![]() The jingle would play while pictures of Buster Brown shoes were displayed. I was in 7th or 8th grade, and I would spend a couple of hours on Saturday morning, watching whatever was on.Īnd one thing that was on was a children’s adventure program, that featured a frog named “Froggy.” The sponsor was Buster Brown Shoes. It was a console with a 12-inch screen and we could only get two or three channels, and all the pictures were in black and while and there were only a few programs televised during the daytime and a test pattern filled the screen for most of the other times. I heard it on the first television set my family bought around 1949, while we were still living in New Haven. The little jingle that most stuck with me was about Buster Brown shoes. So when we heard something that caught our fancy, we remembered it and repeated it and it stuck with us. We were not bombarded with the kind of collective, commercial, high-volume, all-purpose noise that surrounds us today. After the evening news, we turned off the radio and did our homework or read or went for a walk or went to watch a sandlot baseball game or went to the movies or met some friends and hung around the corner or sat on the porch. ![]() Our radios played much of the day and we could listen to adventures in the evening, like Superman and The Green Hornet and Batman and The Shadow and Intersanctum and Johnny Dollar, and news and soap operas during the day and news programs after supper.īut that was it. The point is, that our heads were not as full of noisy distractions as they are now. I was still in grammar school at the time. I would go next store many evenings after supper to watch it with Bill. It was very sophisticated and literate for a kid’s show. That’s where I first saw Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, a witty, bright puppet show out of Chicago, with Fran Allison as the only human. My neighbor and friend, Bill Doheny, had a TV with a 4-inch screen and a magnifying glass installed in front of it. It was all in black and white and the screens ranged between 6 and 12 inches. And we had morning and afternoon newspapers, many delivered to our front door. ![]() And we had movies and many movie theaters. We had radio, thank God, which was wonderful. So there was very little broad-based commercial noise. We grew up at a time, in the late-1940s, early ’50’s, when there was no color television, let alone 50-inch, color, high-definition TV, no Internet, no cell phones, no Walkmans, no DVDs, no CDs, no cassette tapes. That was especially true of my generation. There are certain songs, certain jingles, that get into your head when you’re young and stay there forever.
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