It'll Never Show On Camera

Androcles Likes Bananas KidTV

FORa while I thought my mother was in love with Argentine Rocca. And I thought my aunt was. And maybe Helen from next door and even my father seemed to like him a little. I was nine years old and I thought he was pretty good, too.
In 1949 my parents and I lived in a side-by-side duplex connected to my dad's parents part of the house. Dad's sister and her two little girls lived across the street but they came over to VG and Poppa's place a lot. I think we didn't have much money so everyone liked to visit the older folks a lot just in case it got to be too close to supper time to go all the way back home.

But this isn't a story about VG - who named herself that to stand for Violent Grandmother - or Poppa - I don't know why that was his name. They were a noteworthy pair, phenomenon in my life who would require a lot of space of their own to give you even a hint of the marvelous flavor of their lives as I saw them.

This is about how I got into "show business".
FORChristmas 1949 Poppa got himself the first TV set in our neighborhood in Utica, New York. He thought he got it for himself. He really got it for the entire neighborhood.
Channel 13 had just gone on the air in Utica, New York and the FCC had just gotten rid of Channel 1. (True. Look at your dial. It's still gone.) And Howdy Doody began coming to our house. OK, Poppa's house, but I didn't even have to go outside to get there. Just step across the doorway from our kitchen to VG's, walk through the dining room where Poppa shared his breakfast honeydew melon with his old striped cat, and I was just a few steps away from a career.

Along with Howdy and Buffalo Bob and Clarabell came Hopalong Cassidy and Dave Garroway from Chicago and Super Circus with Mary Hartline. We had a short but informative visit early every evening from John Cameron Swayze when he was just a network newsman and hadn't yet graduated to testing watches with outboard motors.

My dad and his pals drank Utica Club beer on Friday nights and watched Chuck Davey and Roland La Starza beat up other people to the strains of the Gillette March. (To look sharp you've got to be sharp, to be sharp you've got to get sharp!) I wasn't a big fan of Pinhead and Foodini but Captain Video was good and sometimes Spike Jones would be on other people's shows. I even got my folks to buy some of his 78's for our radio/phonograph (AM only, of course) that could close up like a suitcase with fake leather and a handle.
I had to have my homework done early on Tuesday so there'd be no chance of missing Uncle Miltie. I liked it best when Sid Stone would set up his little pitchman's stand on folding legs and say "So ya want more for yer money? Tell ya what I'm gonna do."

And it all poured in glorious torrents from Poppa's fuzzy 13-inch black and white Sentinel TV set that we watched with most of the lights out. By the way, I don't remember our family getting embroiled in the big controversy of the era featuring endless public debate as to whether or not it was bad for your eyes to watch TV in the dark. But we watched in the dark and never did have one of those set top "TV lamps" shaped like a panther with glowing eyes.
MYfirst video crisis came in 1950 - still six or seven years before I was getting yelled at by irate TV directors - and it involved The Lone Ranger. I guess he must have been my favorite.
The Lone Ranger was popular enough to be on two nights a week for a while the first summer after we - Poppa - got the set. To borrow a line from someone else, parents liked him because he never killed anyone and he had perfect grammar even though it never seemed to make much of an impression on Tonto.

The problem for me was that I wanted to see both nights. The usual time was 7:30-8:00 which worked out fine. But the second night was at ten o'clock and I had to go to bed at nine. Since I apparently felt that this was a key building block of my early cultural awareness, I'd simply remove the panel just outside my bedroom door that blocked the unused connection between our upstairs hallway and my grandparents' upstairs hallway.

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A few years later my dad built a little puppet stage and with two of my ten year old buddies I began to put on live shows around town at orphanages and elementary schools. It wasn't until I was about 12 or 13 that I performed with the puppets on a local live TV Christmas kiddy show.

Little did I know that only three years later I'd be working a real job in that same studio and listening to that same Santa tell dirty jokes to the crew. (That bizarre experience along with the trouble that came because of Santa's secret radio is in Kids Are A Bad Influence elsewhere in this collection.)

Our puppet show finale featured a ferocious yellow velveteen lion who terrorized the general populace (consisting of two of the other three puppets and the kids in our small audiences) until the lion got a thorn in his paw. Along came the young lad who was the hero of the piece. It will not surprise you to learn that he removed the thorn and tamed the lion. It might surprise you to learn that he then discovered that the lion liked a good banana.

It was always a show stopper when the ferocious little lion consumed a real banana, live, on stage. Our lion's name was Androcles. And the title of the piece was "Androcles Likes Bananas." It was always a hit with the six to eight year old crowd. And by then I was smitten.

Iwonder whether my career might have veered in another direction if Ed Sullivan hadn't already been so enthralled with that damned Topo Giggio puppet.
So that's how it started for me. A few years later after I had forgotten Argentine Rocca and gotten out of high school a little early I just kept hanging around TV studios for part time summer jobs.

And began forty years of learning what (usually) never shows on camera.

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(Copyright 1987-2004: William S. Murray. All Rights Reserved. May not be reprinted without permission.)