The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [32]
Of course it wasn’t TV as we know it now. For one thing, commercials were often built right into the programs, which gave them an endearing and guileless charm. On The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, my favorite program, an announcer named Harry Von Zell would show up halfway through the program and stroll into George and Gracie’s kitchen and do a commercial for Carnation Evaporated Milk (“the milk from contented cows”) at the kitchen table while George and Gracie obligingly waited till he was finished to continue that week’s amusing story.
Just to make sure that no one forgot that TV was a commercial enterprise, program titles often generously incorporated the sponsor’s name: The Colgate Comedy Hour, the Lux-Schlitz Playhouse, The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, G.E. Theater, Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, and the generously repetitive Your Kaiser Dealer Presents Kaiser-Frazer “Adventures in Mystery.” Advertisers dominated every aspect of production. Writers working on shows sponsored by Camel cigarettes were forbidden to show villains smoking cigarettes, to make any mention in any context of fires or arson or anything bad to do with smoke and flames, or to have anyone cough for any reason. When a competitor on the game show Do You Trust Your Wife? replied that his wife’s astrological sign was Cancer, writes J. Ronald Oakley in the excellent God’s Country: America in the Fifties, “the tobacco company sponsoring the show ordered it to be refilmed and the wife’s sign changed to Aries.” Even more memorably, for a broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg on a series called Playhouse 90, the sponsor, the American Gas Association, managed to have all references to gas ovens and the gassing of Jews removed from the script.
ONLY ONE THING exceeded America’s infatuation with television and that was its love of the automobile. Never has a country gone more car-giddy than we did in the 1950s.
When the war ended, there were only thirty million cars on America’s roads, roughly the same number as had existed in the 1920s, but then things took off in a big way. Over the next four decades, as a writer for The New York Times put it, the country “paved 42,798 miles of Interstate highway, bought three hundred million cars, and went for a ride.” The number of new cars bought by Americans went from just sixty-nine thousand in 1945 to more than five million four years later. By the mid-fifties Americans were buying eight million new cars a year (this in a nation of approximately forty million households).
They not only wanted to, they had to. Under President Eisenhower, America spent three-quarters of federal transportation dollars on building highways, and less than 1 percent on mass transit. If you wanted to get anywhere at all, increasingly you had to do so in your own car. By the middle of the 1950s America was already becoming a two-car nation. As a Chevrolet ad of 1956 exulted: “The family with two cars gets twice as many chores completed, so there’s more leisure to enjoy together!”
And what cars they were. They looked, in the words of one observer, as if they should light up and play. Many boasted features that suggested they might almost get airborne. Pontiacs came with Strato-Streak V-8 engines and Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic transmissions. Chryslers offered PowerFlite Range Selector and Torsion-Aire Suspension, while the Chevrolet Bel-Air had a hold-on-to-your-hat feature called Triple Turbine TurboGlide. In 1958, Ford produced a Lincoln that was over nineteen feet long. By 1961, the American car-buyer had more than three hundred and fifty models to choose from.
People were so enamored of their cars that they more or less tried to live in them. They dined at drive-in restaurants, passed their evenings at drive-in movies, did their banking at drive-in banks, dropped