The Speed of Invention and Sports on the Radio

The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know

May just be passing fancies and in time may go.

Love Is Here to Stay, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, written in 1937

Nostalgia isn’t just for geezers anymore. At any time from 1900 on, a person in their thirties or forties could see just how much technology had advanced since their childhood. When Ira Gershwin was a boy in the first decade of the 20^th Century, radio is an invention still in the experimental phase and the telephone is a toy for the rich. Of all of the inventions he mentions, only movies could count as a popular culture phenomenon before 1910, but the trend was too new for people to be certain it wasn’t just a fad. The oldest of my grandparents, Grandpa Rogers, is a young man in the century's first decade, and the youngest, Grandma Hubbard, is born in 1906.

Jump to the 1930s, when Gershwin wrote the lyrics. My parents were kids. The telephone was a fact of life but for many people, there were still “party lines”, which meant the phone could ring in your home but you shared the line with several of your neighbors, so the call might not be for you. Everyone in the group had to wait to hear the pattern of the ring. Movies were a huge cultural phenomenon, much bigger than they were thirty years earlier, and radio was the first massive technological home entertainment success.

Moving forward another three decades to the 1960s, when my siblings and I were still living under our parents’ roof. Radio still existed, but television had overtaken it as the primary source of home entertainment. The graph above does not show this, only that color TV was starting to make inroads. The movie industry was being challenged by TV and the studio system was breaking down, but it was still a major cultural force. According to the graph above, telephones in 1960 have about 80% market penetration in 1960 and jump up to 90% by 1970. Pretty much everyone has a phone and if party lines still existed, it was only in sparsely populated areas.

Before I write about radio in my youth, a quick peek forward to the 1990s. My nieces and nephews are kids and I am working in the computer game industry. The videogame business was still new and volatile, with early dominant companies like Atari and Coleco already fading away. Video arcades would lose market share as the home technology improved. There was still debate about whether or not whole industry was just a fad. The dominant technologies of today - cell phones, home computers and the Internet – had minimal market penetration.

You probably feel like the world is moving very fast. You might take some comfort in the realization that your grandparents and even your great-grandparents felt much the same way.

When I was boy, radio had already been knocked out of the top spot in the home entertainment field. Most scripted shows – dramas, comedies, variety shows and quiz shows – were now on television and only a few examples remained on radio. But though the kinds of shows available on radio had shrunk, it was still the dominant source of two forms of virtually free entertainment, sports and music.

A quick paragraph defending the phrase “virtually free”. Of course you had to buy a radio or TV set and when you turned it on, your electricity usage would go up, costing you a few cents every hour. But no payment you made would get into the pockets of those who were providing content. The government held control on the airwaves and broadcasters had to pay for licenses and uphold standards the government would set. Using today’s definition, it was socialism and it ran, for the most part, very smoothly.

You “paid” for radio and TV by paying attention to commercials. It is and was a completely unenforceable contract. You could mute commercials or run a quick errand when they were on. Once home taping becomes an option, you could fast forward through them. And yet, this odd form of payment has successfully funded the massive industries of radio, TV and advertising content for decades and does not show any signs of dying out. Internet content follows much the same business model. We are so immersed in capitalism that the odd details of its continued existence are almost beneath our notice, but for me, the business model of advertising is one of the oddest details by far.   

Let’s look at sports in the 1960s and early 1970s, or more accurately, let’s listen to them. Televised sporting events were much rarer than they are today. Baseball home games were never televised except if your team was lucky enough to make the World Series, and even the more TV friendly NFL and AFL would black out home games if they had not sold out well in advance of game time. Basketball and hockey on TV were very rare occurrences. After baseball, boxing was probably the sport with the most cultural impact and horse racing was much more prevalent than it is today. In both cases, gambling was a big part of that.

Fans of a team of any sport would often become fans of the announcers as well, and those fan bases were decidedly local. In Los Angeles, men my age can wax as nostalgic for Vin Scully and Chick Hearn as they do for Sandy Koufax and Jerry West. For me, the great announcers of my youth were Russ Hodges for the Giants, Lon Simmons for the Giants and the 49ers and Bill King for the Raiders and the Warriors. 

Hodges was our link to history, having worked for the Giants when they were still in New York. He spoke his most famous line “THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!” when Bobby Thompson hit the game winning home run in the 1951 single game playoff against the Dodgers. 

Simmons could be very funny and in some ways he was my favorite growing up. I remember a ballgame where a player came to the plate and the fans were not happy.

Hodges said, "He's getting a mixed reaction from the fans."

Simmons replied. "Yes, there are loud boos and there are soft boos." The broadcast booth was close enough to the press box that you could hear the writers laughing in the background.

And then there’s Bill King. King spoke so quickly and clearly and saw the action so precisely, he was on another level. The closest comparison I can make is to listening to Art Tatum play piano. I would listen to him even if a game was on TV, his voice on the radio and the TV muted. I particularly remember the 1972 Raiders-Steelers playoff game known best for “the immaculate reception”, Franco Harris catching a pass that bounced off Jack Tatum, a Raiders defender. Harris was trailing the actual intended receiver by at least ten yards and caught the deflected ball just before it hit the ground, then ran it in for the game winning touchdown. The main TV camera didn't catch the whole scene, but King called the play in real time, exactly as it happened. The TV announcers were dazed and confused and needed to find the right camera angle to make the play clear. Back then, referees didn’t review plays, but to their credit, they got it exactly right on the field. King got it exactly right as well, but he was a good fifty yards away from the action.

The fans on radio couldn't see Bill King's facial hair, but it was on a completely different level as well.

In the Bay Area, sports radio also had a great disaster, Harry Caray announcing for the Oakland A’s in 1970. Caray is beloved in St. Louis and Chicago where he called the games for Cardinals, then the White Sox and then the Cubs. In the Bay Area, we were used to the top professionals and Caray was just an aging, back-slapping drunk. His act didn’t work here. Monte Moore, the A's main announcer before and after Caray's rocky tenure, considered 1970 the worst year of his professional life. Much later in the 1990s, Will Farrell's impression of Caray on SNL played up the drunken incoherence. It was exaggerated to be sure, but it was accurate as well.

On Monday, I’ll continue discussing listening to radio in my youth, dealing with the content that fill the most hours of air time, recorded music.

Albert Finney 1936-2009

Ten years ago on my old blog Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do, I wrote an appreciation of Albert Finney. Today we have the news of his death and fans around the world are expressing their love and admiration for the man. He was nominated five times for acting honors by the Oscars, but never won. On Twitter, fans have named their favorite roles in more than a dozen productions, including Tom Jones, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Two for the Road, Scrooge, Annie, Murder on the Orient Express, Under the Volcano, Erin Brockovich, Big Fish, The Gathering Storm, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Dresser and many more. The picture above is from Miller's Crossing. I can't say it's the best work he ever did, because his work from role to role is incomparable. All I can say for sure is Miller's Crossing and Murder on the Orient Express are the two Albert Finney movies I have seen most often. It doesn't matter if he's listed as the star or just a major supporting role, when I see him on screen, I immediately classify the work as an Albert Finney Movie.

I have no idea what he was like to work with, but the work itself will last forever. He was one of those actors who made the other actors around him look better than usual, and this includes some of the best known names in the industry.

Here's another shot from Miller's Crossing. Gabriel Byrne's character Tom searches for Verna and when he hears she's in the ladies' room he barges in unannounced. Finney has a cameo with no lines in the scene. That's him in the background in the maid's outfit. Just thinking of him deciding to spend so much time in the make-up chair for less than ten seconds of screen time makes me smile.

Best wishes to the family and friends of Albert Finney, from a fan.

We shall not see his like again.
 

The Draft, Part 2

My older brother Michael turned 18 in 1968. He had no plans to go to college, so a student deferment was not available. My father advised my brother about what to do when we went the draft board. He told Michael to make sure they knew about the pin in his leg, the result of a nasty motorcycle accident Michael had in high school. Dad recommended he affect a slight limp. My dad told him to tell the people inspecting him that he had heard the Army would pay to fix it.

All of these subterfuges had no effect, but Michael received a medical deferment just the same, due to his allergy to penicillin. I spoke to him just recently to make sure about the details, and he told me his official classification was 1-Y. He joked that with a 1-Y, it was likely our mom would be called up before he would.

 In December of 1969, the first of the draft lotteries was held, and the results would apply to men born between 1944 to 1950. Most of them would have already gone through the process, just as my brother had, but some of them would have deferments with a time limit on them, like those who were attending college. Those with low numbers would be conscripted, while those with high numbers would be spared. My brother was already effectively out of the system, so he paid no attention to the lottery. The number for his birthday was 69. Without the 1-Y, he would have been drafted and almost certainly sent to Vietnam, as was the case for many of his classmates.

I was five and a half years younger than my brother, with a birthday in late December. My time in the barrel came not when I was eighteen, when I registered, but instead when I turned twenty in 1975. Nixon was gone and Saigon had fallen, but I still might be forced to give up two years of my life to peacetime service, like Tom Lehrer and Jules Feiffer before me. Unlike my brother, I had gone to college and was still attending in 1975, but a low lottery number could render that moot. My lottery number was 310. If the Army didn’t change the rules, I had no reason to worry about the Selective Service.

The lottery’s introduced in 1969 was due to an executive order by Richard Nixon, in consultation with the armed forces. It’s doubtful this idea could have passed Congress at the time. Being seen as anti-draft was political poison in most of the country. Even so, the Army had always disliked the draft. It tended to produce very bad soldiers and the wars after World War II didn’t require the same level of manpower.

While it was young men, their friends and family who were marching in the street, the decision to kill the draft came from the military. Men in a smoke-filled room somewhere, men who had no reason to hide their contempt for the “dirty hippies” opposing the draft, effectively got rid of this system for their own reasons. Pleasing the protesters was neither here nor there to the Army, but Nixon did see the political advantage in taking an issue away from his political opponents. It was never presented as a concession to the anti-war movement. Nixon claimed he hadn’t seen the anti-war protests, that he had been watching sports on TV at the time. (Some of his publicly stated lies were just as transparent and foolish as Trump’s.) It was also made crystal clear that failing to sign up for the Selective Service was a crime and the government would still prosecute anyone who didn’t get a draft card.

The change was swift and the logic odd. Why would the government continue this bureaucracy and put the full force of the law behind it if wasn’t going to use the Selective Service to conscript young men in the army? Why did both major parties support a bureaucracy that effectively did nothing? Parties with anti-draft planks were small and had no clout, like the Libertarians or the Peace and Freedom Party. In 1976, the first presidential election that I was old enough to cast a vote, I registered Libertarian in large part because of my dislike of the draft, but also because of Nixon’s abuses of the FBI and IRS to go after his political enemies.

I voted for the Libertarian candidate Roger McBride for president in 1976. His claim to fame was as a “faithless elector” in 1972, casting his vote in the Electoral College for the Libertarian Party candidates instead of Nixon and Agnew, the ticket his group of electors had were meant to represent. 1972 was the first year the Libertarian Party had fielded candidates for president and vice-president. This is exactly the sort of pointless act of rebellion that appealed to me when I was young.

I even decided to attend a meeting of the Libertarians after the 1976 election was over. Within an hour of meeting my fellow party members, the bloom was off the romance. I was passionately against the Selective Service and COINTELPRO, and while I didn’t use drugs at the time, it was clear to me the War on Drugs was a bad idea. Others there, all of us relatively young white men, were equally passionate that not one penny of federal money should be spent to support the postal system.

I left the meeting with a very strong impression, one that has not changed in the more than forty years since. The Libertarian Party was chock full of nuts back then, and it hasn’t improved with age.

I write about the draft because it was a reality all young men faced, my brother and I included, both of us now in our sixties. Men just a few years younger than am I did not face this danger, and it has been dormant for decades, even now when the United States has been fighting wars that have lasted decades. When the draft existed, when young men were forced to give up years of their youth to be in the military or flee the country or go to jail, there was no serious political movement to abolish it. It moved forward through the decades by inertia. Your grandfather was drafted, your father was drafted, when the time came, you would be drafted. Then the draft effectively ended, though the bureaucracy to start it back up exists to this day. The inertia to maintain this new and opposite status quo is just as strong now. Neither major political party would have made abolishing the draft a plank in their platform even back in the height if the anti-war movement in the 1960s. Now, neither party would consider adding a plank to re-instate the draft. The popularity of war waxes and wanes, but the all-volunteer army is an idea that stays popular, regardless of what the government might ask those young volunteers to do.

The change was swift, implemented by executive decree and never turned into a political poker chip. It was Nixon who effectively ended the draft in his first term, but he never admitted it. He hated the anti-war movement and wouldn’t think of running in 1972 on the accomplishment removing this burden from the lives of all young men in the country. Publicly, the Selective Service was still presented as a legal obligation, punishable by jail time if any young man did not comply. But it collected those names, issued those draft cards and did nothing with them, the perfect example of a pointless bureaucracy.

We have lived with this charade for fifty years now. If I had my druthers, I’d see it shuttered, but there is no political will to do that either. It is likely kept in place waiting for a third world war, which these days would probably mean war with China, the only other true superpower. Russia is more than willing to rattle a sabre, but it fights now with political maneuvers because its military is deeply depleted by the loss of morale after Afghanistan and the generations of corruption of the country’s leadership, a corruption that continued and even grew after the Communist Party collapsed under Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

A major impetus for this blog are the recent historical fiction films like The Paper, Hidden Figures, BlacKkKlansman and On the Basis of Sex, stories about events that happened in my lifetime, stories that show young people how much different the world of their parents and grandparents was from life as it is lived now. I do not expect a movie about the end of the draft will soon grace the silver screen or even become a prestige mini-series. There was no underdog hero, there was no exciting courtroom drama. It was a backdoor deal and those who caused it would not even admit its main effect, the burden it lifted from the lives of all American young men.

I’m 63 now. If it returns, it is no concern of mine. Still, I am glad that men younger than I am have not had to endure what my dad and my brother and I did, and it is my fervent hope the unjust system never returns.

The Draft: Part 1

When I was a kid, I worried about being drafted. This was a completely normal worry for any American male who wasn’t planning on volunteering for military service, but most didn’t give it much thought until sometime close to their eighteenth birthday, when signing up for the Selective Service would be mandatory. I was worried well before I was ten, and I can still recall the grown-ups in my lives that helped fuel my anxiety, though only one of them knew me personally and none of them would have wanted me to worry as much as I did.

It was on a weekend sleepover at my Grandma Hubbard’s place that I first learned my dad had been drafted and that he served in Korea. I was between 5 and 10 years old. Grandma Hubbard ran a nursing home and staying at her place for a Friday and Saturday night was a treat all my siblings and I enjoyed. Staying in a nursing home might seem a dreary affair for a kid, but Grandma had a color TV before we did and a nice hi-fi system. More than that, she was a good cook. I especially remember her fried chicken and occasionally fried rabbit, a meal I enjoyed but never had before or since. More than that, some of the patients and nurses adored me. I say with no false modesty I was an adorable kid.

Among the patients, I particularly remember Mrs. Benjamin, who was 99 years old when I met her and devoted to the San Francisco Giants. We would sit together in the front room in rocking chairs, listening to Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons calling the games on the radio. Mrs. Benjamin did not make it to 100, dying just after the Giants lost the 1962 World Series, likely of a broken heart. Among the nurses, there was a large African American woman named Gussie who loved me to bits. She and I would play cards and I would cheat by announcing new rules when the game was nearly over.

“Now you let Gussie win sometimes!” Grandma Hubbard would scold. Gussie would just laugh.

It was one weekend I noticed a medal in my Grandma’s bedroom on her night stand. When I asked, she told me my father won it in Korea. He had safely landed a plane that had a wing shot off and soon after that, he was honorably discharged and came home. He didn’t want the medal and so he gave it to his mom for safekeeping.

All of this was news to me. My dad never spoke of his wartime experience before I saw the medal, but he was willing to speak of it now that I had questions. In all the time he was alive, I don’t ever remember him volunteering stories, but that one afternoon, I asked questions and he answered them.

It was 1950 when he was drafted at the age of 21. He married my mom before he left. She had a son by a previous marriage, my brother Michael, oldest of what would become a brood of five, two boys and three girls. My father adopted Michael and I considered him my brother, not my half-brother. I admit with shame that once during an argument, I referred to him as my half-brother and it clearly hurt his feelings. I never said it again. In reality, the distinction was meaningless to me. When I was born, my older brother Michael and my older sister Kim were already part of the household. He lived with us until he moved out as a young man. Michael was always there and he was always my brother.

My father had studied at University of California, but he had neither a student deferment or permission to avoid service as the breadwinner of a young family. As he put it, he was dragged from under a bed kicking and screaming and shipped off to Korea.

My father was sent to an accelerated boot camp, but even with his few college classes, he was not put on track to be an officer. More than the college credits, his most useful military skill was he already had a private pilot’s license. Regardless of that, he started his military career as a buck private and rose to the rank of corporal before he was cashiered and back to that truly desired rank, civilian.

Anyone familiar with military protocol will know that a corporal should not be flying a plane, but he was solo in a small cargo plane that lost a wing to enemy fire.

So how did a corporal find himself flying a military cargo plane? He was flying from the front line down to Seoul and back to pick up booze. The thinking was that he had shown he could fly and he was a skinny kid in early 20s. Giving him a co-pilot would mean the plane wouldn't carry as much whiskey. My dad joked that he had to land the plane safely because if he crashed, they might not be able to put out the fire for weeks. He also added that the parachute was not an option. He was terrified of parachutes.

The booze runs were a regularly scheduled part of my dad’s job. Every few weeks, his unit would need more refreshment and some officer, usually a lieutenant or captain, would knowingly lend my dad his uniform so he could fly the plane without arousing suspicion. My dad tells the story of some particularly thirsty full colonel offering his uniform, but this was vetoed. No one would believe someone could rise to rank of full colonel being as obviously young as my father at the time.

This had been going on for several months, clearly against military code but just as clearly sanctioned by his immediate chain of command. When he landed the crippled plane, the military magazine Stars and Stripes published the story and people other than his immediate superiors got wind of the situation. A decision had to be made whether to give him a medal for bravery or a court-martial for impersonating an officer. He got the medal, meaningless to him, and a discharge and ticket home, which were more valuable than gold.

This is not where the story ends. Months later, the Army is in touch and tells my dad they overpaid him $473.27 and would he please remit a check as soon as possible? (My father liked to make up numbers. In his defense, the story goes better if some exact numbers are chosen here.) Offended, he wrote back that they never overpaid him and in fact, because they had never given him flight pay, they actually owed him $790.84. They had given him a medal for flying, so they had to admit they knew, and flight is hazardous duty, so it earns extra pay. Letters went back and forth for months and the Army finally decided to give him the flight pay minus the amount they claimed he owed them.

As I said previously, all my dad’s stories highlighted the absurdity of army life, which prepared me very well for popular entertainment that would have the same theme. But I was kid and I asked questions, and those stories weren’t as funny.

Was he ever shot? No.

Did he ever kill anyone? Probably, was his answer.

He told the story of a battle where he and his comrades are entrenched on high ground and a North Korean troop tried to dislodge them. (I have no idea how many men are on either side of this battle. I was too young to ask.) The order is given to commence fire. The advancing North Koreans soon stopped advancing and fell to the ground, some of them returning fire. This goes on for some time, my father never stipulated how long. Eventually, most of the North Koreans retreat. The order is given to cease fire. It is finally quiet. Many North Koreans were not retreating. They were dead or wounded.

This is the only battle story my father told. There was no bravery or glory in it, just bullets at long range killing and wounding the enemy. I never asked about the casualties among his comrades.  One North Korean military commander tried to win a battle against the odds. He failed. Some number of men died due to his mistake, the majority of them his own troops. If there was any moral to this it was simply, war is boring.

I heard these stories in the early 1960s. I’m not sure if it was before or after Kennedy died. The United States had troops in Vietnam, but I likely learned this story from my dad before the big escalation ordered by LBJ. I was less than ten years old, but I realized the draft still existed and it was just waiting for me to come of age.

And then there was popular culture. I’m not sure where I was when I first heard Tom Lehrer, but I immediately fell in love. The first album I heard was An Evening (Wasted) with Tom Lehrer. I had never heard any music like this or even read liner notes like this, which generously quoted many of the worst reviews Lehrer ever got. The album opens with the morbidly cheerful Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and ends with one of his many songs about nuclear annihilation, We Will All Go Together When We Go. Along the way, he plays the song he wrote about his time as a draftee, It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier. It was like the stories of my dad’s experience had been turned into a peppy song with funny lyrics. I cannot overstate how much of an influence to this day Tom Lehrer has been in my life.

My next big influence was the Jules Feiffer cartoon Munro, made in 1959. I’m not sure when I saw it on TV, but it was a few years later on KQED, the local public station. It’s the story of a headstrong four-year-old being drafted. Coincidentally, I was four when the film was made, but older when I saw it. It captured my anxiety almost perfectly. Again, like my father’s stories and Tom Lehrer’s songs, the army was presented as an unrelenting and stupid bureaucracy, and I understood clearly in my pre-pubescent mind that it was just waiting for me to grow up. Lehrer and Feiffer have something in common. They were draftees, but were lucky enough not to see combat.

I was in high school when first read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five, two of the great anti-war novels written by veterans of the allegedly Good War. Both enlisted after Pearl Harbor, so they were not draftees. I was pleased to find out, many years after reading their books, that Heller and Vonnegut were pals.  

The story goes that in the 1980s, Vonnegut and Heller are at a party being thrown by a hedge fund manager. Vonnegut tells Heller that last year, the host had made more money than Heller had made from decades of royalties on his bestselling Catch-22. “That may be true,” said Heller, “but I have something he will never have. I have enough.”

Years later, when politicians were coming out against the war, two of the earliest converts were Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and George McGovern of South Dakota, both of them veterans of World War II and, not surprisingly, good friends.

It felt good to know there were adults who felt the way I did about war, but there was no significant faction of elected officials who were proposing getting rid of the draft. To oppose the draft was considered cowardly, an excuse for “lazy hippies”. Ironically enough, decades after Vietnam, many pro-war politicians were outed as draft dodgers as well, most notably Dick Cheney, the man largely responsible for the American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that turned into quagmires every bit as damaging to American power as Vietnam was, but with considerably lower American death tolls.

It appeared inevitable. The draft had caught my dad and Jules Feiffer and Tom Lehrer and it wasn’t going anywhere. It would be there to catch my older brother Michael and eventually, me.

Introduction

I turned 63 last month. Most people schedule their age related revelations for numbers ending in zero, but I have always had a contrarian view of the numerical. I teach math to college students for a living, and I realized that at 63, I am roughly three times the age of my students now. I am much closer to being their grandparents' age than I am to being their parents' age.

It's not a sudden revelation to me that I am old. I have been calling myself a geezer for some time now. My hair isn't salt and pepper, it's grey. I have several age related maladies, notably bursitis in my left hip and arthritis in both my knees, and they are getting progressively worse. I'm not an invalid and I can still take care of myself, which is a good thing because I live alone and I like it that way.

And then there's my memory, which has been a point of pride all my life. It's a long time in the past now, but back in the 1980s I was a three time champion on Jeopardy!, which for a lot of people is my most interesting accomplishment. If someone asked "Who's that guy who was in that movie?", I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out who the actor was, and I could do it reliably and on occasion I still can. But now, my memory hits glitches and it's embarrassing. Sometimes I will completely blank on an actor's name, even though I can list several of their credits. For me, walking can help get my memory back on track, but even that is not 100% reliable. Of course, I have the Internet available and the specific odd ways I forget things can be solved by a trip to imdb.com, though it feels like cheating to me. A few years ago, I blanked on the name Jim Broadbent, but I still remembered he was in Moulin Rouge and Topsy-Turvy, so once I admitted to myself his name would not pop back into my memory eventually, I could find his name in a cast list online.

So my memory is not what it was, but it's still much better than average. This blog is going to be about my memories, mostly of public events. I'm not planning to go into the details of my first kiss or my first car or the time my dad told me to put malt vinegar on fish and chips, which was shockingly delicious to me. I returned the favor many decades later when I told him to put sriracha on pho, but as I said, this is not the point of the blog. Details like these will be the seasoning, not the meat. I will be diving into my feelings surrounding a topic, but the topics will be about general pop culture instead of private moments in my life.

I got good at trivia by immersing myself in pop culture at an early age and doing my best to commit things to memory. In some ways, it was easier then than it is today because the culture was less fragmented, but it was harder because nothing was on demand. If you saw a TV show you liked, you might never see it again unless you watched during re-run season or if the show went into syndication, which wasn't a foregone conclusion. Some movies and shows became perennials on TV, like The Wizard of Oz or How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but if you liked something out of the ordinary, it was work to find it and even with all that work, it might be lost for decades. That changed with home video recording, but that wasn't popular tech until I was in my twenties and I had already trained my memory to save things. They might be gone forever if I didn't.

And so I am starting a new blog. It's a sign that I'm a geezer that I would do a blog and not a podcast, but I'm not that keen on podcasts yet, and I don't have a good recording studio at hand. My plan is for two posts a week, one on Monday and the other on Friday. I will be posting links on Twitter and I hope to grow an audience. 

I've written single topic blogs in the past. The longest lasting were This Day in Science Fiction and It's News 2 Them, a blog about the cover stories of the supermarket checkout magazines. My current plan is for this new blog to last two years.

And so, I welcome you to my new blog. My next post will be this Friday, talking about the experiences of my father, my older brother and I had facing what was inevitable for young men until about fifty years ago, the draft.

Hope to see you then.