I remember my mother telling me when I was a child that there had once been a radio play called "War of the Worlds" produced by Orson Wells in 1938, wherein Martians come and try to take over the Earth. Maybe in a small way that was my introduction to "Science Fiction". She explained to me the noteworthy fact that there had been not a few Americans who were fooled into thinking that the Martians had actually landed in New Jersey and were intent upon destroying human life on this planet. And even though periodically throughout the broadcast the announcement was repeated that this was a radio play, a fictional account of "The War of the Worlds by HG Wells, produced by Mercury Theater on the Air in an original dramatization", people had taken it apparently very seriously.

Listening to it now over the internet, as I write this, I cannot help but feel that it is so well made, sounding so genuine, with announcers reading their parts in such a faultless tone and cadence, betraying perfectly acted scenes of fear, surprise, disgust, and so on; yes, it is so well made, so much so that, had I been there in 1938, I am not sure that I would have been able to help myself, but to wonder what on God's green earth could be going on. It's too perfect. It's eerily realistic. They use the proper names of real towns and government organizations. They interview people who seem quite real. The names they give are very believable. Sure, granted, the pace of the story is quite swift and would only betray the true nature of the broadcast if one were to listen to all the scenes of the play consecutively and in a spirit of calm. That would mean, anyone tuning into the broadcast anywhere in the middle without having heard the introduction to the play, would necessarily become quite understandably confused.

Well, I did intimate that perhaps this was the beginning of my love for scifi, but that was perhaps just a joke.

My true love for scifi started with StarTrek. Everyone knows StarTrek, but does everyone know the Original StarTrek? Does everyone know the original Spock? Leonard Nimoy's Spock? Sure, Captain Kirk seemed to be the most attractive character for the young pre-pubescent females in the audience. I will admit, he was nice enough to look at, but I think Spock was much more interesting for me. Spock had "powers". The mind meld! Oh, the mind meld!

And Spock had that quality, he never got his feathers ruffled about anything. Spock had this power, you couldn't mess  with him. He was impervious to excitement. He would just lift that one eyebrow really high. I am wondering if during the casting of the character they chose Nimoy because of the facial plasticity necessary to be able to raise up his eyebrow so high. It was kind of obvious. Over-obvious. I think that kind of acting was in vogue back then. Acting is a more realistic now, more subtle...

I loved that show. I didn't love just any scifi or any show for that matter. It had to have a certain quality. I think that show more than any other television series affected me. As a young child I didn't have much to do with television though. StarTrek came out when I was already a bit older. When I was really young we didn't even have a television. We got our first set when my father won a contest at work. He worked for General Electric. There was a GE plant in our town. My father used to go to work every day and come home every afternoon shortly after I came home from school. He would go down and do work in our vegetable garden before dinner every evening. He used to take off his outer shirt and work in his muscle man tee shirt, thereby getting a very dark tan on his arms and neck and shoulders. When dinner was ready my mother used to ring the bell outside the back kitchen door. My father would take off his tee shirt revealing lily white skin where the tee shirt had been. His arms and neck were black to my eyes. It was quite a contrast. He used to then come up the small half hill near the barn to an outside water tap that was operated with a hand pump. When I was small my father had made a little cement wading pool there and we used to play there when we were very small.

He used to strip his upper body and wash at the pump and then come up the very steep upper hill to the kitchen where he would enter, perhaps exchange a very few words with my mother and then retire to the living room. Or if it was a particularly hot day and he was very sweaty he would enter through the basement door and take a shower before coming up the basement stairs which entered into the living room area through a door. Later on my father moved that staircase and closed the doorway in the living room. After that the stairway to the basement went off the dining room. After cleaning up, my father sat in a wing-backed chair and would read the newspaper before dinner was on the table. I remember often hearing his light snore behind the paper he was holding. When my mother called the family to the table my father would every once in a while tickle me as I walked around his chair to go and sit at my place opposite him, my mother between us. Mother sat at the head of the table, closest to the kitchen. If there were any need, she could easily rise and serve us from the kitchen. My father sat closest to the living room and I was with my back to the window looking out upon the driveway to our house. My younger brother sat next to my father nearest to the front door of the house. It was usually just the four of us as I recall. Earlier there would have been my older sister and two older brothers. But by the time I was growing up, it was just me and my little brother. My sister was gone from home by the time I was 11 and my two older brothers were gone long before that.

There were two newspapers in my hometown, one owned by a Republican and one owned by Democrats. That is the way it seemed. They could have been owned by the same media company as far as I am concerned. But at the time it was like that. One of the papers subscribed to one party line and the other to the opposite line. I don't remember what was the name of the newspaper. My parents were Republicans. To this day I don't know what that meant other than that they voted for Nixon, Eisenhower and so on.

But we were talking about television, which we did not even have in our house until my father produced the winning suggestion in the suggestion box contest at the GE plant when I was about six years old or so. I remember the clipping of the newspaper article that was printed when he won that TV. There were about five or six other people who also won prizes in that same contest and they were all standing there in a black and white photo. My father was at the center leaning on the television set. It was a "portable" model, if I recall correctly,black and white with a "rabbit ears" type of antenna. My older brothers and sisters, if they ever read this, are welcome to augment this or even correct me. My memory of this time is rather sketchy.

The very first television series I remember watching was Superman. Superman, Jimmy and Lois Lane. I was never impressed with that show very much, but I was a little kid and I watched it with my other siblings who still lived at home. There were 5 of us. I remember being gathered together in the living room and watching Superman. I think it was on for half an hour and that was it. We got that half an hour in front of the TV and then we were sent off to bed. The oldest children, the first four (all girls), were by that time out of the house. The first, third and fourth were married with children, the second sister was in the army at that time. Or she was living somewhere by herself and going to art school if I remember correctly. She married quite late (for that time; she was 28 when she met her husband to be).

I remember all of us sitting in front of the TV in the living room, next to the basement door. Then on family trips or other outings while driving in the car I used to get bored and I would try to entertain everyone somehow with a story; and I often tried to tell about something I had seen on the TV. I would then be told, usually by my sister, 7 years my senior, to shut up, as it were. "We were there too, silly! We already saw it." That was a little disappointing for me.

So, for the first years of having a television my mother limited our media consumption very strictly. As I got older these restrictions relaxed somewhat. We were able to watch a bit more of television and my father often had his golf shows that he watched. That was his sport. I could never fathom how anyone could watch something that boring on television, but that's what he liked. Anyway, we were not allowed to watch just as much and what and when we wanted. Naturally, there was not anything on television at that time that was X-rated or anything of the kind. Television generally wasn't on all the time anyway. I think it stopped sometime around nine or ten o'clock at night and didn't start up until around six in the morning the next day. I do remember that another show I watched with my little brother was Captain Kangaroo.

Then there were a couple of other shows. But these were characterized for me by the feeling of frustration that I couldn't really watch all the episodes and often was a bit in the dark as far as the plot went. For instance, I remember "Lost in Space''. As I said, I looooved scifi, and that show qualifies as scifi in a way, I guess. Anything about space was good in my book. Lost in Space was older than Star Trek. It predates it by a few years for sure. So, it was early on in our TV-owning career as a family. Hence, the television hour(s) were more strictly rationed at the time and I was younger anyway. But by the time Star Trek became a thing I was getting older, around 10 years old, and we were not as heavily supervised around the boob tube as we had once been.

Star Trek became my fascination at that point. But what was it about the TV that made my mother so hesitant to let us take in as much as we wanted? Aside from considerations about our homework and so on? Well, at the time I only heard from her telling stories of her own youth and experience with "entertainment" media. She recounted to me how she and her sisters used to climb through a bathroom window and sneak down the street to a movie theater in South Philadelphia, where my mother had grown up in a row house until she was 12 years of age. They, she and two other sisters and perhaps one of her brothers, would then pay 10 cents each to sit in on the showings. Why the sneaking around? My grandmother felt that this type of entertainment was "a tool of the devil" and did not allow her progeny free access to the movie theaters. They would not have even had television by that time. And I am not even sure if they had a radio. That would have been in the mid to late 1920s.

When my mother recounted this to us as children, it seemed just a bit strange to us, laughable almost, to think that my grandmother said that TV, Hollywood entertainment, was "a tool of the devil". Now I am not so sure we were right to smirk about that. 

Now we live in an age of ubiquitous access to media. It's everywhere. During my mother's day and even during my day as a child, it was not everywhere and certainly not available in such a wide variety of shapes and sizes and tastes. The formats were very predictable. The one thing that we don't experience nowadays in the same format, that was there in my mother's day and probably during my time, as well, though I cannot recall this because my mother never allowed us to go to the movies AT ALL, that was the newsreel that you saw first, before the feature film started. Before every movie there was a newsreel. I suppose after TV became a household thing and everyone had a TV set, then you had the evening news. Then newsreels were not the thing any more. Hence, in my time these had already started to die out. But before TV was in every house, the news reel was still the thing you saw while you took your first few bites of popcorn and sipped on your soft drink.

What were these newsreels like and who made them? Good question. The newsreels were generally produced in Hollywood, I think... as such, the borders between "real" news and fiction were somewhat fluid. Probably every major studio produced both news and feature film entertainment/TV shows etc. I don't know when we started to think of these presentations as having different and separate origins. I am trying to fathom this development. But I think they were always produced by the same organs, by the same actors. The studio just put on another hat and voila, news, voici, fiction. News and fiction have always been produced in the same studios by the same people. It's just always been that way. No wonder my grandmother was uncomfortable with it.

Dear Reader,

Alright, if you are not happy with the above statements, well? It’s still hard to argue about it. The government gave contracts to major studios to produce news reels. That’s a fact. It started like that. How else should it have started?
Again, these opinions are offered to you and you are not expected to subscribe to them. Please do your own research.