hillaryalbert-blog

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You jnow what’s comin? Big thangs

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Even BIGGER things a comin

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big things a comin

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~title~

The Rhodes family got a TV fairly early on, in 1952. By Papa’s recollection, they were about the third family in Appleton City to get a set for their home. It was a 17″ black-and-white Hallicrafter that cost $400, which in today’s money would be nearly $4,000, tantamount to buying a car!

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1950-hallicrafters-baw-tv-and-mahogany-cabinet

The TV had three channels to choose from, all broadcast out of Kansas City and received with an over-the-air antenna. The programming on those channels, channels 4, 5, and 9, was mostly local news with some syndicated programming between the morning and evening news broadcasts. Stations in those days didn’t broadcast 24/7, so there would be a sign-off around 11 PM and nothing broadcast until the morning news at about 7 AM the next morning.

For children-centric programming, he recalls Howdy Doody, the Mickey Mouse Club, and cartoons like Looney Tunes that would air on Saturdays when the kids might actually be in front of the TV set. There wasn’t much children’s programming during the day in the 50s because the kids were all in school or playing outdoors with friends and neighbors.

“I recall on Saturdays when we would get a constant diet of Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse and cartoons like that that basically had no moral or educational value.”

I posed a question about diversity of TV actors and subjects just from my own curiosity, and he pretty much confirmed my assumption that the vast majority of TV in those days was white actors portraying white stories. The one exception he could recall was the Cisco Kid and his sidekick Poncho, who were hispanic cowboys. He also remembers that the women in the programs he and his siblings would watch, which usually tended to be westerns, were pretty much limited to being damsels in distress and subservient roles, fully dependent on the male heroes to do the heavy work for them.

The whole family would sometimes watch shows all together, namely variety shows with hosts like Ed Sullivan and Doris Day.

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-roy-rogers-show-roy-rogers-dale-everett.html?product=art-print

Of course in the 50s, certain childhood diseases would keep a kid stuck at home for days or weeks at a time. Ailments like measels, mumps, mono, or something of the sort beginning with an M didn’t really have vaccines at the time, or at least those vaccines weren’t yet required for a child to attend public school. Papa remembers being stuck at home with one of those illnesses and happening to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation ceremony live on TV in 1953.  His mother didn’t usually have the TV on during the day (she was more of a reader, like my Papa), so it’s pretty clear that it was an important, anticipated event that people planned to watch if they had the ability to tune in.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22764987

He also recalls watching the Kennedy inauguration ceremony when he was in college, which he would have had to watch in a shared environment either in the student union on campus or in a lounge in his frat house. He didn’t own his own set until after he was graduated and married, living in his own home. He didn’t watch a whole lot of TV in college, but he did watch Jeopardy, which is also one of the few broadcast programs I watch on TV as well. 

Raising his own family, they 

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Chevy Bel-Airs, Acuña, Mexico, and the Columbia Record Club

As this is my first conducted interview, a bit of background information is in order:

My interview subject is my Papa, Ron Rhodes, who was born in 1943 in Mulberry, Kansas, a small town near Pittsburgh. All his life he’s lived in rural towns, whether in Kansas, Missouri, or a short stint in Utah when he was a toddler. Most of his childhood was spent in Appleton City, Missouri, near Butler. He has three siblings, an older brother and younger brother and sister. He graduated from the University of Central Missouri (back then called Central Missouri State University) with a degree in history (and subsequently earned a master’s degree) where he met his wife, my Nana, getting married in 1964. They raised a family of three girls, my mom and her sisters, in Windsor, Missouri (where he lives to this day), a town of about 3,000 people equidistant between Clinton, Warrensburg, and Sedalia. Both Nana and Papa were teachers and coaches at the local high school, English/Debate and History/Football respectively.

Photo © Arianne Rhodes Fortune. Used with permission. (My Papa and Nana with me and my younger cousin circa 2002)

Like most American families at the time, his family owned a tabletop radio set that everyone in the home utilized. They would listen to variety shows, notably Jack Benny and Bob Hope. Music-wise, they would also listen to what was popular at the time, swing, big bands, and orchestral music.

He recalls his dad always owning Chevrolets, most memorably Bel-Air models, most of which had built-in radios. The radios in those cars were strictly FM radios, with no other options for other media. His dad pretty much bought a new model every other year on the odds, besides one occurrence Papa remembered…

“My older brother was driving by then, and he managed to run it through a ditch on prom night, so that year he bought a ’58.”

https://www.autabuy.com/details/?vid=57094538

At this point I ask if he and his siblings ever took advantage of clear AM signals at night to listen to international stations. He pauses, takes a long nip off his vape (much to my aunt’s chagrin), and recalls a station out of Del Rio, Texas.

“Now, if you know your geography, you’ll know that Del Rio is on the Rio Grande… because of FCC regulations that limited the amount of power that they could transmit with, the station was in Del Rio, Texas, but the tower was across the river in Acuña, Mexico… so they could crank it up, and they would advertise the 100,000 watt power. What was the FCC gonna do, invade Mexico? Well, Trump might…”

He also recalls a station out of Shreveport, Louisiana that they could often pick up in that Bel-Air, but it was all “hillbilly music” so they didn’t often tune in to that one unless they had no other options. Their 1949 Phillips shortwave radio in the home was able to pick up transatlantic transmissions.

https://picclick.com/Crank-Brothers-Multi-5-Tool-Gold-184000697297.html

Building a collection of records came pretty easy to the Rhodes family thanks to the Columbia Record Club, a subscription service that mailed 33 1/3 RPM vinyls directly to your house every month for an absolute dirt-cheap price. The first month they would send you 13 records for $1, then every month after they would either send you a random record they were trying to promote, or you could pick your own for a small premium.

https://www.retrospace.org/2011/04/retro-fail-24-columbia-record-and-tape.html

His older brother, Buddy, was the family manager for the record club. He cultivated records by Elvis, The Beatles, the various members of the Rat Pack, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como, Gene Autrey, and others. Their mother joined the record club herself as well so she could pick the records she wanted that the kids weren’t very interested in. His parents kept control over the nice record player in the living room while the kids used a small, portable, cardboard record player that could be easily replaced when it inevitably broke. His parents didn’t really have any restrictions on what the kids could listen to, so overall they just listened to whoever was popular and topping the charts.

His favorite record they received from that record club was, oddly enough, a Steel Drum band out of Kingston, Jamaica, that played not only calypso music, but classical and contemporary pieces in a calypso style as well. He maintains to this day that one of his all-time favorite pieces of music is a rendition of Toselli’s Serenade by the Royal Steel Band.

https://open.spotify.com/album/0D0lntNcCn5GZNEfxfQzhu

While talking about that old time rock n roll, Papa revealed to me that he had a little rock and roll band in high school and that he was the drummer, which was brand new and exciting information to me!

“We called it ‘rock n roll’ but basically we were playing what you might call ‘rockabilly’. It was pretty awful, I’m sure, but we’d do that.”

Over time as technology improved, the transistors in the cars got better, FM was added to the car radios, and then cassette players, CD players, and now aux cords and Bluetooth capabilities. Papa doesn’t own a smart phone, so he doesn’t have much familiarity with streaming music or radio, though he is familiar with CDs and cassettes. His current car is pretty much limited to playing radio, because when he traded in his old car he forgot to take out all the CDs in the disc changer, so he doesn’t have many CDs anymore. Luckily his current car’s radio system downloads CD tracks and stores them in a computer, so he doesn’t have to worry about losing those CDs in the future.

He’s a big fan nowadays of those channels on TV that are just 24/7 streams of specific music genres and artists. He particularly likes the Jimmy Buffet, Grateful dead, Classic Rock, and Elvis stations.

“I love Jimmy Buffet, he just makes up words that rhyme.”

https://www.margaritaville.com/kaaboo-form

He uses the radio nowadays for news a bit more than he did in the past. Local stations for local news, of course, but national news is strictly an NPR job for him. He doesn’t mind CBS’ news radio, but his lack of access to internet make it and unreliable resource, so he sticks with NPR.

“I listen to local radio to find out what’s happening around here, you know, who got killed in a car wreck out here on B Highway, stuff like that.”