Me and the Today Show

When I think back to it, I'm a little surprised that I don't remember a time in my life when there was no television. I remember what our first one looked like--like this:

a whole lot of box and not much screen. It was black and white, of course, and it had a dozen tubes in the cabinet behind. Honestly, it seems to me that, like a naughty kid, it required a little banging around once in a while to keep it on the straight and narrow. I remember my father whacking its side, and I also remember him telling me that I shouldn't be so harsh with the old thing.

I wasn't very old then, and, as I said, when I remember it sitting there, I can't help think it was more than a little, well, progressive of them, stern Republican conservatives and very religious people as they were, to buy a set, as we called it. . ."a TV set." I don't really remember a time when there wasn't "a set" in our house. (Do people say that anymore?) And I remember the aerial: like some Dutch Reformed people, they didn't stick it in the attic where no one could see it.

Oddly enough, during my own earliest years I don't remember sitting around the set as a family and watching some of those early shows. I don't know why not. I remember Saturday night Gunsmoke, but that seems to me to have been much later. 

What I do remember and (therefore can safely judge) will never forget was Dave Garroway and the irrepressible J Fred Muggs, his sidekick monkey. It may not seem odd today and it probably wasn't then either, but that monkey stole the show for me at least, kept me glued to the set right through my morning fare of Sugar Pops--"Sugar Pops are tops," or so the ditty went, an ad I may well have seen during the Today show.

I was four years old in 1952, the date The Today Show, starring Dave Garroway, first aired, the oldest show on television. Child psychologists might dispute this, but I'm not sure I remember anything before that time, so not long ago when the Today Show celebrated its 70th anniversary, I couldn't help but remember how Garroway and that monkey buddy of his were guests at our place every last morning of my childhood--well, just weekdays: it was cartoons on Saturday. The set went dark and dumb on the Sabbath (Sunday TV would take a few more years--although not many because Lassie came on right before church on Sunday evenings).

I don't watch the Today Show anymore. Maybe I should. Our set is turned to CNN or MSNBC (yes, I know them's fighting words). I've nothing against the Today Show or NBC these days, and I'm really taken by the fact that the Today Show, so much a part of my childhood, has been a staple of American mornings for as long as it has. "Good morning," Dave Garroway said on January 14, 1952. "The very first good morning of what I hope or suspect will be a great many good mornings between you and I."

And it has been, most probably far beyond his wildest dreams.

Me? I can't dream of a breakfast (haven't had Sugar Pops for years--can you still buy them?) without the news, thanks to my dad, who, with me, sat at the kitchen bar and devoured Corn Flakes while listening to Dave Garroway talk about the news. I don't think I'm addicted to morning news, but a breakfast without them would be more difficult than a morning without breakfast.

So my heartiest congratulations to NBC for 70 years of that show, on a medium that changes as often as the weather. Congrats to the Today Show, and thanks, Dad, for Garroway and J Fred, for the set itself, and an early morning diet of headlines, for creating in me a hunger to know what's going on in this big, wide world.