I was born into a black-and-white world on TV, in home movies and photographs. In many ways, the very society itself was in black-and-white metaphorically. The world into which I was born was very structured and extremely conventional, with clearly-defined gender roles, racial status, and fashion styles. Choices were few and, most people thought, acted, and interacted in ways that were “the norm” – and, therefore, “normal.” I know we’ve come 180 degrees since, but we’re talking about different eras!
I was born in 1960, late in the Baby Boom, which means the Vietnam War ended while I was still in middle school; so my reference point of Washington corruption, futility, and excess was instead Watergate.
My parents were part of the Greatest Generation, born in 1924, so that memories from their formative years came from the Great Depression, followed by World War II – what a double whammy to start life!
Have you ever seen the movie Pleasantville? Toby McGuire and Reese Whitherspoon, as 1990s teenagers, are transported into a 1950s TV sitcom. The “good news” is nothing ever really goes wrong in that fictional TV town. The bad news is that nothing is ever even on the edge of exciting, either! Nobody’s ever in danger because everything is super safe and you can count on that. You also can count on everything being boring, because nobody dares to take chances! Oh, it might be boring, but it’s also safe! In fact, it’s boring because it’s safe and, conversely, it’s safe because it’s boring!
Little by little, concepts including art, creativity, critical thinking, and individualism emerge and bring with them the possibility of danger, but also the value of color. One by one the citizens of Pleasantville literally become colorized as they realize “pleasant” doesn’t have to equate to “boring.”
That’s what happened in my little world… almost literally, because color TV came along about the time I started school. My family didn’t get a color TV for several years, but I did see one at my Aunt Ruth’s house, with all its slightly-off hews of the rainbow “in living color,” as the NBC Peacock reminded us regularly on that network.
My early experiences in school featured a similar path from black-and-white to color and I don’t mean only moving from the drudgery of “(No) Fun with Dick and Jane” books to the vivid imagination of Dr. Seuss! Even then, I had my doubts about choices of the powers-that-be in education of that time. My kindergarten teacher occasionally would wear sunglasses backwards and tell us she had eyes in the back of her head… and they wonder why my generation turned to drugs!
Then, they had us first graders learning an alphabet with 30 letters, only to reach the second grade to realize four of those “letter sounds” had been fired! I wondered whether they applied for jobs with another language.
A couple of years later, the powers-that-be decided we third graders had developed sufficiently with sounding out letters to read so that we could take a shot at speed-reading! After all, what busy 8-year-old had time to waste? They’d throw a paragraph of 30 words on the overhead projector and after what seemed like three seconds, they’d move on to the next one! That style of reading was like a nonsensical version of Scrabble, getting only parts of sentences and none of them matched.
In the fifth grade, the teacher in our reading class had us debating whether U.S. Army Lt. William Calley was guilty of murder in the Mi Lai Massacre of the Vietnam War. That was difficult enough for the courts to decide, much less a motley gaggle of 10-year-olds!
Still, there were forces of enlightenment. Ruth Ellis, my fourth grade teacher, was like a second mom to us all. Meanwhile, I was blessed with my actual mother, who thought life should be fun and childhood should be magical. Dan Lee, my fifth grade teacher, was downright cool in important ways and demonstrated that a man could teach.
TV also opened things up to me, especially when a black comedian named Flip Wilson arrived on NBC. It wasn’t long before All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and several other shows brought social commentary to middle America, accompanied by lots of laughs. Eventually, music on radio and records, movies such as Network and Breaking Away, and books including “Candide” and “Catch-22” opened my mind and my world.
Question of the Week
What early influences brightened and even colorized your world?