I’ll admit right here and now: I never was part of that great American broadcasting tradition — I never was a PBS kid.
Sesame Street, huh? Where’s that?
Ever the intellectual giant, the only thing with Sesame in or on it that I knew of were those wonderful McDonald’s Big Mac burgers, with two, all beef patties, special sauce, cheese, lettuce, onions — you get the idea.
It’s not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed the laid-back gentleness of Mr. Roger’s neighborhood. I may have. It wasn’t that I was some sort of sawed-off Reaganite. I hadn’t been introduced to the Bonzo the chimp movies until I was in high school. Nor was I a pint-sized member of that vast right-wing conspiracy Hillary Rodham-Clinton likes to blame for her husband’s open (barn) door policy.
Nope. Nothing so remarkable nor romantic (dang-it).
It’s a little more innocent. Quite simply, the signal from the ‘local? Public Broadcasting Station in Detroit, Channel 56, didn’t reach our home’s TV antennae. (Kids, a TV antenna was a metal thing on the roof that caught TV signals and that all little boys and girls had to climb a ladder to reach and adjust so their fathers could watch the big game.)
Up there on the hill in Independence Township, where I grew up, we had all the amenities: electricity, running water plus a television set that picked up channels 4, 7, 9 and sometimes Channel 2 — NBC, ABC, CBC and sometimes CBS. Had our TV antenna been able to catch the PBS signal maybe I wouldn’t have been on the Bozo the Clown, Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant schedule. But, alas PBS wasn’t piped into our home, so those four were some of my first TV heroes.
Thinking about it, I was never a PBS adolescent, young adult or anything else. PBS didn’t have compelling shows like, The Nightstalker, Six Million Dollar Man, McMillan and Wife or that apex of television greatness, The Dukes of Hazard.
Come on, really, how could some guy with funny hair slowly articulating, ‘Billions and Billions? of things compete with the unholstered femininity of Charlie’s Angels?
It was a no-brainer. He of little brain, got up and turned the channel to the place where the jiggly action was. (Oh yeah kids, not every home had a remote control channel changer. We had to actually walk over to the TV, grab a hold of a knob and turn.)
Fast forward 30-some-odd years . . .
I’m all grown up (and out) now.
We have cable television running through our home, bringing us crystal clear programming on about 70 channels (though on the roof, the old antenna still stands tall and proud, a reminder of the past glories). And, while I still tend to be entertained by the likes of the SciFi Channel, I have finally discovered PBS.
Yep.
Thanks to those of more liberal leanings and bigger, faster, stronger brains than mine (dear wife Jen and our boys, Shamus, 5, and Sean, 3) I actually will sit and watch almost an entire PBS show. And, what I really appreciate is the lads like PBS kids? programming.
One show I put on the television in the morning, before the boys wake, is The Liberty Kids. This is a cartoon about two young people (a boy and girl), set in the American colonies around the time of our country’s breaking the bonds of England’s hold. Holy historical reenactments of Independence, Batman! History on TV, for kids! Hallelujah!
Wow . . . I’m getting a head rush.
Boy, I say, boy — yer ’bout as sharp as a bowlin? ball.
I guess I have grown up — really. It is only the thought of an adult that would rate a cartoon about American history above Foghorn Leghorn and the rest of the Loony Toons.
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