I can let the passing of the chief writer of "Howdy Doody" go by without comment, but I can’t be quiet about the death of Penny.<\/p>\n
I always wondered what it was like growing up without TV.\u00c2\u00a0 My parents told me about the great radio shows, but I couldn’t help feeling they were deprived, unable to live a complete life with television.\u00c2\u00a0 And now I’m in the same situation.\u00c2\u00a0 I love the Internet, but it came late in life.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s it like to have grown up with computers, the Internet and smartphones?\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, I remember when everybody got VCRs and Walkmen, even iPods.\u00c2\u00a0 Nobody buys an iPod anymore, they get a Touch…that ain’t an iPod, that’s a smartphone without the phone!<\/p>\n
Anyway, I grew up with a TV.\u00c2\u00a0 A black and white set in the playroom.\u00c2\u00a0 It was encased in wood.\u00c2\u00a0 It stood on four spindly metal legs. There was no remote control.\u00c2\u00a0 And every night at five, I sat there with my sisters and watched the "Mickey Mouse Club".\u00c2\u00a0 Not the jive color remake with Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, but the black and white original, with Cubby and Darlene and Annette and…Spin and Marty.<\/p>\n
We had this little table.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d say it was covered in Formica, but that hadn’t been invented yet.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a low-slung affair, with four small chairs.\u00c2\u00a0 My mother would serve us pasta, with butter and salt.\u00c2\u00a0 Although back then we didn’t call it "pasta", we called it "noodles".\u00c2\u00a0 And occasionally french fries.\u00c2\u00a0 I always saved them for last.\u00c2\u00a0 I wanted to savor them.\u00c2\u00a0 Even though these crinkly slivers tasted terrible even when hot and I never got to them until they were cold, or at least lukewarm.<\/p>\n
After the "Mickey Mouse Club" there was Claude Kirchner.\u00c2\u00a0 Yup, a circus show.\u00c2\u00a0 I hardly ever watched it, but I considered kids wimps if their parents made them go to bed when it came on at seven.\u00c2\u00a0 My mother never went to bed before midnight, I started following in her footsteps early.<\/p>\n
And eventually we graduated to dinner upstairs.\u00c2\u00a0 With tomato sauce on our pasta and "Beaver" on the TV.\u00c2\u00a0 But in those early years in the single digits we’d spend time on the bottommost floor of our split-level, watching shows on the original black and white TV.\u00c2\u00a0 Eventually, my father won a color Admiral set in a raffle at the Jewish Community Center and all my friends came over after school to watch the World Series, at least until they got their own sets, but I remember watching the "Flintstones" downstairs. And "Sky King".<\/p>\n
"Circus Boy" too!\u00c2\u00a0 When Micky Dolenz resurfaced in the "Monkees", I remembered him!<\/p>\n
But there was something special about watching "Sky King".\u00c2\u00a0 It was sophisticated.\u00c2\u00a0 We were children, but it seemed to be made for adults, at least it felt that way.\u00c2\u00a0 And we related to Penny.\u00c2\u00a0 She was who we wanted to be, a modern teen who wasn’t locked in the basement playing board games, but out in the wild west of Arizona, facing danger, living on the edge.<\/p>\n
At least it seemed that way from far away Connecticut.<\/p>\n
I admired, I looked up to, I alternately felt like the younger brother and the wannabe lover of Penny.\u00c2\u00a0 And now Penny’s dead?<\/p>\n
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