I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It, By Frank Dello Stritto

We had so much fun reading books by Baby Boomers Bill Bryson and Stephen King that we decided to have one more summer lark, I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It: Growing Up in the 1950s and 1960s With Television Reruns and Old Movies, the new book by film historian Frank Dello Stritto. 

Dello Stritto has written two excellent books of film history, Vampire Over London and A Quaint and Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore.  The first was the only in-depth examination of actor Bela Lugosi’s time in the UK and was essential reading for Lugosi completists; the second was a series of essays on the mythology of classic horror films.  Forgotten Lore was one of the most interesting and thought-provoking tomes on the meanings behind many of the classic horror films I had ever read, and it comes highly recommended.

So clearly, Dello Stritto has a deep affection for the classic monster films that were such an integral part of the Baby Boomer experience.  Fortunately, he takes a different track in I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It, writing, instead, about how a member of the first television generation learned about the world around him by watching television, and how those images became the template by which he judged everything else.  For anyone with an interest in Pop Culture and the influence of television, this book is a must.

Talking about television viewing is always, to one degree or another, an exercise in self-flagellation, and Dello Stritto spares himself nothing.  It seems that every Pop touchstone of the 1950s is here, from Howdy Doody and The Twilight Zone, to his love of Abbott and Costello.  (The title is a line from one of Dello Stritto’s formative experiences, viewing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  His lengthy dissection of this film, which could be dismissed as a simple comedy from two clowns at the beginning of their decline, is nothing short of masterful.)

And while he manages to put a great deal of the era’s television into historical context, I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It is a surprisingly personal and appealing narrative.  We cannot understand or appreciate what television meant to young Dello Stritto unless we understand the boy himself, and the author provides an in-depth look at his growing up, his family, and his friends.  It is all curiously affecting because any Baby Boomer, interested in television or not, can pick up this book and nod, yes, this was me, too.

Here is a brief excerpt from the Preface:

This book is about growing up in America—in New Jersey to be exact—in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a personal history, but one which, with some variations, is shared by many Americans of my age. It is a marginal history, and might be a trivial history but for a coincidence of timing. The postwar baby-boom generation and television—two of the pivotal components of 20th-century American culture—came of age together, and each helped shape the other. Watching television, and later going to the movies, certainly shaped me.

Much of a young person’s life is … an ongoing struggle simply trying to figure things out. We tend to imitate what we see, by watching our parents, family and friends, or by watching television.

Imitation starts early, and we have no memory of learning the most basic skills. I have vague recollections of learning to read and write, none at all of learning to talk or walk. I have no memory of first crawling to our old television set and turning its channel dial. On most 1950s televisions, the dials and knobs stand maybe two feet above the floor and pose some challenge to a very small child. Perhaps the need to reach up accelerates my ability to stand erect.

Among the early tasks that I have no memory of first learning is reciting the Lord’s Prayer. At the start of every school day, I and my classmates, like millions of children across America, struggle through the King James phrases. We learn the prayer long before we can read, and never think much about what we are saying. Only years later do I come to understand “hallowed be thy name,” or “forgive us our trespasses.” Reciting the phrases is a daily ritual, something that I do each day. The prayer always ends with a phrase I do not understand, “lead us not into temptation.”

There once was a boy—maybe an urban legend, but I believe in him—who like the rest of us recited The Lord’s Prayer every day. He always said “lead us not into Penn Station.” He never knew his daily error. I believe in him because asking protection from such places makes more sense to a child than fending off whatever “temptation” is. When I am a very young boy, my parents take me through the old Pennsylvania Station in New York City. Awesome and scary place; huge beyond belief; alternately chaotic and hauntingly empty; noisy, then silent. Strange sounds echo from far off. I think of that day whenever I see the 1931 Dracula. Doomed Renfield, looking like a beleaguered commuter who has missed the last train home, enters the cavernous halls of Castle Dracula, wondering what to do next.

I believe in the Penn Station boy because I see someone like him every day. He takes various forms. The two most common incarnations through most of my early years are Stan Laurel in airings of his 1930s comedy shorts and Lou Costello in reruns of his television series. They try to imitate the world as best they can, never really figuring it out, never quite getting it right. In every show, they do something akin to confusing “temptation” with “Penn Station.” Hilarious but spot on. As a child, and now often enough as an adult, I have exactly the same experience every day.

The Lord’s Prayer, via a Supreme Court ruling on prayer in public schools, and the old Penn Station, via relentless urban development, disappear from my life at about the same time. By then, both had done their job, exposing me to old world eloquence and elegance, to the power of words and image, of sight and sound. I may not have appreciated what I was saying or what I was seeing, but the memories are still with me.

One of the many fascinating things, to this reader, is Dello Stritto’s tacit recognition that pop cultural currency was a very fluid thing to the Baby Boomers.  Thanks to television’s new-found need for content, classic movies were broadcast almost incessantly.  To many of us, Laurel and Hardy, for example, were as famous in the 1960s as they were in the 1930s.  That kind of pop catholicism is missing in contemporary culture, and it saddens me to see generations share so few cultural touchstones.  A child of the 1970s myself, we were as interested in the Marx Brothers as we were in the television show Happy Days.  I’m no longer sure that such a thing would be possible in these days of Balkanized cultural consumption.

To be sure, I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It is not without some piddling problems: it is, perhaps, just a hair too long, and Dello Stritto may linger a little too long on the origin of his obsession with actor Bela Lugosi.  But these are quibbles.  I Saw is a book of tremendous resonance and sweetness, and it does something no other book of film history has done:  it made me feel young again. 

I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It can be ordered directly from the publisher, Cult Movies Press, at: http://www.cultmoviespress.com/.  You will not regret it.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson

Most Jade Sphinx readers are familiar with William McGuire “Bill” Bryson (born 1951) because of his amusing books on language, science and travel.  He has also been a fixture on television and radio, and is one of the smartest and funniest men on the contemporary scene.

However, the Bill Bryson that I enjoyed the most was the gentle memoirist who wrote The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), Bryson’s wry story of growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Bryson grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, during a unique moment in American history: following World War II, Americans enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity.  Returning GIs had children at a remarkable rate, and the resulting Baby Boomers had a brave new world in which to inhabit.  And inhabit it, they did.  Reading Bryson’s memoir is both sweetly nostalgic and oddly bitter … most Baby Boomers were “free range” children. We went outside after school, played, explored and created friendships without continual (and oppressive) adult supervision.  The very idea of a “play date” would’ve been inconceivable to us … every day was a play date.  Our imaginations were unfettered; we did not need electronic mediums to spoon feed adventures for us, we made them up in our own backyards.  The whole world seemed accessible by bicycle, and inexpensive paperbacks, comic books, radio and television filled our minds with visions of the American West or the depths of Outer Space.  It was a paradise for boys.

Sadly, multiple forces converged to destroy this boyhood Arcadia: the social upheavals of the 1960s destroyed our culture and the Reagan revolution of the 1980s destroyed our economy and political process.  The changes wrought by these two catastrophes have changed the very fabric of the nation, and we have been reeling from the after-effects ever since.

Today, children are squired by parents from one place to another; the idea of unsupervised play in unthinkable.  Most childhood entertainment has been so filtered through a prism of political correctness or so vulgarized by toilet humor as to be unfit for children or adults.  Worse still, the Internet and computer games have robbed children of valuable time to spend outdoors, making friends, or just daydreaming.  None of the changes in American childhood seem to be for the better.

Thunderbolt Kid takes us back to a happier, simpler time.  The book tells of Bryson’s times in school, of his heroic alter-ego (the Thunderbolt Kid), and, simply, what it was like to be a boy during the Great American Century.  It also deals with a period of ‘bad boy’ behavior that Bryson went through, and the various friendships he made.  (It did this reader a world of good to come across the name Jed Mattes [1952–2003], a very sweet man and friend who died before his time.  He knew Bryson when they were teens in the Midwest, and Bryson thought Mattes, who grew up to be one of New York’s finest literary agents, was sophisticated beyond his years.  Indeed, he was.)

At the end of the book, Bryson tells the reader that "life moves on," and that he wishes that the world today could be more similar to life in the 1950s and early 1960s. The last lines of the book are, "What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I'm afraid."

Too true.

For an idea of Bryson’s comedic touch, here’s a snippet from the book:

The only downside of my mother's working was that it put a little pressure on her with regard to running the home and particularly with regard to dinner, which frankly was not her strong suit anyway. My mother always ran late and was dangerously forgetful into the bargain. You soon learned to stand aside about ten to six every evening, for it was then that she would fly in the back door, throw something in the oven, and disappear into some other quarter of the house to embark on the thousand other household tasks that greeted her each evening. In consequence she nearly always forgot about dinner until a point slightly beyond way too late. As a rule you knew it was time to eat when you could hear baked potatoes exploding in the oven.

We didn't call it the kitchen in our house. We called it the Burns Unit.

"It's a bit burned," my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. "But I think I scraped off most of the burned part," she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.

Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes — burnt and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.

As part of her job, my mother bought stacks of housekeeping magazines — House Beautiful, House and Garden, Better Homes and Gardens — and I read these with a curious avidity, partly because they were always lying around and in our house all idle moments were spent reading something, and partly because they depicted lives so absorbingly at variance with our own. The housewives in my mother's magazines were so collected, so organized, so calmly on top of things, and their food was perfect — their lives were perfect. They dressed up to take their food out of the oven! There were no black circles on the ceiling above their stoves, no mutating goo climbing over the sides of their forgotten saucepans. Children didn't have to be ordered to stand back every time they opened their oven doors. And their foods — baked Alaska, lobster Newburg, chicken cacciatore — why, these were dishes we didn't even dream of, much less encounter, in Iowa.

Like most people in Iowa in the 1950s, we were more cautious eaters in our house.* On the rare occasions when we were presented with food with which we were not comfortable or familiar — on planes or trains or when invited to a meal cooked by someone who was not herself from Iowa — we tended to tilt it up carefully with a knife and examine it from every angle as if it determining whether it might need to be defused. Once on a trip to San Francisco my father was taken by friends to a Chinese restaurant and he described it to us afterwards in the somber tones of someone recounting a near-death experience.

"And they eat it with sticks, you know," he added knowledgeably.

"Goodness!" said my mother.

"I would rather have gas gangrene than go through that again," my father added grimly.

In our house we didn't eat:

• pasta, rice, cream cheese, sour cream, garlic, mayonnaise, onions, corned beef, pastrami, salami, or foreign food of any type, except French toast;
• bread that wasn't white and at least 65% air;
• spices other than salt, pepper and maple syrup;
• fish that was any shape other than rectangular and not coated in bright orange breadcrumbs, and then only on Fridays and only when my mother remembered it was Friday, which in fact was not often;
• seafood of any type but especially seafood that looked like large insects;
• soups not blessed by Campbell's and only a very few of those;
• anything with dubious regional names like "pone," or "gumbo" or foods that had at any time been an esteemed staple of slaves or peasants. 

All other foods of all types — curries, enchiladas, tofu, bagels, sushi, couscous, yogurt, kale, rocket, Parma ham, any cheese that was not a vivid bright yellow and shiny enough to see your reflection in — had either not yet been invented or was yet unknown to us. We really were radiantly unsophisticated. I remember being surprised to learn at quite an advanced age that a shrimp cocktail was not, as I had always imagined, a pre-dinner alcoholic drink with a shrimp in it.

All our meals consisted of leftovers. My mother had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of foods that had already been to the table, sometimes many times. Apart from a few perishable dairy products, everything in the fridge was older than I was, sometimes by many years. (Her oldest food possession of all, it more or less goes without saying, was a fruitcake that was kept in a metal tin and dated from the colonial period.) I can only assume that my mother did all of her cooking in the 1940s so that she could spend the rest of her life surprising herself with what she could find under cover at the back of the fridge. I never knew her to reject a food. The rule of thumb seemed to be that if you opened the lid and the stuff inside didn't make you actually recoil and take at least one staggered step backwards, it was deemed OK to eat.

Both of my parents had grown up in the Great Depression and neither of them ever threw anything away if they could possibly avoid it. My mother routinely washed and dried paper plates, and smoothed out for reuse spare aluminum foil. If you left a pea on your plate, it became part of future meal. All our sugar came in little packets spirited out of restaurants in deep coat pockets, as did our jams, jellies, crackers (oyster and saltine), tartar sauces, some of our ketchup and butter, all of our napkins, and a very occasional ashtray; anything that came with a restaurant table really. One of the happiest moments in my parents' life was when maple syrup started to be served in small disposable packets and they could add those to the household hoard.

*In fact like most other people in America. It is perhaps worth noting that the leading American food writer of the age, Duncan Hines, author of the hugely successful Adventures in Eating, declared with pride that he never ate food with French names if he could possibly help it. Hines's other boast was that he did not venture out of America until he was seventy years old, when he made a trip to Europe. He disliked nearly everything he found there, especially the food.