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Classic Christmas Television

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Christmas shows during television’s Golden Age were different because the rules were a tad more stringent.

The National Association of Broadcasters developed the Code of Practices for
Television Broadcasters in 1951, defining ethical standards for television programming. Many of us remember seeing the Seal of Good Practice at the end of a show’s closing credits. Among those standards was that “(n)ews reporting should be factual, fair and without bias” and “should be telecast in a manner as to avoid panic and unnecessary alarm.” Ah, the good old days.

So Baby Boomers grew up with variety shows as television staples during the 1950s and 1960s. Every year we looked forward to those shows’ Christmas specials: Bing Crosby, Red Skelton, Danny Kaye, Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan, Carol Burnett, Dinah Shore,  Andy Williams, with and without The Osmond Brothers, and the somewhat bland Perry Como. Bob Hope and the USO did an annual Christmas show with the troops in Vietnam until 1972. We all sat on the national couch in the Great American living room collectively enjoying the once-a-year rituals.

But there was one quirk that really made Christmas week special.

Many people are probably unaware of an unwritten rule: no one died on prime-time television programs during Christmas week. Dramatic shows relied on comic relief—often subtle, sometimes uncharacteristic—to meet that requirement. Combat!’s 1962 Christmas night episode, The Prisoner, featured Shecky Greene as a conniving soldier whose scamming gets him paired up with a bombastic colonel played by Keenan Wynn. That was a lot different from “Newborn King,” the 2011 NCIS Christmas episode during which Gibbs delivers a baby in the back seat of a car while ZIva wastes several bad guys in a shoot-out.

Many of the classic movies and Christmas specials from my childhood appear every year, sometimes ad nauseum, as when AMC runs “White Christmas” back-to-back to back. But there are a few that have faded into obscurity.

Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951-1966). Composed by Gian Carlo Menotti and inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Adoration of the Magi, this one-act opera is about a crippled shepherd boy and his mother whom the Three Wise Men visit on their way to Bethlehem. It was done live until 1963, the first time it was videotaped, much to Menotti’s consternation.

Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962). The well-known voices of Jim Backus,
Morey Amsterdam, Jack Cassidy, Paul Frees and others came together in this animated, musical version of Dicken’s story. “All Alone in the World” is the plaintive song young Ebenezer Scrooge sings when the Ghost of Christmas Past takes old Scrooge down memory lane.

Twilight Zone: Night of the Meek (December 23, 1960). Art Carney is a department store Santa fired on Christmas Eve. He finds a bag in the street with a seemingly endless supply of gifts which he gives to the needy kids, and finds redemption. The 1985 Twilight Zone remake with Richard Mulligan and William “Richard Thornburg” Atherton just wasn’t the same.

The Story of Christmas: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Roger Wagner Chorale (1963). I described this in my last post. Tennessee Ernie Ford Enterprises finally released it on DVD in 2006. Here’s “What Child Is This,” the beginning of the Christmas Gospel according to Luke.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). I was fortunate enough to see this debut, before advertisers chopped it up into the little pieces we see now. If watching Linus explain the meaning of Christmas doesn’t choke you up, I have a load of Kingsford for your stocking.

Rich Little’s Christmas Carol (1978). Rich Little did a one-man version,
impersonating famous people for the cast: W.C. Fields as Scrooge; Paul Lynde as Bob Cratchit; Richard Nixon as Jacob Marley; Truman Capote as Tiny Tim, and many others. My favorite lines:

Marley/Nixon: Don’t you believe me???

Scrooge/W.C. Fields: No. And neither did anyone else.

The Littlest Angel (1969): I mention this one only because of the sick feeling I got watching Johnny Whitaker (Jody Patterson-Davis on Family Affair), plunge off a cliff to his death. I read the book to my kids, a much more pleasant experience.

I’d like to know if anyone else remembers seasonal and/or regional favorites growing up.

The Charlie Brown Tree

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Christmas was pretty good when I was young. I hadn’t become acutely aware of being one of the “have-nots” and Christmas was a time when the perpetual underlying tension between my mother and stepfather seemed to fade for a few weeks. I looked forward to the respite, however brief it might be.

One of my memories is of the year we had our own Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

Almost everyone bought real trees back then, usually from a fenced-in lot that looked more like a hastily-erected corral. (The only artificial tree was an aluminum one that came with a rotating color wheel. Yuppie hipsters will pay big bucks for something most of us considered butt-ugly and crass.) We’d look around for a five footer that wasn’t dried out and hadn’t started shedding needles. Ten buck or so later, we’d stuff it into the trunk, take it home, and wrestle it into the tree stand, trying to make it look straight and steady enough so it wouldn’t tip over.

Most Christmas light strings were made of thick, tan wires attached to black plastic sockets outfitted with clips that attached to tree branches. Inside lights used the night light-sized C7 colored screw-in bulbs; outside strings had the larger C9 bulbs that were sometimes textured to imitate a flame. We used one white bulb to light up the Star of Bethlehem cutout in the front of my mothers’ old wooden Nativity stable. I never remembered the difference between “series” and “parallel” wiring, only that if a bulb went out on one type, you’d spend hours trying to track down the offender.

Some people lit their trees with the Noma bubble lights. Shaped like candles topping a street-light shaped reservoir filled with fluid, they bubbled when the bulbs heated up, providing hours of entertainment.

We had a couple of Shiny Brite ornament boxes filled with the solid color balls, since most of the original glass decorations had bit the dust in years past. There was always a wad of tangled-up hooks somewhere in the bottom and inevitably one or more hangers would pop out of the ball, daring me to put it back in without crushing the ball.

We never had much money and this year must have been especially tight. My stepfather decided we’d cut our own. That isn’t easy when you live in desert mountains and the dominant species are piñon and scrub oak, but hope springs eternal.

We drove out of town through the new tunnel and backtracked on Old Divide Road, which used to be the only access from the west, to Juniper Flats Road, which led to a plateau high above Route 80. Calling it a road is being charitable. It was a one-lane dirt trail of boulders and gigantic ruts on a 30-degree incline that would bust an axle if one was cavalier.

So we gingerly climbed about a mile until the road plateaued and we could breathe again. It was early evening and the sun was just about to set. We wandered around among the scrub until we came upon something that resembled an evergreen. It was small but I imagined lights and ornaments would make it suffice. My stepfather got out a carpenter’s half-hatchet, whacked the base a few times and we had our tree.

It was a lot smaller when we got home. The tree stand was far too big, so we put it in an old paint can filled with dirt. It looked a lot like Charlie Brown’s forlorn little tree. We dressed it up with one string of lights, a few ornaments and icicles and put a towel around the can for a tree skirt. Mom plugged in the lights and we stepped back.

As Linus would say three years hence, “It’s not a bad little tree. It just needs some love.”

And love made all the difference.

Sounds Of Christmas Past

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Christmas music used to be something we used to hear for two or three weeks in December. We had a small collection of Christmas LPs we played on a monaural portable record player until I was in high school when we got our first stereo (bulkier, but still portable). That was long before stores and advertisers inundated us with holiday tunes and Christmas decorations in October.

When I was seven years old, I cried the first time I heard Connie Francis singing “Adeste Fideles.” I covered up by telling my mother I was sad because the record was slightly warped, making Connie sound like she had a bad case of hiccups. I have more than 150 CDs of Christmas music in several genres—classical, pop, jazz, comedy, big-band classics, new age, medieval and world music—there are a handful that remind me of Christmases Past.

 The Andy Williams Christmas Album (1963). Saying “Happy Holidays” was perfectly acceptable back then and wasn’t part of the “War on Christmas.” Andy Williams was still married to Claudine Longet; we watched their Christmas specials on TV. Good times; naïve times.

The Story of Christmas by Tennessee Ernie Ford with the Roger Wagner Chorale (1963). This combines traditional carols with songs from South Africa, Mexico and Japan, tributes to Mary’s donkey and Christmas trees, and the Christmas Gospel. It was the soundtrack to the NBC television special broadcast on December 22, 1963, without commercial interruption.

 Merry Christmas by Johnny Mathis (1958). His version of “Winter Wonderland” was a hit single in the UK and the album was on the Billboard 200 in 1959, 1960 and 1962. My mother was devastated when she found out he was gay, but she still loved his music.

W.T. Grant’s A Very Merry Christmas, Volume 3 (1966 or 1967). This compilation was only available through the now-defunct W.T. Grant department stores. I remember it for Percy Faith’s “Angels We Have Heard On High,” Mahalia Jackson’s version of “Silver Bells,” and Jim Nabors’ “Three Wise Men, Wise Men Three.” I didn’t know that Gomer Pyle could sing!

 Reader’s Digest’s Joyous Noel (1968). This was a four-record set with singers long-past (Enrico Caruso, John McCormack, Marian Anderson, Fritz Kreisler), recent-past (Kate Smith, Mario Lanza, George Beverly Shea, Spike Jones), and then-current (John Gary, Perry Como, Harry Belafonte, Lorne Greene, Vaughan Monroe) among many others. It also had the uncensored version of Glenn Miller’s “Jingle Bells,” with the verse about Mexicans sitting around all day listening to music and drinking tequila. I managed to find a copy on e-Bay a few years ago.

 Christmas With The Norman Luboff Choir (1964). I bought this after hearing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” on the Reader’s Digest album. The only time I’d seen this album in CD format was in the post exchange at the Grand Forks Air Force Base in 1991. I bought it for about nine bucks; Amazon.com was selling a new one for $255.99 at the time I wrote this.

I’d like to know if anyone else has favorite Christmas albums.

The Captain and Me – A Thanksgiving Memory

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Thanksgiving dinner was truly a feast when I was a kid because of the special menu items we rarely ate the rest of the year. Canned yams. Real dinner rolls. Big black olives we stuck on our fingers before eating them. A lime Jell-O salad made with cream cheese, pineapple and celery. Mom would stuff the remaining celery sticks with leftover cream cheese or peanut butter to munch on before dinner. And, of course, that cranberry jelly with the rings around the center.

Mom would have gotten up early Thanksgiving morning to start the turkey. She would boil the giblets to make broth for the stuffing, which was made out of old bread, since no one had invented ready-made seasoned croutons yet. Then she’d stuff the turkey, cover it with a cotton dish towel and put it into the oven, basting it several times until it was done. We didn’t have a roasting pan and this was decades before oven bags (which I used before my wife told me I was committing a mortal sin).

I’d remember one Thanksgiving for the rest of my life.

It was November 28, 1963. We’d gotten a television in January, a present from my grandmother who couldn’t believe we existed without one. Three days before we watched as a caisson carried JFK’s coffin from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral and then to Arlington Cemetery. Macy’s had considered cancelling the Thanksgiving Day parade but decided to let the show go on to raise the spirits of a country in mourning.

I watched Captain Kangaroo when I got up that morning, as I did almost every morning, waiting for the parades that would follow. NBC traditionally broadcast the entire Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. CBS showed parts of the Gimble’s parade in Philadelphia, the J.L. Hudson parade in Detroit, and the Eaton’s Santa Claus Parade in Toronto in addition to the Macy’s parade. It would be exciting, even though I would be watching in glorious black and white on a 19-inch Admiral TV. (We actually had cable back then since there was no other way to get a TV signal from Tucson across the mountains).

A few minutes before the end of the show, Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans silently set a small table and brought out Thanksgiving dinner while “We Gather Together” played in the background. Then they sat and bowed their heads, as millions of others would be doing later that day, pondering that for which they could be thankful in the midst of tragedy.

It didn’t mean much to me until I was well into my forties, worn down by adversity, often brought on by my own mistakes. The memory of that simple ritual helped me through some dark times. Many years later I found welcome in the arms of another family for whom Thanksgiving is sincerely a time for reflecting upon what we have and not what we’ve lost.

Burning the B

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Most people have fond memories of childhood Thanksgivings. One of mine is of a flaming hillside.

Many of the towns founded in the mountains of the American West would, after many years of existence, construct a large letter on a nearby hillside as a monument to tenacity, a symbol of civic pride, or part of an interscholastic rivalry. Arizona sports about 60 such “mountain monograms,” including competing A’s in Tucson and Tempe for the University of Arizona and Arizona State University.

My hometown, Bisbee, sits in a canyon in the Mule Mountains of southeastern Arizona. In 1927 the townspeople decided to build a B near the top of Chihuahua Hill, the rust-colored mountain overlooking the downtown area. Local businesses ponied up $300 for concrete and other construction supplies, hauled up the mountain by mule. The Phelps-Dodge mining company donated a ton and a half of lime to whitewash the giant letter. “The B,” as it became affectionately known, was finished in May, 1928 with the help of most of the high school boys.

The Drillers Club, a group of Bisbee High School upperclassmen, assumed responsibility for The B’s upkeep a few years later. Every fall they supervised a group of freshman boys that hauled cans of water and fifty-pound bags of lime up Chihuahua Hill to a spot below The B, where their loads were combined in 55 gallon drums. The boys then carried buckets of fresh whitewash farther up to The B, dumping their loads and trekking back down for more. Dan Smith, a member of the Bisbee High School Class of 1967 and a veteran whitewasher said, “As the day went on, it began to look like there was more whitewash on us freshmen than there was on the B.”

The B became a symbol of high school spirit for decades. It also was once the target of Bisbee High School’s arch enemies, the Bulldogs of Douglas High, about 24 miles to the east. Dating back to 1906, these two teams have played more than 140 games in one of the oldest high school rivalries in the country. According to alumnus Ralph Echave (BHS ’48):

“On the evening of our Lettermen’s Banquet at the Copper Queen Hotel, people from Douglas climbed the mountain and painted over the middle bar of the B turning it into a “D”. The next day, miners, former BHS students and their families, gathered… ‘sticks of Dynamite’ and full tanks of gas (and) were going to Douglas to blow up the D. Fortunately, they were stopped on the road and DHS and the City of Douglas apologized, came to Bisbee and fixed our B.”

Every Thanksgiving Eve Bisbee held a pep rally before the Bisbee-Douglas football game played on Thanksgiving Day through 1963. The students and the band marched up Main Street to the athletic field above Horace Mann School in full view of The B. The Drillers had outlined The B with rags and other waste soaked in motor oil and diesel fuel; the start of a bonfire on the field signaled the Drillers to start. I was lucky enough to see this final Thanksgiving Eve burn.

People gathered in the Phelps-Dodge Mercantile parking lot, on porches of houses that were high enough to afford a good view, or along the new Route 80 bypass cut into the southern mountain range above the town. We found a good spot just above the old post office and stood on the shoulder by our deep blue Chevy Biscayne, a car whose back end looked like a manta ray.

We waited patiently as dusk turned into night. Suddenly, two small flickers appeared in the corners of The B’s interior circles. Another torch lit the lower edge of The B’s perimeter. Slowly, the fire started to burn, then rage, crawling around like a fire-breathing dragon on the prowl. The conflagration grew until the entire B was completely outlined in an inferno, prompting cheers and whistles from the crowd below. We watched as the fire burned itself out and drove home.

Burning B

The Burning B – 1959

The next day The B looked charred and battle worn, like a boxer peering through a black eye. The appearance shocked me; maybe because one morning I’d watched a house just across from Lincoln school burn just before class started. I didn’t realize that in time the Drillers would gather a fresh batch of freshman boys to restore The B to its former glory.

But some traditions fade. Solar-powered lighting, capable of changing colors, now illuminates The B instead of fire. Freshman boys no longer trudge up Chihuahua Hill to whitewash The B. I left Bisbee in 1966, but that memory has never left me.

Special thanks to the Bisbee Memories Group: Ralph Echave, ’48; Ed Swierc, ’53; Jay Lane ’57; Robert Tanner ’61;Jim Sharp ’62; Dan Smith ’67; Jane Decker ’72; JA Jance; and the Copper Chronicle.