The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [75]
The other thing I did a lot in Winfield was watch TV. My grandparents had the best chair for watching television—a beige leatherette recliner that was part fairground ride, part captain’s seat from a space ship, and all comfort. It was a thing of supreme beauty and utility. When you pulled the lever you were thrust—flung—into a deep recline mode. It was nearly impossible to get up again, but it didn’t matter because you were so sublimely comfortable that you didn’t want to move. You just lay there and watched the TV through splayed feet.
My grandparents could get seven stations on their set—we could only get three in Des Moines—but only by turning the roof aerial, which was manipulated by means of a crank on the outside back wall of the house. So if you wanted to watch, say, KTVO from Ottumwa, my grandfather had to go out and turn the crank slightly one way, and if you wanted WOC from the Quad Cities he turned it another, and KWWI in Waterloo another way still, in each case responding to instructions shouted through a window. If it was windy or there was a lot of solar activity, he sometimes had to go out eight or nine times during a program. If it was one of my grandmother’s treasured shows, like As the World Turns or Queen for a Day, he generally just stayed out there in case an airplane flew over and made everything lapse into distressing waviness at a critical moment. He was the most patient man who ever lived.
I watched a lot of television in those days. We all did. By 1955, the average American child had watched five thousand hours of television, up from zero hours five years earlier. My favorite programs were, in no particular order, Zorro, Bilko, Jack Benny, Dobie Gillis, Love That Bob, Sea Hunt, I Led Three Lives, Circus Boy, Sugarfoot, M Squad, Dragnet, Father Knows Best, The Millionaire, Gunsmoke, Robin Hood, The Untouchables, What’s My Line?, I’ve Got a Secret, Route 66, Topper, and 77 Sunset Strip, but really I would watch anything.
My favorite of all was The Burns and Allen Show starring George Burns and Gracie Allen. I was completely enchanted with it because I loved the characters and their names—Blanche Morton, Harry Von Zell—and because George Burns and Gracie Allen were, in my view, the funniest double act ever. George had a deadpan manner and Gracie always got the wrong end of every stick. George had a television in his den on which he could watch what his neighbors were up to without their knowing it, which I thought was just a brilliant notion and one that fed many a private fantasy, and he often stepped out of the production to talk directly to the audience about what was going on. The whole thing was years ahead of its time. I’ve never met another human being who even remembers it, much less doted on it.
NEARLY EVERY SUMMER EVENING just before six o’clock we would walk uptown (all movement toward the center was known as going uptown) to some shady church lawn and take part in a vast potluck supper, presided over by armies of immense, chuckling women who had arms and necks that sagged in an impossible manner, like really wet clothes. They were all named Mabel and they all suffered greatly from the heat, though they never complained and never stopped chuckling and being happy. They spent their lives shooing flies from food with spatulas (setting their old arms a-wobbling in a hypnotizing manner), blowing wisps of stray hair out of their faces, and making sure that no human being within fifty yards failed to have a heaped paper plate of hearty but deeply odd food—and dinners in the 1950s, let me say, were odd indeed. The main courses at these potluck events nearly always consisted of a range