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By Root 1410 0

conducted in Nevada in the peak years. The mushroom clouds were visible from any parking lot in the city,*5 but most visitors went to the edge of the blast zone itself, often with picnic lunches, to watch the tests and enjoy the fallout afterward. And these were big blasts. Some were seen by airline pilots hundreds of miles out over the Pacific Ocean. Radioactive dust often drifted across Las Vegas, leaving a visible coating on every horizontal surface. After some of the early tests, government technicians in white lab coats went through the city running Geiger counters over everything. People lined up to see how radioactive they were. It was all part of the fun. What a joy it was to be indestructible.

PLEASURABLE AS IT WAS to watch nuclear blasts and take on a warm glow of radioactivity, the real joy of the decade—better than flattops, rocket mail, spray-on mayonnaise, and the atomic bomb combined—was television. It is almost not possible now to appreciate just how welcome TV was.

In 1950, not many private homes in America had televisions. Forty percent of people still hadn’t seen even a single program. Then I was born and the country went crazy (though the two events were not precisely connected). By late 1952, one-third of American households—twenty million homes or thereabouts—had purchased TVs. The number would have been even higher except that large parts of rural America still didn’t have coverage (or even, often, electricity). In cities, the saturation was much swifter. In May 1953, United Press reported that Boston now had more television sets (780,000) than bathtubs (720,000), and people admitted in an opinion poll that they would rather go hungry than go without their televisions. Many probably did. In the early 1950s, when the average factory worker’s after-tax pay was well under $100 a week, a new television cost up to $500.*6

TV was so exciting that McGregor, the clothing company, produced a range of clothing in its honor. “With the spectacular growth of television, millions of Americans are staying indoors,” the company noted in its ads. “Now, for this revolutionary way of life, McGregor works a sportswear revolution. Whether viewing—or on view—here’s sportswear with the new point of view.”

The line of clothing was called Videos and to promote it the company produced an illustration, done in the wholesome and meticulous style of a Norman Rockwell painting, showing four athletic-looking young men lounging in a comfortable den before a glowing TV, each sporting a sharp new item from the Videos line—reversible Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Jacket, all-weather Host Tri-Threat Jacket, Durosheen Host Casual Jacket with matching lounge slacks, and, for the one feeling just a touch gay, an Arabian Knights sport shirt in a paisley gabardine, neatly paired with another all-weather jacket. The young men in the illustration look immensely pleased—with the TV, with their outfits, with their good teeth and clear complexions, with everything—and never mind that their clothes are patently designed to be worn out of doors. Perhaps McGregor expected them to stand in neighbors’ flower beds and watch TV through windows as we did at Mr. Kiessler’s house. In any case, the McGregor line was not a great success.

People, it turned out, didn’t want special clothes for watching television. They wanted special food, and C. A. Swanson and Sons of Omaha came up with the perfect product in 1954: TV dinners (formally TV Brand Dinners), possibly the best bad food ever produced, and I mean that as the sincerest of compliments. TV dinners gave you a whole meal on a compartmentalized aluminum tray. All you had to add was a knife and fork and a dab of butter on the mashed potatoes and you had a complete meal that generally managed (at least in our house) to offer an interesting range of temperature experiences across the compartments, from tepid and soggy (fried chicken) to leap-up-in-astonishment scalding (soup or vegetable) to still partly frozen (mashed potatoes), and all curiously metallic tasting, yet somehow quite satisfying, perhaps simply