TV was so exciting that McGregor, the clothing company, produced a range of clothing in its honor. “With the spectacular growth of television, millions of Americans are staying indoors,” the company noted in its ads. “Now, for this revolutionary way of life, McGregor works a sportswear revolution. Whether viewing—or on view—here’s sportswear with the new point of view.”
The line of clothing was called Videos and to promote it the company produced an illustration, done in the wholesome and meticulous style of a Norman Rockwell painting, showing four athletic-looking young men lounging in a comfortable den before a glowing TV, each sporting a sharp new item from the Videos line—reversible Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Jacket, all-weather Host Tri-Threat Jacket, Durosheen Host Casual Jacket with matching lounge slacks, and, for the one feeling just a touch gay, an Arabian Knights sport shirt in a paisley gabardine, neatly paired with another all-weather jacket. The young men in the illustration look immensely pleased—with the TV, with their outfits, with their good teeth and clear complexions, with everything—and never mind that their clothes are patently designed to be worn out of doors. Perhaps McGregor expected them to stand in neighbors’ flower beds and watch TV through windows as we did at Mr.
Kiessler’s house. In any case, the McGregor line was not a great success.
People, it turned out, didn’t want special clothes for watching television. They wanted special food, and C. A. Swanson and Sons of Omaha came up with the perfect product in 1954: TV dinners (formally TV Brand Dinners), possibly the best bad food ever produced, and I mean that as the sincerest of compliments. TV dinners gave you a whole meal on a compartmentalized aluminum tray. All you had to add was a knife and fork and a dab of butter on the mashed potatoes and you had a complete meal that generally managed (at least in our house) to offer an interesting range of temperature experiences across the compartments, from tepid and soggy (fried chicken) to leap-up-in-astonishment scalding (soup or vegetable) to still partly frozen (mashed potatoes), and all curiously metallic tasting, yet somehow quite satisfying, perhaps simply because it was new and there was nothing else like it. Then some other innovative genius produced special folding trays that you could eat from while watching television, and that was the last time any child—indeed, any male human being—sat at a dining-room table voluntarily.
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 their clothes at drive-in dry cleaners. My father wouldn’t have anything to do with any of this. He thought it was somehow unseemly. He wouldn’t eat in any restaurant that didn’t have booths and a place mat at each setting. (Nor, come to that, would he eat in any place that had anything better than booths and place mats.) So my drive-in experiences came when I went out with Ricky Ramone, who didn’t have a dad but whose mom had a red Pontiac Star Chief convertible and who loved driving fast with the top down and the music way up and going to the A&W drive-in out by the state fairgrounds on the east side of town, and so I loved her. I’m sure Ricky was conceived in a car, probably between bites at an A&W.
By the end of the decade, America had almost seventy-four million cars on its roads, nearly double the number of ten years earlier. Los Angeles had more cars than Asia, and General Motors was a bigger economic entity than Belgium, and more exciting, too.
TV and cars went together perfectly. TV showed you a world of exciting things—
atomic bombs in Las Vegas; babes on water skis in Cypress Gardens, Florida; Thanksgiving Day parades in New York City—and cars made it possible to get there.