Back in the Saddle Again

When the G.I.s came back from World War II, in fact, less than one-half of one percent of households owned a TV. Within a decade, well over half of all homes were tuned in, and America would never be the same.

Near the middle of that decade, my parents plunked me down in front of their newly acquired set, no doubt hoping that it would distract me for a while. Little did they know that it would distract me for my entire life.

Many of my earliest memories, in fact, are not of things that happened in the real world, but rather of things that I watched on television. My oldest clear memory is of sitting on the living room floor on a Saturday morning, watching a program about the Texas Rangers. (I know it was Saturday because my parents were home doing housework.)

Westerns were very popular in the 50s and 60s by the way, and everyone could choose their favorites from among the 20 series that were in production at any given time. Even people who didn’t watch them probably knew the basic premise of popular programs such as “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza,” “Wagon Train,” “Rawhide,” “Maverick,” etc.

There wasn’t a man, woman or child in America who didn’t know who the Lone Ranger was, or his horse for that matter. That in itself is something of an irony, given that part of his shtick was that his identity was a secret from everyone other than Tonto.

I don’t mean to imply that TV invented westerns. Hollywood had told cowboy stories from day one, including classics like Stagecoach, Shane and High Noon. “The Loan Ranger” was originally a radio serial in the 1930s.

There just seemed to be some sort of convergence of technology, social movements and theater arts during my childhood that provided the perfect environment for producing westerns. Of course there were always a few cop shows, medical dramas, sitcoms and variety shows, but westerns ruled.

I think part of it was caused by the sheer demand for scripted content that the new medium required. Westerns provided a familiar backdrop that could accommodate any type of story that you wanted to tell, coming with a complete set of conventions that writers were free to use or discard.

There was a real “Old West,” to be sure, but in general it was easier to go with fictional towns and characters dealing with events that might be highly improbable. Take that ultimate climax, for example: the gunfight.

Historians tell us that such confrontations were extremely rare. While it is true that many westerners were armed (and still are), they were unlikely to square off in the street for some sort of legalized duel. The Earp brothers notwithstanding, quick-draw competitions were not really a thing.

All that content, incidentally, was free to the viewers, so long as they had a set and some form of antenna. “Rabbit ears” were good enough for some folks, or failing that, maybe a coat hanger. For more discriminating viewers, a rooftop contraption was the way to go. I have no idea how many people fell off of roofs or got electrocuted by power lines while trying to fine-tune a channel.

Young people probably have no clue what I’m talking about, but just try to imagine a world where everything is the opposite of the way it is now. There were three channels – four if you count PBS – screens were small and “pictures” were in hazy black and white. Most TVs were in cabinets which could double as furniture.

Here’s one nobody would believe. When your TV went “on the fritz,” which happened fairly often, you would call a repairman who would come to your house and fix it. (Doctors did the same thing, but that’s a story for another time.)

So the content was “free,” the maintenance was reasonable, but the televisions themselves were very expensive. In 1960, a 24-inch color TV console cost about 10 times what we would expect to pay for a 60-inch high-definition flat-screen with smart-TV capability. Back then, it was commonplace to pay for your TV in monthly installments.

But let’s get back to the cowboys. I think there’s another reason that westerns were so popular back in the day, and to see it you need only look at who was making these things.

The young men and women who went off to fight the war (yes, that’s how they referred to it) were in the prime of their working careers in the 1950s and 60s. Virtually everyone in America had been connected to the war effort in some way, and they had all shared a singular sense of purpose.

The formal surrender ceremonies must have provided them some degree of closure, but they had gone through an awful lot. Hundreds of thousands of Americans had not come home, G.I.s had seen things they couldn’t unsee, dozens of cities had been reduced to rubble and millions of men, women and children had been systematically murdered.

You would think that the entire World War II generation would need to see a therapist, but here’s the rub. They didn’t want to talk about it. They had saved the world from tyranny, and on one level they knew that, but they were determined to forget the ugly details and go about living a normal life.

Unfortunately, the human mind doesn’t work that way. If you suppress an unpleasant memory in one place, it will just pop up someplace else or several other places. I believe that one of those places was television westerns.

Most westerns depicted the struggle between good and evil, and there was rarely any doubt about who was who. Nor was there any attempt to explain why the bad guys were bad. As for the good guys, they did the right thing because it was right, and they expected nothing from anyone in return.

You must be asking yourself by now whether all of this has anything to do with selling products in the school market. I actually think it does.

The same generation that told these cowboy stories also built the magnificent postwar economy that would gradually be taken over by my generation, the Baby Boomers. Our heroes were a little more nuanced, and we tended to put profit ahead of what we considered an antiquated notion of right and wrong.

Now those Boomers are leaving the stage in vast numbers, replaced by Gen Xers and Millennials. Like my own age group, these new generations have a strong tendency to differ with the life choices of their parents and are often inclined to be more aligned with their grandparents.

When they buy products, they will need to feel that they are doing the “right thing” for students, teachers and schools. It will be up to you to fill that need. Saddle up.