Weeks 23-25: My First Disillusionment

In which the podcaster finally reveals where and when his beef with the televised world began, and uses that to try to light a way forward through darker times.

 
Video link: Little Billy Magee on "Happy The Clown" - June 1955

THE NEXT POD WILL BE CAST ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7. 

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 18 – WEEKS 23-25: My First Disillusionment

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 18, covering Weeks 23 through 25 of My 12-Month Video Fast – but actually covering the third week of November, 1963. You see, the 22nd of November in 1960 was the day that I came out of my mother, henceforth known as my birth-day, and it was exactly three years after that that I was to receive what would be arguably my first glimpse of the true nature of television. So this seemingly self-focused tangent is in fact relevant to our extended topic, perhaps more relevant than any episode to date. Whether that is the case and whether said argument is indeed convincing will be yours to decide in a few minutes. But there was an incident that day, an inciting incident, which might have been traumatic, at least to my little-boy brain, and may or may not have been tragic on a much greater scale, if you believe my tale to the finest iota.

I crafted the following story into a monolog in the early 90s, and it eventually became part of a trio of chapbooks called the Mythkiller Series. (You’ve already heard one of them, “The Purpose of Rash Action,” which I read in Episode 10 of the same title. I think you’ll find this one to be quite different both in style and rhetoric.) Unlike my other recollections, this story is not told from memory. The most I retain from that day are a couple of visual flashes, which may or may not be authentic, though I do remember how I felt. Most of the details come from my mom and one of my aunts, who were first-hand witnesses. It’s a family story that been told occasionally over the years, but the basics are pretty…basic, so I don’t think there’s much exaggeration regarding what actually happened. Plus I absolutely love reading this one, so this is kind of a little birthday present to myself – but also from me to you. And I hope you’ll enjoy it. So without further blah-dieu, I give you…

MY FIRST DISILLUSIONMENT

My first disillusionment came at an early age, on my third birthday to be exact – which I imagine to be early for disillusionment, excluding of course that first ammoniac breath in the harsh light of hospital. This was, at least, my first personal realization, first shock of duhkha (that Buddhist thing), the first real bummer to usurp my infantile Weltanschauung. What, you might ask, what could possibly crack the padded psychic infrastructure of an idealistic East Coast protogenarian? The Happy the Clown Birthday Show, of course.

It was Suburbia of the early 60s, and anything was possible, though I might not know it yet. My parents had somehow finagled me onto the show, and I’d never been more excited in my life; I was reaping, perhaps, my first intimation of a peak experience. What better day could there possibly be? Ever since I’d been old enough to prance, so they say, I’d sung and danced around the room every afternoon to Happy’s cathode ray antics. Now I was going to Happy’s house in the TV set myself, and I’d become a cathode ray to celebrate my third birthday. Yippee-ai-ay!

One of life’s most essential (if disagreeable) lessons is not to blame your parents for their trivial mistakes. So they make an oversight or two that veer you decades later into therapy – what fault in that? Show me malice in a jack-in-the-box, in a ballet class, in a bowl of peas! And what most vicious oversight did my dear progenitors make on this auspicious day? What simple nescience could sow a three-year mind with seeds of anarchistic grief? Why, they forgot, they didn’t think, no one at all would think to explain to me what a television studio really is. There I was, innocent, bland, and full of joy, anticipating the most wondrous funhouse filled with prizes and surprise; only to find myself dragged through a shoving throng into a damp and cavernous cinder-block room with cold little bleachers and blinding lights thrown upon a large and lonesome colored wall.

What place was this? Certainly not Happy’s place – could it be so? Veils began to drop like shrouds of flies, the myth began to melt to mere façade. Suddenly Happy seemed less clown than painted fat man, the toys mere scuttled junk, the colors shielding shades of gray. Too young perhaps to sense mortality, I knew at least a fury for my wasted hope, and more that something living had been lost. Ahh, my friends, the first dead dream is a heavy corpse.

I refused to cooperate, of course. I would not sit in the birthday chairs with the other birthday children, nor sing the birthday song with the other birthday children (I still don’t like that song), nor slide down the birthday slide with the other birthday children. Instead I paced back and forth across the set, hands clasped behind my back, hunched, bereaved, and reticent as a bitter old man, until someone led me to the side, sat me on a bench, and gave me a Sugar Daddy, which my parents took away ‘cause it would rot my teeth.

Such an exhilarating moment when one first discovers the need for revenge, as I did on that fateful day. Dash dead dreams – here was more raison d’être than I’d ever glean from the televised world. I did not know how, but I knew that show must not go on, just as we most surely know it would, despite one sniveling little brat. Or would it? Was I really powerless to drag injustice to its filthy knees? Would it go chuckling on, smearing salt like grease paint in my wounds? Not when I knew with all my heart (though knew not how) that show could not go on.

Alas, the fury of a birthday boy scorned! How can a child in innocent rage know not to wish malice of the monkey’s paw? Alas, I did. Alas, the show did not go on – but how?

Recall that in the early 60s most television was still broadcast live. It had been since the ominous day of its birth, every single day, until this day. For just then, as Happy was still slapping on his face and a rapacious bunch of birthday kids was preparing to turn into cathode rays – just then, fifteen hundred miles away, in a hospital in Texas, the President of the United States, having been shot through the head hours before, died of severe brain loss. (And I thought that’s usually what got them elected.) And on this day, for the first (and I somehow suspect only) time in history, all the networks ceased their regular broadcasts in recognition of national grief.

I submit this report to the growing list of assassination hypotheses.

Did I appreciate this trouble the universe went to to resolve my micro-dilemma? I think not. It was years before my baby-boom brain would grow capable of abstract conceit, and besides, I couldn’t have my Sugar Daddy. All I’d gain from that miserable day was a deceased Commander-in-Chief, a better set of teeth (for a while anyway), and my first magic wand – or rather an 8 x ½” wooden dowel, dyed red at one end, blue at the other, stamped with the words

“HAPPY THE CLOWN”  WFIL-TV  Channel 6

, on which my grandmother graciously scrawled, “Nov 22, 1963”.

In a way, it was all our birthdays.

*                      *                      *

There’s also a little coda or postscript which I added to the original monolog after a curious coincidence. As I was putting it together as a chapbook a few years later at my folks’ place in New Jersey, I happened across the following obituary.

From The Atlantic City Press, Wednesday, July 14, 1993:

PHILADELPHIA – Howard Jones, who as “Happy the Clown” entertained a generation of Philadelphia children, has died at 83.

Mr. Jones captured the imagination and earned the devotion of thousands of children who watched his television show between 1956 and 1968. He died Sunday at Sacred Heart Hospital.

Happy the Clown’s show was so popular that children had to wait up to a year to be part of the studio audience and take a ride in his go-cart, nicknamed “Chippie the Chipmunk.”

Children were so excited to be on the show that they would sometimes “widdle all over him,” said Mr. Jones’ wife, Delia Sciochetti.

“He took so many baths, he finally had to get a nurse,” she said.

Such innocent times they were, we always say – but were they really? How about naïve? Or ideologically blinkered? Or just sugared out of our minds? I mean, what is innocence anyway? Maybe the brief state before you’re scarred by trauma or indoctrinated with ideology…and how long does that take? As a three-year-old being raised in White American Suburbia of the early 1960s, was it ideology that made me believe that Happy’s house was a real place? Certainly no one ever told me as much (at least I don’t think so), just as no one had mentioned the reality of a TV studio. I’m pretty sure that I came to that conclusion on my own from what I was seeing on that rectangular gray-toned screen – which, ideology or not, tells us a lot. Did the show itself suggest it was a real place? The scant footage available on the internet contains nothing along those lines – it looks as if they were winging it, trying to put on a birthday party five days a week for a large group of bemused, befuddled, and frightened 3-6 year olds thrown together on a sound stage. Whew that sounds like work. Looking at the footage, it appears that many of the other children were as taken aback as I. And maybe that disillusionment, which, much as I joke of it, was actual, maybe that unveiling of the clapboard walls was a good thing, for me at least, in that burgeoning little radical brain.

So the three-year-olds get a pass for naivety – maybe. And the adults? History suggests that a lot of White Suburbanites, who for some years had been…booming, were wandering around wearing rose-colored glasses with the words “American” and “Dream” sharpied across the lenses. That sounds pretty blinkery to me. A generalization perhaps, and I’m sure there were many who didn’t see things this way, or were starting to shift perspective. Poet Adrienne Rich for instance managed to pull herself out of the concrete block of middle-class marriage in the 1960s to become a radical lesbian feminist (and a much better poet for it). But what about your average Joe or Howard, Howard Jones, say, a 1950s radio announcer who found himself with a 13-year gig [HTC SHOW INTRO APPLAUSE] leading hordes of gussied-up kids through anxious singalongs of “Happy Birthday,” “Good Morning, Mister Mike” [SOUNDBITE: A STANZA FROM THE SHOW], and “God Whose Name Is Love,” among others, with avuncular brio [SOUNDBITE]; then coaxing them up a rickety 5-foot-high sliding board to ask them just plain weird questions face to painted face [SOUNDBITE] before shoving them on their way down that long, steep, wobbling slide to relative safety in the arms of a waiting nurse. Did he know what part he was playing in the ideological anaesthetizing of a generation, or was he just a schmuck in a hat? Did he have any sense of himself as a tool of oppression, or as simply another proud American with a job? Who knows? And it would be rude and inappropriate to guess. All we do know is that he eventually left the show to focus on real estate; Happy found himself happier pastures (freshly covered in developments). You can take it from there, I think.

I’ve spent the last couple of minutes touching on the White middle-class perspective on media and American culture in general in the early 1960s. That’s partially because I was expanding on my own “perspective” at the time (if you can even call it that) and also because the Happy the Clown show seems to have been aimed at that demographic. I should qualify that though by restating that there’s not a lot of documentation online – a scattering of pics and a 3 ½  minute video segment from a 2007 docu called Philly’s Favorite Kids Show Hosts (link in the episode notes). Looking through all of those, I managed to spot three or four Black birthday children amidst dozens of White kids, so there was at least some inclusion, though it’s impossible to gauge the extent from that sample size, and certainly didn’t approximate the demographic ratio. That said, we all know that the perspectives of Persons of Color in that era were worlds apart from those of the White middle-class after, say, centuries of racial and socioeconomic oppression. I’d say “nuff said” but there’s never enough said. In regards to film and video media, even fifteen years before the publication of Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, People of Color must have been generally to acutely aware of their minimal representation, which even then greatly employed caricature and stereotype. I can’t say whether the effectiveness of advertising to make people want want want Geh! would have been more or less effective, but I suspect that if you’d have been able to ask the right people, you’d have found Black and Brown citizens to be far less naïve regarding the use of depiction as a tool of oppression.

Six decades later, Americans in general seem to be much more aware of media manipulation. Does that suggest that we’ve grown less naïve? Why would it? I’ll tell you who’s not naïve (about this anyway) – the mongers of mass media, and this is one increasingly tangled and blinkery web they weave. Especially if you believe you can see through the shell game, you’re in a worse sandtrap than ever. In fact many who purportedly understand the machinations, still head in zombie-like hordes to Walmart or Ross Dress for Less to stack carts with resource-killing shit that they don’t really need. While more veils than ever have been lifted, revealing the dark workings of the Capitalist and Supremacist mind, and lots of fine folks have managed to distance themselves from the melee, more people than ever seem completely mesmerized by their screens and prone to wallow mordantly and whole-hog in the delicious ideologies they impart. And I’m not counting myself out of any of this. But one thing that’s definitely risen all around is disillusionment. The oppressive strategies of the corporate oligarchy have become more blatant and widespread than ever, bootheeling even its long-deferential middle-class. Racism, misogyny, queer-hating, and other rotting demons are having a field day, but the corporate interests are impartial – they want everyone’s money and as much of it as possible. They’ve got their fangs in deep and they’re not letting go. Wake up call: inflation is not essentially an effect of supply chain or market fluctuations; it’s an effect of greed. They’re on the prowl for profit, regardless of race, sex, religion, gender, or preference. And how do you get away from it? Well, you can turn on the TV. As long as you’ve still got electricity, anyway.

I wonder what Happy the Clown would say to that. I wonder what song he’d sing.

For some, this is their first disillusionment; for many it’s just a new cap on the mountain. And now – now we seem to be heading into darker times (see, this is about the last few weeks after all). I hate predictions, and I don’t have any for you. I do wonder, though, among other things, whether the disillusioned will retreat further into escapist media, and if they do, how much that will help and how sustainable it’ll be – even and perhaps especially for the believers who are convinced that everything will be so much better, but who may well end up in the trash bin of poverty and illness along with so many others. 

That aside, I do have a question or two for the moment, as a sort of open-ended end for this episode. What media do you think you’ll seek out in this coming “era”? Do you expect to use it to escape, which would be completely understandable, or to strengthen, sustain, inform, and engladden as needed (or some of each)? What might be healthiest and most nourishing for you to watch, listen to, read? I just want to put it out there. And note that I didn’t say “what might be healthiest for we…,” because everbody’s gotta figure this for themselves. Of course dialog might help with that figurin’, but ultimately, what should you let in, to help you live approximately how you want to live and do effectively what you need to do, whatever that might be? I don’t expect it to be monolithic, not just one form of media but likely a variety, a range, a kit for all moments, so to speak. Nor do I think of that choice as static – I assume it will evolve or even change quickly, because who knows what’ll happen (or not).  And I also don’t expect that you’d have an answer this minute, or maybe you will minute by minute, and maybe you already have. And whatever it is, I’m pretty sure that media in general is somewhat inescapable at this point, and an integral facet of our lives in this culture, so you kind of have to choose if you don’t want to drown in it. And why not treat yourself kindly? Log knows you might need it. Eat truth when you’re hungry for it; soothe yourself when raw; and try not to neglect amusement, which is an essential part of being human. Let your media be shelter, armor, shield, tool, weapon as you need. And don’t forget, media ain’t only an at-home thing – I went to three music shows in the last week, which was what I needed, the bands by turns angry, raunchy, blissful, and powerful – and I feel all the better for it. Those were the first shows I’ve been to in ages, because I’ve been that much a hermit, and I think live shows are back on the docket, right along with the community that comes with. For my part, at this point, I think I’ll be trying to use media decisively when I can – for pleasure, relief, information, beauty, inspiration – rather than being used by it.

And with that, onward.

The next episode will drop on its regularly scheduled day, that being the first Saturday of December, the 7th. Maybe I’ll explore some of the media that I’ve been finding beneficial, or maybe something else entirely, depending on what culture-quakes we have between now and then.

This has been Episode 18, covering Weeks 23-25 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Thank you for persevering.