Stack & Roll
When I was twelve years old we moved from Wisconsin to Maine. There were many things about that move that were milestones. My mother was going from being a graduate and post-graduate student to again being a gainfully employed professional, earning 7X the income that we had lived on for the past four years. We were moving from an enlightened urban center in the Midwest where we drank “pop” to the deep Northeast (South-Central Maine is about as provincial as it gets in New England) where they drank “soda” and even “tonic”, even though it all bubbled and tasted the same. In Madison/Middleton in the middle of the state, we only got two of the three major networks (for some reason CBS didn’t reach us…I remember because we were very upset not to be able to get Gillian’s Island) and we were moving to a remote town in Maine that happened to have a direct line of sight to Mount Washington in New Hampshire (the highest peak around) and was therefore the location of the studios for WMTW Channel 8, the local ABC affiliate that beamed its signal off Mount Washington. We also had no trouble receiving the NBC and CBS stations from Portland, so we had finally gotten into the three-network world that we craved. While I know there were lots of other differences between Wisconsin and Maine, not the least of which were all the outdoor activities like skiing, golfing, tennis and canoeing that proliferated in the “Vacationland” that was Maine (at least according to the license plate tag line), it was the television that was jumping out at me for that moment in my young life.
In Wisconsin we had a TV, or more accurately, several TV’s in a row, over our four years there. Television was in the early stages of its physical evolution in the era from 1961-1965. Our first one was the size of a large wooden cabinet about four feet high with a small 5-6 inch black and white screen. The used apparatus (my mother was a lowly graduate student with an even more lowly income) was so big that the only place we could put it was in my sisters’ bedroom. That alone made that first TV strange and more a novelty to watch than a regular part of our daily ritual. My mother must have found a better used set soon thereafter because I remember that 19” model squatting lower to the floor in the living room and having the ubiquitous rabbit ears antenna on top. Others in the neighborhood were getting rooftop antennas by then, but that was for people with money. We pursued the fun of manipulating the rabbit ears and even using the fabled tin foil wrappings to improve reception of our two channels. It was on that set that I recall the Saturday night line up of Have Gun Will Travel and Gunsmoke, not to mention Bonanza on Sunday and The Lone Ranger on weekday afternoons. I’m not sure I realized it then, but there really was a dominance of Old West shows on the menu those days.
After my grandfather died in 1963, my mother inherited a few bucks and moved us to a much nicer home in Middleton, Wisconsin. For some reason probably having to do with the layout of the house, the TV went back into my sisters’ bedroom and I used to watch it in there, presumably with much less ability to govern the channel selection since I was the youngest and had to live under the iron first of my oldest sister, Kathy, who had very particular taste in viewing which wasn’t always the same as mine. We were still on the black and white program. Color TV was introduced in 1954, but few shows were produced in color until the 1960s and even fewer households had color TVs until the late 1960s. What I remember from the TV viewing in Middleton was the Friday night Colossal Theater, which was on late (something like 11pm I suppose), but which became a favorite for my sisters and me since there was all manner of Hercules and movies from ancient times, like Sinbad the Sailor. When I could get away with it, I would sneak a viewing of one of my favorite shows, Combat with Vic Morrow. I don’t remember when it was on, but it was prime time in those days and it gave rise to my love of WWII movies.
When we moved to Maine in early 1966, since we were moving on up as the Jeffersons would later declare, we bought our first color TV, a sleek and beautiful Zenith modern console done in the Saarinen molded white plastic base design with a rosewood top. It must have cost my mother a fortune, but it found its way into our living room in the Maine farmhouse we were allotted to live in (part of the Job Corps campus). That house sat on the 18th hole of the Poland Spring Golf Course and the most valuable thing in it was that Zenith Chroma-Color TV, which was probably a whopping 21” diagonally. Now we could watch The Wonderful World of Color from Disney on Sunday nights, not to mention a whole host of shows that the three networks were throwing at us each and every night during prime time.
I distinctly remember those years of 1966-1968 as the years when I became aware of the important schedules of life. We had, by then, accustomed ourselves to the school calendar where we would get out for summer in early June and go back in early September, but I’m not sure I realized how much the rest of the world operated on a similar “summer vacation” followed by the “back-to-school” program. I remember ten years later when I started to work in banking in 1976, learning that Vice Presidents of the bank got six weeks of vacation of which they had to spend either the month of July or August out of the bank. While the world we had left behind in Latin America when we left there for Wisconsin in 1961 was still snoozing the afternoons away during siesta time, Americans were snoozing away their summers at the beach or in the mountains. That meant that September became a big launching month for any new initiatives that Americans wanted to bring forth. That was when the biggest American industry, the Detroit car makers, would launch their new models. We would speculate and marvel about what new models would come out in September. It was a real synchronized national event that would get full coverage in both Life and Look magazines and we were all rapt with the new styles.
The second biggest upstart industry was television, which grew hand in hand with the help of advertising, much of it coming from those boys in Detroit. Television also worked on a September launch schedule. We would get our TV Guides in August and marvel at and study the prime time schedule matchups from the networks. It was all very strategic and I’ll bet the programming gurus were paid a small fortune to figure out exactly when to air this or that show and which shows should lead into or follow on from what show, much less compete against what powerhouse competitor show on another channel at the same time. It was all a big deal and we all paid lots and lots of attention to how the networks stacked up their shows and rolled them from one into another. No bingeing, no streaming, no Roku.
Somewhere after the advent of cable TV (which really started to take off with CNN in 1980), the whole TV schedule thing became much more random and the lineups did not launch all at once anymore. We all sort of lost track of how that all worked and there was no memorization of what was on when. But now, the stack & roll is back. I don’t know when it started, but we started paying attention to cable news in this household in 2015 in the run up to the 2016 election. The MSNBC Chiron is now firmly etched into my TV screen. I find myself suddenly back in the late 60s mindset. I can tell you that we start our day with Morning Joe, slide into Jose Diaz-Balart in mid-morning, and occasionally even see our afternoons dominated by Andrea Mitchell, Chris Jansing, Katy Tur and Nichole Wallace. And then the pre-eveing and evening lineup kicks in. Ari Melber, The ReidOut, Chris Hayes, Alex Wagner, Lawrence O’Donnell and finally, finishing with Stephanie Rule. We get a weekly dose of Rachel Maddow on Monday’s but that’s like a long lost treat. Maybe one day we might even get another glimpse of Brian Williams, who has gone off into retirement. I can now recite the MSNBC stack & roll like I used to know that Gunsmoke followed Have Gun Will Travel. Things are less innocent now, but how things change and yet stay the same…