Boom Tube

Television programing was being invented as the early baby boomers were growing up. There were a lot of us and so there were a lot of shows for us. Most of them were pretty weak.

Romper Room totally sucked. I am convinced that marijuana cigarettes got called doobees in response to the insipid Romper ladies exhortations to do be a Do Bee, while looking through her magic mirror at all of us. The less said about Captain Kangaroo and Mister Green Jeans, the better.

We got a lot of retreaded serial Westerns from the Saturday matinees of the '30s, '40s and early '50s. I liked those. Gene Autrey and Hopalong Cassidy were pretty faggy but John Wayne was good, whether he was on his own, part of the Three Mequiteers or teamed up with wily, old Gabby Hayes. My favorite was a cowboy star named Sunset Carson. He never had a sidekick. I pretended I was his sidekick and learning to be a crusading range rider. Cowboy Bob Steele, the Yiddish Avenger was really good too. He was only about five feet tall and mowed down the big bad men with his tiny fists, what little kid wouldn't like that.

The local kid shows would never fly today. The budgets were low, the scripts rudimentary and the talent pool shallow. There was this one guy named Engineer Bill, who had a huge electric train set up. There were always a lot of closeup shots of his trains going into and coming out of deep, dark tunnels, accompanied by loud train whistle sound effects. He would have a little boy on each day as a guest. The little boy was always an electric train enthusiast. Engineer Bill and the boy would examine each others equipment and the boy got to run engineer Bill's big locomotive around the track a few times. Then they played a milk drinking game called Red Light/Green Light. I'm sure many's the boy who reenacted that game years later when remembering his visit to Engineer Bill's Round House, only with something a lot stronger than milk. Something bad happened one day on the set of Engineer Bill's Round House. The show was never on again and Engineer Bill retired from the entertainment industry and sold insurance somewhere in the Valley, for the rest of his life. He died recently. His daughter wrote the obituary and said he was a wonderful man. Maybe she didn't have any sons.

Another great show we had was Billy Barty's Big Top. Billy was a famous dwarf. He was no taller than a five year old. This show had a circus theme, a large participatory audience of young children and Billy dressed up like a Ringmaster, with a tailcoat, top hat, shiny boots and a whip. I don't know if you've ever seen Billy, he got pretty steady work in the movies for decades playing demons from hell. Many of the children in the audience would cringe and cry out when he came near. Most kids shows played cartoons. On Billy Barty's Big Top they only played Three Stooges shorts. That was good. I liked the Three Stooges.

Soupy Sales was a guy that really understood kids. He never patronized or talked down. He made fun of adults. His whole show was just him in a kitchen set and two, dog paw, hand puppets, White Fang and Black Tooth. Adults got the idea he was somehow dirty or subversive. He wasn't. He was just in tune with little kids. He had to move around a lot. Chances are he was on TV in your area when you were a kid at some point. He was in Detroit before LA, then moved on to New York City. He lasted about a year.

Us kids got a little older, we watched the dance shows in the afternoon. American Bandstand played everywhere but I think it was out of Philly. We didn't have that much in common with the kids in Philly.

LA had it's own nationally syndicated dance show, Lloyd Thaxton's Hop. I always thought it was better than Bandstand but then, it was a West Coast Show. There were three big Rock and Roll AM stations in LA. KFWB was the best in the early '60s. Later, KRLA was best during the Sunset Strip years. As AM radio faded out into '70s FM, the KHJ Boss Jocks won out by default. At any given time during the '60s and early '70s at least one of these stations had an afternoon dance show on local TV, every weekday, after school. They mostly spun records but they always had at least one live act. These were good bands. The Sunset Strip and Laurel Canyon was the place for aspiring musicians in those days. The Doors. The Byrds. Sonny and Cher. The Beach Boys. Gary Lewis and the Playboys. The Turtles. They were all on, all the time. English Bands that were in town would do the shows too. If you were in the 8th, 9th or 10th grade, it was a big deal for social kids from the same school to get a block of tickets and go to these shows as a group. They would dress up in their best clothes, arrange dates with a suitable dancing partner and get a couple of Moms to haul them up to Hollywood, in the family wagons. The rest of us would all tune in that afternoon to see them on TV. It didn't matter that they looked incredibly young and unhip, next to the DJ hosts, the professional Go Go Girls and the Bands. They were there and we weren't, so who was unhip? These shows changed all the time. There were a bunch of different ones. Boss City, Ninth Street West, I can't remember all the names. It was a long time ago.

One show I remember was called Groovy. I think it was KHJ and Sam Riddle was the host. Sam was a little guy who managed to look like he was in his twenties for a couple of decades. He wore really expensive designer clothes, pointy toed shoes with stacked heels, big floppy cravats and flippy, shellacked, haircuts. He was a top morning drive time DJ. When he did a show it always got the best bands. The Summer of '67 I think, they switched the show from an indoor studio to the beach next to the Santa Monica Pier. Since it was a beach show, they needed a guy with a body to host. They got this guy named Michael Blodgett. He was not a DJ, just some kid who wanted to get into show biz, from the Mid West. He was like a big, friendly, floppy puppy. They teamed him up with the head dancer from the studio show, a hard body, valley girl, with three coats of lacquer, named Kam Nelson. This show was only on for about three months but it was the best LA afternoon dance show ever, even though there wasn't much dancing. Micheal would run around the beach and talk to people. Kind of like Huell Hauser, only young, not gay and not incredibly lame. Kam would deliver monologues on why she thought long hair for guys was really, really sexy. They always had a dance contest, every day. Just for girls. Just in bikinis. So maybe it was really a bikini contest. It was very tastefully done though. No leering judges. Kam always picked the winner. She knew about dancing and bikinis. I worked most afternoons so I only got to watch it a few times. It was good though.