequently going down the hill to the Maynard’s to watch cartoons there.”

With the Millstone having fallen, grandmother “Monnie” as we called her, had less of a job getting old RJL to capitulate. She had no scholarly revulsion to television and simply wanted something to watch while she knitted.

Eventually, a confessional Blue Book appeared in the mailbox at the Millstone where Grandpa admitted he’d given in. From that day forward until his final letters in 1969, almost every letter from RJL had some guilt-ridden mention of his deepening relationship with television, a one-eyed monstrosity he dubbed “Cyclops.”

Grandpa, August 1962

Here I sit before Cyclops – slowly declining in IQ, morale, and decent citizenship – and no rescue in sight. To entertain your mother, Cyclops portrays something styled “To Tell The Truth.”

I bet you never heard of it, much less endured it. I see the ad is for Geritol – must rush out and buy a bottle. In fact, I have now become so exposed to the art of Madison Avenue that I am well determined never to buy anything that is advertised on TV.

Television alternately amused and galled RJL. He hated the commercials most of all. For a man who loved the English language, Madison Avenue’s blithe disregard for grammar, clarity and truth was often too much for the old man. And in the 1950s, advertisers could lie all they wanted.
“Not one single case of throat irritation due to smoking Camels,”
read one ad.
“Not a cough in a carload!”

Up in Minnesota, we six boys watched the commercials, saw the grown-ups puffing away, and learned that inhaling the smoke of dried weeds rolled in paper was acceptable behavior; reserved for adults of course, but acceptable. It was on TV all the time; even sport stars extolled tobacco’s virtues.
“Show Us Your Lark Pack! ... I’d rather fight than switch! ... Show me a filter cigarette that really delivers taste and I’ll eat my hat!”
We let ourselves believe these commercials and one by one began to sneak cigarettes from Mom’s purse and Dad’s desk. Ultimately, four of us became addicted and it took us each about 25 years to pull free of nicotine’s talons. (Mom quit in ‘67.)

The happy cigarette commercials seemed full of the same stuff that powered all of the Ozzie-and-Harriet America of the ‘50s – cheerful dishonesty.

Sexual repression, too, cut across the continent like a fault line and ran straight under Rochester, Minnesota. The tectonic plates – God and Jayne Mansfield’s pointy breasts – ground against each other but it would be years before the whole thing blew.

In fact, to understand the Eros of the ‘50s, picture the vice-president’s wife, Pat Nixon, and then imagine the only “mood music” you can put on is Doris Goddamn Day.

Lies, sexual repression, public relations, and cheerfulness were the culture of the 1950s. There were the lies Joe McCarthy told about Pinkos and the Lefties, in between his trips to the liquor store; there was the lie that radioactive iodine 131 wasn’t contaminating the milk supply; that Gary Power’s U-2 was a “weather plane.” There were the lies about Thalidomide and DDT, the lies from Madison Avenue and the lies from Hollywood. (America’s macho hunk Rock Hudson? Gay.)

Then there were the lies about surviving an atomic attack. The government knew full well entire cities would turn to charcoal in the event of an attack. But they were still able to look us in the eye and assure us that the half-inch plywood laminate of our school desks was sufficient protection from fireballs of 10 million degrees Fahrenheit. My brothers and I later wondered if the announcer in the
Duck and Cover
film occasionally had to stop while recording the script just so he could get the giggles out of his system and make it through the whole thing.

“And so, kids, when you see the flash, what do you do? That’s right, like a turtle going into its shell, you duck and....

“CUT! Cut! Give me a minute here, guys. (Sound of laughter off-mike.) ‘That’s right, kids, desk tops will save you.’ Jesus, it’s … never mind. Okay, sorry. Take 2.”

While the War Department rattled their sabers, the news media hopped into action and began telling citizens it was their patriotic duty to be very afraid and to build fallout shelters.
(“If you dig a deep hole and sit in it while we have our war you can come out later and the Commies will be gone. Maybe even the beatniks, too.”)
To the neighborhood kids, fallout shelters were just cool new forts to play in. But for Kip and Jeff and any kid coming of age in this time of paranoia and public relations, there developed an underlying cynicism. Their lack of faith in seeing old age probably contributed to the creation of a whole generation of wise-asses. An honest appraisal of their likely early demise (and the attendant “Krispy Kritters” jokes) seemed preferable to the grown-up world’s suppressed paranoia and billboard grins.

The paranoia began with the successful explosion of a Soviet thermonuclear device in ‘49. It went up a couple of levels when East German soldiers strung barbed wire across Berlin in August of ‘61. And by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, my mother and much of America were teetering on the edge of hysteria.

“We hear heavy planes flying south over our home here in Florida,” wrote her father, RJL. “I suppose this is part of the concentration of forces in this area. One is roaring overhead as I write.”

Writing back, Myra noted, “The Maynard’s and the Wiedman’s are the latest in our neighborhood to begin construction of atomic fallout shelters. The contractor who is building the Maynard’s says he put in 50 shelters last month.” So at a cost of $600 Mom and Dad bricked over all the windows in the Millstone’s basement and turned that bright play area we once called the Rumpus Room into a dungeon. It became the ultimate room to hide in; our atomic Alamo, where we would wait out the end of days as the world’s grown-ups flung nuclear fire.